Godlike Nerd

Let's try not to be too glib

Mon, 03 May 2010 11:15:31 +0000

From How Wired.com Tracked the iPhone Finder:

In response to Wired.com’s scoop identifying the finder of the lost iPhone prototype, many have asked me how we did it. The process of uncovering digital footprints to identify Brian Hogan was indeed challenging and enlightening, so I thought I’d tell the story here. Heck, it might even teach police officers a thing or two so they don’t have to kick down doors.

Wired certainly deserves some credit for breaking the story. Initiative in this day and age of blogs usually get you the good kind of attention. However, it doesn’t give you free license to be a jackass and make smarmy comments that make no sense.

Saying it without really saying it

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:35:40 +0000

If you were confused about whether Apple was still committed to the Mac, their lack of Apple Design Awards for anything Mac pretty much says it all.

The Apple Design Awards 2010 recognize iPhone OS applications that demonstrate technical excellence, innovation, technology adoption, and quality.

Use a garden hose instead of a fire hose

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:52:53 +0000

I’ve been spending some time revisiting GTD and Inbox Zero. Several of the themes are important and in particular, the idea that your time is finite is probably most important. As I get older, my time becomes even more limited. I’m not sure how to explain this, but there it is.

As this is the case, the content you consume needs to match your limits. Trying to consume more than you have time for simply frustrates you and leaves you less time to consume the content you actually enjoy.

Quick iPhone time-saving tip: App Store

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:18:52 +0000

Put you App Store icon on a less frequented page. You’ll feel less compelled to check for updates and look for new apps.

Fighting Stupidity with Stupidity

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:07:24 +0000

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece on why he won’t be buying an iPad (which extends to why you shouldn’t either. I don’t agree with his article, but the vehement arguments against some of his have been equally asinine.

Joel Johnson wrote an otherwise brilliant piece that says:

So what if you can’t make iPad programs on an iPad. I don’t complain I can’t make new dishwashers with my dishwasher.

Doctorow doesn’t outright call this out as an issue, but it fits with the theme of what he wrote. The problem is this is analogy is flawed. Let’s see if you can tell the problem with it if I put it in mathematical format.

My horribly incomplete backup plan

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:42:22 +0000

It’s been a long time since I took a hard look at my backup situation, but a series of blog posts in my reader has caused some naval gazing.

A long time ago in a computer far far away

My backup plan was once dead simple. I used CCC or Super Duper to create a clone of my boot drive whenever I thought of it. Sometimes I was good and did it weekly, sometimes I went months without.

Photos

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:39:54 +0000

Behold the wonder of IMAP caching

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:01:00 +0000

I’m a fan of Low End Mac‘s Mac catalog. It’s a quick and easy way to go look up vital stats about old computers, such as when they were released, the original specifications, and the original price. I’ve settled many quibble’s using its information.

However, their other columns present sometimes out of date, and sometimes even wrong information. For example, Charles Moore often writes about the failure of IMAP. This goes back years, but let’s check out the latest installment.

Google Gears maintenance isn't a priority for Google

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:04:31 +0000

The recent Firefox 3.6 update made me re-examine my add-ons as always. What struck me as odd was that Google Gears wasn’t compatible. Clearly that was a mistake. Google couldn’t possibly ignore the chosen browser of most of the tech elite.

It’s not totally ignored no. Indeed there’s a ticket for the problem. It has a Medium priority. Medium? Not working with Firefox isn’t that important?

That got me thinking. The last time I checked, the latest Safari in Snow Leopard wasn’t supported. Still true. Also has a Medium priority.

Perspective

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:12:30 +0000

The three or four of you that have forgotten that you have me saved to your RSS reader of choice will likely suddenly realize that I’ve not written in a long time. I didn’t fall off the face of the earth or even end up in a ditch. The fact is I saturated myself in what I loved.

I love Macs and technology in general. Combine that with my work ethic-like approach to new things, and you can see how I could burn out. It became a job. An endless job of trying to turn a few grains of actual information into an expansive network of information. At one point, the site was effective enough to give you a way to track what I did minute to minute.

For the record

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:01:25 +0000

To my towel, you’re awesome and I love you.

PS You’re still a towel.

It's Macworld Damnit

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 23:09:12 +0000

Something has been building steadily for a couple weeks now and I just can’t contain it anymore. After countless hours of reading though, the rage within me has reached the spilling level. I read nearly every Mac website I can find (via RSS). I can give non-Mac news sources a pass on this, but the rest of you should hang your heads in shame.

Macworld, as in Macworld Magazine and Macworld Expo, is spelled as I have it. Macworld Expo is like Mecca, but for Mac users. It’s the ultimate event in the Mac universe. Given that fact, why is it so god damned hard to spell it right?

Gmail Filters Changed?

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:10:32 +0000

I’ve been using Gmail for most of my mailing lists. There’s a very good reason for this. It groups things into discussions beautifully. I also subscribe to several mailing lists that reside on the same server. For example, I subscribe to BBEdit Talk and Yojimbo Talk, both of which are run by Bare Bones (shocking, considering they develop them).

They don’t have a domain that’s dedicated to mailing lists, so the addresses are productname-talk@barebones.com. I’m also a compulsive filer, so I apply labels to these messages for quick manipulation. One label is “mailing lists”. Rather than map email “To:” each of these email addresses, I’ve been using the fact that filters work on a contains instead of match basis to simplify. For the longest time a filter that looked for “To: talk@barebones.com” worked perfectly. It’s suddenly stopped working. It’s now an exact match.

It's Official: I've Made It as a Writer

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:52:03 +0000

Thanks to my article about a bullshit Steve Jobs interview, I’ve gotten my first threat.

12:11:04 AM mmskmmskmmsk: dlong

12:11:08 AM mmskmmskmmsk: get the fuck outta here

12:11:16 AM mmskmmskmmsk: posting garbage on digg

12:11:24 AM mmskmmskmmsk: trying to promote your own shitty site

12:11:44 AM mmskmmskmmsk: like you broke a story or something

12:11:48 AM mmskmmskmmsk: you didnt break shit

12:12:00 AM mmskmmskmmsk: the article on that site was not proven fake

A Visit from the Cable Guy

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 12:36:49 +0000

While I’m going on and on about utility companies (because let’s face it, Verizon and Comcast are rapidly becoming nearly the same), how about I write up the experience I just had.

I don’t normally expect visitors on a Saturday unannounced. Further, I don’t get packages. When I got to my front door, it was a Comcast employee. He warmed up by asking if I had Verizon home phone service. Well, seeing as I don’t like getting taken advantage of, the answer is no. He then asked me if I had a home phone. It’s clear where he was going, so I played along. Yes, I have internet phone service (Vonage in particular). He guessed that it was Vonage.

Verizon needs to stop jerking me around

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 01:02:46 +0000

Verizon FiOS is looking real good, $44.95 for 15 Mbps down/2 Mbps up. My Comcast cable access is 8 Mbps for $52.95. Verizon sends me advertisements in the mail multiple times per week advertising their fiber internet service.

Given, it’s lumped in with those mass mailers that clog my mailbox, but it’s getting sent directly to my house. They proclaim in big proud letters:

The limitless fiber-optic power of Verizon FiOS Internet is now here.

Football Time Again

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 14:58:43 +0000

All right guys, Fall is fast approaching and you know what that means. It’s time for football. Last year we all had a lot of fun (though I barely summarized each week’s results and that’s likely to be worse this year).

Without further ado, here is the info to join up.

Go to Yahoo’s Football Pick’em page. You’ll need a Yahoo! account.

Once there, choose to join a private group.

Group ID: 31839

Interview with the MetroWest Daily News

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 13:10:53 +0000

Despite my sporadic blogging here lately, I got chosen to be interviewed with a local newspaper, the MetroWest Daily News, for an article in their Sunday edition today. I haven’t seen the finished product, but we talked about blogging, professional blogging, journalistic integrity, and a blog’s effect upon your job and career in general.

Hopefully I’ll come across as insightful. I’ll try to post the link once it appears on the website.

Greatly exaggerated

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 18:04:35 +0000

Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I’d figure out who said it first, but that would mean I have time to. Here’s a quick rundown of everything that’s been keeping me busy.

The Day Job

I’ve been involved in a task that’s rather new to me, high pressure, and interesting. Overall I’m enjoying it, but it’s still soaking up my free time.

Softball to the Face

I managed to take a softball to the face 2.5 weeks ago. I was wearing my glasses and as a result, I managed to shift my nose over. I didn’t feel any pain and the initial swelling hid the fact that my nose became crooked. I had a nose bleed, but it went away quickly, so I didn’t get it looked at immediately.

Boot Camp without All the Pushups

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 22:30:53 +0000

If you keep your eye on Macs, you probably already know about Boot Camp. It’s a bit of a surprise, but I suspect it was done so that users choosing to run Windows can do so in a safer manner with proper drivers. The drivers included with the new software are the key part of this announcement.

Hacking the firmware to coerce a Mac into booting Windows took a little while, but it wasn’t really all that complicated. However, putting money into a development staff for Windows drivers is quite an expensive proposition and it goes to show Apple’s commitment to leverage the move to x86 to their full benefit. They can easily scoop up fence sitters that afraid of losing the ability to run Windows.

Von-Age; the tele-fon works!

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:43:34 +0000

Von-Age; the tele-fon works!: Vonage has sent me dozens and dozens of advertizements and free phone deals for months lately. Seems like they’re stalking me out after Verizon mentioned how I threatened to go into their Manhattan office three years ago in order to cancel my line faster (really it was a simple request they couldn’t/wouldn’t understand, cancel my line as of that day, they took 40 days to cancel my phone)

Bias and Reason

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 23:29:40 +0000

If you’re thinking about sound software right now, you’re way off. Instead I’m talking about the literal words. VOIP (Voice Over IP) is a really hot technology right now because it makes phone calls much cheaper than using traditional telephone service. I’ve pondered whether IP network use is cheaper than maintaining traditional phone networks, or if the telco’s were simply sticking it to everyone. Considering recent more aggressive pricing by the telco’s, I’d suspect it was the latter.

I'm Sorry Erica

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 19:22:54 +0000

I’m sorry I said what I did. You’re amazing and didn’t deserve that. I love you.

Beating Mike Again

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 10:55:16 +0000

In another vain moment, I rechecked my PageRank at Google. I remembered it being 5/10. I was right. Take that, Mike and his rank of 6.

Edit: Doh. Higher is better. I’m a moron.

I'm Better than Mike

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 22:37:09 +0000

Because Mike wrote today about how his site is ranked 690,887 at Alexa, I had to find out what this site was ranked. Cue up “You’re so Vain” please.

Apparently, I’m much more popular than Mike, sitting pretty at 530,545.

Booya.

Good Public Relations

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 23:05:50 +0000

I can’t help but feel like I’ve abused the good ranking I get with this blog on Google, but when I complained about the stress ball I had that squirted over my shirt (the Morf ball), I didn’t expect to get a response from the company. I certainly didn’t expect this kind of response.

Jade Hansen wrote:

We came across your web log regarding our Morf Ball. We are sorry to hear of the trouble you encountered with it leaking. As a result, we’d love to send you a complimentary Cyber Gel Squeeze Ball, our other popular stress reliever. Rest assured, this item will not explode or leak. Please provide us with your shipping address, and I will have them sent out to you ASAP.

Using Gmail on your Domain

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 21:10:26 +0000

A little while back, Google announced it was hosting San Jose City College’s email. Prior to that, rumors started circulating that Google would be licensing its Gmail technology to others due to clues in the code.

Honestly, I could not see a downside to this arrangement (paranoid delusions are not considered). Most college students don’t want to fiddle with email client configuration. A webmail interface is perfect for campus wide availability. The over 2 gigabytes of storage space works great for students to send files back and forth on a regular basis. Because it’s maintained by Google, it also means it’ll be available to students even after they graduate. And yes, I am still a little bitter that U-Mass is too damn cheap to give lifetime email addresses to graduates.

Whine, Whine, Whine

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 12:46:25 +0000

Like any hardcore Netflix user, I read Hacking Netflix. One of the more repetitive, annoying themes is the dissatisfaction of Manuel. If you thought I was obsessive about Macs, well, it’s nothing compared to this guy and Netflix. And it has to be bad. In fact, he takes this quest so seriously that it has shades of a Don Quixote syndrome. Netflix is one mighty windmill. He’s pulled the AP in as his Sancho Panza. It even has a picture of him. Lovely.

Webmail, now in beta

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:02:25 +0000

Ever since Google released Gmail to the public, Yahoo and Microsoft have been watching the hipster geek crowd move away from their webmail systems (Yahoo Mail and Hotmail respectively). Gmail shows users that webmail doesn’t have to suck. It lit a fire under the ass of webmail providers. Ultimately, it prompted the two companies to actively develop their offerings, and adopting the Google model, release them as “beta”. “Beta” in this case can be read as “if something don’t work, you’re on your own.”

Hotlinking

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 21:30:01 +0000

Because Mike still doesn’t have comments, I’m forced to respond over here to another of his posts. The gist of the article is that some punks at myspace were using his images on their profile pages, sucking up his bandwidth. I had the same thing happen with a punk at Xanga. The conversation I had with him was:

“Hey, could you either attribute my photo or take it off your site?” (My site address was given.)

Acting Self Important

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 23:44:15 +0000

Dear Apple,

If you’re going to publish calendars for your iCal users and advertise them, keep them up to date. A movie release calendar that ends late October of last year is useless.

Your pal,

Derik

Post Macworld Roundup

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 22:49:09 +0000

Back in December, I made some predictions.

The quick recap is, I was completely right about the Powerbook (though I didn’t see the moronic name change coming). I didn’t see the iMac coming. The Mac mini rumor was nice, but ultimately, it wasn’t in the cards. My hope clouded my judgment.

iLife ‘06 and iWork ‘06: Yawn. Again.

I’m surprised at the complete lack of information about Leopard. The prospect of getting surprised is actually exciting. Apple may just sit on the features until after Vista appears. That might slow Microsoft just a bit.

Gmail Has Lost Its Focus

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 12:08:21 +0000

I use my Gmail account to manage several mailing lists I’m subscribed to. I also regularly re-evaluate it for use as my main email address. So far, no dice. I just like desktop email clients much more.

One of the more compelling things about Gmail is the amount of space allotted for each user (2686 MB at the moment). With most emails being only a few kilobytes big, users aren’t going to fill up that space (particularly because that allotment grows every day). There are exceptions, such as Adam Curry (who receives lots of audio files in his email), but other users aren’t going to have an issue.

Rosetta is Not All That and a Bag of Chips

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:11:35 +0000

Macworld’s lab tests of the new intel iMac confirm what I’ve been telling people since the Intel transition was announced.

I can summarize the results pretty quickly. Considering that the Intel processor in the new iMac is a dual core, the speed isn’t really that much better. In fact, taking that into account, it’s slower. Also, Rosetta isn’t the panacea that everyone bought into. I knew it wouldn’t be. It doesn’t work with anything that requires precise timing and it’s slow. Slow.

Pushing Gmail to the limits

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 21:10:24 +0000

Over at Mike’s blog, he’s redirecting all mail from a domain that gets over 3000 pieces of spam a day. I’m really looking forward to his results because he usually puts together pretty visual results that are fun to look at.

I’m still waiting for an objective comparison of the various spam filters out there, particularly the ones built into the big webmail services like Yahoo and Hotmail. I’ve found those services perform pretty terribly. Despite trying to “train” their filter, I regularly get mail with similar subjects dropped right into my inbox. I’ve heard Google’s is better, but I’d rather not pollute my own account for experimentation.

The Big News

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 22:26:49 +0000

After recently hinting that I had something big to share, the time has come to let everyone know what it is. Macworld has taken me on as one of two regular contributers to their new MacUser blog. This is an incredible opportunity and I couldn’t be happier to be involved with this project.

I’ll be writing extremely regularly over there, though the pieces will be much, much shorter compared with my pieces here. I will be writing the occasional extended rant on MacUser, but nothing compared to here.

Pretty Dynamic DNS Names

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 09:54:59 +0000

I regularly SSH into my desktop at home to both run things from the command line and also set up tunnels to connect via VNC. The problem with this has always been knowing your IP address. Consumer broadband connections have no guarantee of retaining an IP for any amount of time. As a result, so called Dynamic DNS services were created. These services allow one to regularly change a domain name to match your current IP.

Create Your Own Planet

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 09:25:19 +0000

I’d hope that readers of my weblog would be familiar with Planet d00dism. It’s a website run with Planet Planet that uses my various RSS feeds to construct an aggregation of what I’m doing online (stolen wholesale from Erik Benson). There’s even an RSS feed for it. However, installing the software (which still hasn’t had a formal release), is a bit much for most people. Some don’t even have proper web hosting.

That’s why I was so excited to read that 43People has added this capability. By default, it includes your 43Things, 43Places, 43People, and All Consuming.

FeedFlare Rocks

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:30:59 +0000

Heather noticed that I turned on several of the FeedFlare features for my RSS feed. I fall in love with FeedBurner more and more every day.

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Technorati Cosmos

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Happy New Year!

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 16:31:34 +0000

I haven’t thought of any resolutions, other than to stop being prematurely mysterious when hinting about announcements.

What are yours? Have any suggestions for me?

Tags: newyears, resolutions

December 2005 tis the Season of “Best of”

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 15:50:03 +0000

I’ve become really addicted to Digg. Slashdot has simply become too slow and excludes far too many worthy stories. The unfortunate side effect is that some stories get more attention than they really deserve.

This month, it was a whole class of stories: “Best of”. Pseudonyms include “things you didn’t know about”, “things you should download”, and “things for new blank users”. They’re just lists of things that people like. They’re not noteworthy and usually, they’re not even original.

Derik the Camel

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 01:06:05 +0000

Being the vain man that I am, I google myself every once in a while. I feel the compulsion, if for no other reason because I’m afraid of Derik Farnsworth overtaking me, then coming to my house to call me a girly man.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that there was a story about me as a camel. I know everyone thinks of me as a camel because I have foul breath and spit a lot. Ha ha. Seriously though, the story is priceless as is the following repeated phrase.

Merry Christmas

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 18:36:11 +0000

Merry Christmas to all the Christians in the audience. I hope you find your hopes and dreams under the tree.

Hopefully I’ll have a big announcement to share with y’all soon.

Standardizing the Feed Icon

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 18:30:56 +0000

A big ado was made when the Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer team announced they would use Firefox’s feed icon. I guess it’s better than yet another icon, but I never what the problem was with the original XML icon, etc. was in the first place. Mozilla seemed to create the icon because “RSS” wasn’t considered kosher considering the number of Atom feeds out there.

As an aside, what’s even more maddening is that Safari still opts for Atom feeds over RSS feeds despite ordering in the source when one clicks the RSS subscribe button. Not only is that an inconvenience for webmasters, but it confuses the hell out of users.

WRT54G(S), I Think I Love You

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 13:30:15 +0000

Next to my TV, I have an EyeHome and a Playstation 2 (with ethernet adapter). I originally bought a D-Link DWL-G810 wireless to ethernet bridge. That way, devices with only an ethernet port could join the wireless network I had running out of my loft. It worked, but only for one device because it only had one port. To remedy this, I bought a D-Link DSS-5+ switch. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, that don’t work. It seems the bridge will recognize only one MAC address at a time.

Gmail Gains Groups

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:51:01 +0000

Google, little by little, is trying to draw me into using Gmail full time. The latest round of feature additions include a vacation auto-responder (something I think ends up being unintentionally annoying) and contact groups. I was so excited to see the latter feature. I thought it would end my auto-filing problems. The truth be know, I filter my email more than anyone I know. Half of my email is auto-filed away from my inbox. The other half is colored according to who its from, allowing me to color prioritize. Purple is family email. Blue is from friends. So on and so forth.

Macworld Expo San Francisco

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:54:12 +0000

Love to see your comments about MacWorld 2006 on your blog, if you have any. This year will be my first as an attendee, and I plan on drinking Steve’s Kool-Aid all week. Even sadder, I’m looking forward to it a little bit more than Christmas…..not sure what that says about me.

So, if you have predictions, comments, hopes or desires you want to see happen that week, I think you have enough geeks that would enjoy hearing your perspective.

The Day Netflix told me No More

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:54:17 +0000

It’s official. I have way too many movies in my queue. I tried to add Suspiria to my Netflix queue, only to get the following response.

If you wish to add this movie to your Queue, you must first remove some movies.

I’m going to trim it a little, but I fear I may be forced to spawn a new queue (just for TV shows). Boo to Netflix for its artificial 500 movie queue limit. Split it into multiple pages if necessary. I don’t care how they handle it. It’s an inconvenience to me.

The New G5s Can't Use Standard Airport Express Cards

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 21:57:44 +0000

Maybe I’m just behind the times or didn’t read the news stories about the dual core G5s intently enough. Apple is using combination Airport Express/Bluetooth 2.0 cards in G5s now instead of the Airport Express cards used in all other Macs.

From the Apple KB:

Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) computers are designed to work with a combination AirPort Extreme with Bluetooth 2.0+EDR card, which combines AirPort and Bluetooth wireless technologies on one card. Please note that other versions of AirPort cards cannot be used with Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) computers. Although the connector on the computer’s logic board will fit an AirPort Extreme card, it is meant for the AirPort Extreme with Bluetooth 2.0+EDR card only. Power Mac G5 (Late 2005) computers will not recognize an AirPort Extreme card if you attempt to install one.

Puking on Prefs

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 18:06:05 +0000

I’ve been trying to get keychain syncing to work between my two Macs. You’d think that the login keychains would sync (especially since .Mac syncing is supposedly enabled), but they don’t. I decided to make a new keychain and try to get it to work.

I start using the Reset function to try to force synchronization. And for those interested, no, I still haven’t had any success getting keychain syncing to work. It’s way too hard to get working.

burp Senseo on the Way

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 08:31:10 +0000

I was checking activity on my credit cards today only to find a $15 charge I couldn’t remember. Then it came to me. The free Senseo carried a $15 shipping and handling charge. It was placed on my card on Monday which means it could arrive any day now. Then I can be all jacked on coffee at home too.

Second Time's the Charm

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:35:35 +0000

We may have finally reached the final chapter in the Linksys Compact Wireless router (WRT54GC) saga. The replacement arrived today. I started first by upgrading the firmware with Firefox. It went through without a hitch.

So far, I like it, but what I’ve read about poor range looks to be true. That said, it may not be the fairest comparison when matched with my DI-624, in whose review on CNet was noted for long range.

Firmware Meltdown

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 17:31:54 +0000

So, the WRT54GC router arrived on Monday. Seeing as it was my birthday, it was like a gift to myself. I immediately started playing with it, turning on WPA2 and putting in a password from Steve Gibson’s excellent WPA password generator.

Being the obsessive compulsive software upgrader that I am, I decided to flash its firmware. Keep in mind that I’ve flashed many network devices including an original Airport Base Station, a Linksys BEFSR41, a D-Link DI 624, a D-Link DI-524, a Motorola WA840G, a D-Link DWL-G810, and a couple other routers. I can’t list the others because usually I was upgrading the firmware of some stranger’s unprotected router over the wireless connection. Yes, I am a daredevil.

I'm a Sucker for Networking Equipment

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 16:17:35 +0000

This is going to sound like a terrible plug. I know it.

I’ve been having some issues with my D-Link DI-624 router. In particular, now that I’m using WPA, my Powerbook will suddenly lose connectivity even though the signal is full. It’s frustrating. Disconnecting and reconnecting restores connectivity for varying amounts of time.

I’ve always had good experiences with Linksys routers. However, because of that record, they tend to cost more than the competition. The WRT54G has been hovering steadily at $40, while the WRT54GS is sticking at $60. I was beginning to give the WRT54G some serious thought (particularly because of the ability to use alternative firmware). However, that ability has been lost in the latest revision of the product.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:15:02 +0000

I have a lot to be thankful for this year and I’m glad that I’ll be able to celebrate that with my family today.

I hope all of you are in good health and have much to celebrate. Don’t forget to save room for some pie!

Acronym Soup: LRS

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 02:18:19 +0000

Ever since Woot sent me a Motorola WA840G by mistake, it’s been augmenting my parent’s wired network as a wireless access point. It’s been working great for their needs (connecting my old Pismo via its Airport card).

When I got home today for a Thanksgiving stay, I decided I’d update the firmware on all their network devices. The old Linksys router’s firmware hasn’t been updated in quite a while. That’s fine because the thing is rock solid. The Motorola access point had a new version with many new features, so I updated it.

Why I Can't Commit

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 16:01:06 +0000

John Gruber recently wrote about why going to a single computer (a Powerbook) is going to work for him in Full Metal Jacket. Naturally, his new philosophy reflects his personal needs. He does take a look at the opposite viewpoint using a single example (Jonathan Rentzsch), but his needs are overly specialized and overly rare. There are many more reasons one would want two machines.

Tether

To start, the big assumption for this article is that the user wants or needs a laptop. The reasons are fairly unimportant. I personally started with a laptop because I wanted mobility.

Spam on del.icio.us

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 21:11:08 +0000

It’s no surprise that Digg became a target for spam, but would you believe that del.icio.us is now a target? Check this guy out.

Don’t click his link. It leads to a dummy Blogspot page containing nothing but an ad for Google’s Firefox toolbar extension. Blogspot is fast becoming a playground for spammers. Google needs to get a tighter grip on that.

At any rate, the guy labeled that single link with every technology buzzword out there in order to pollute del.icio.us. It’s amazing the stupid lengths these jackasses will go to.

Free Senseo on the Way

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 19:20:42 +0000

In case you didn’t read the link in the supplemental, for a picture of your coffee pot doing something unusual (I opted to fill it with Halloween candy) you get a Senseo machine (currently valued at $49.99). Ok, so you need to pay $15 for shipping and handling, but that’s still huge savings.

Anyway, I submitted my photo and it was accepted this morning. It won’t ship for 4-6 weeks due to high demand (geez, free $50 device, who thought that’d be popular?). I can’t wait so my lazy ass can have coffee every morning.

SmashMyMaturity.com

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 22:27:08 +0000

I’m sure you’ve all read about SmashMyiPod.com. I thought it was infantile in concept before I read the website. You can imagine my shock when I read his classy responses over on Cult of Mac.

I hear ipod video screens cause impotence and hair loss.

Then I made a stupid mistake and went to the site where I got to read the following.

I hear iPods cause cancer and genetic mutations in fetuses.

Remote Control Your Mac

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 21:58:19 +0000

There have been times that I wanted to remote control someone’s Mac. In particular, a friend of my brother that went to my school used to need the occasional help. VNC was a huge help in those situations. Unfortunately, getting the VNC server configured was a hassle, required third party software, and ended up taking more time than the actual troubleshooting.

That’s why I was thrilled to find out that there is now a VNC built into Mac OS X. I know it’s in Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), but I’m not sure about earlier versions. You’ll need to poke holes in your firewall if you’re using a router or a software firewall that isn’t the one built into Mac OS X.

Topher Grace is Venom?

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 18:01:19 +0000

Someone please tell me that someone is screwing with IMDB. Topher Grace is supposed to play Venom in the upcoming Spider-Man 3 according to IMDB.

Didn’t someone already play Eddie Brock in the earlier Spider-Man movies? I might be wrong, but I remember pointing it out to someone. Let’s ignore that because actors are regularly replaced.

Topher Grace though? Venom is a powerful, violent killer. He inspires terror in people. Does this this face scare you? Really?

The New Yahoo Maps Beta is a Real Drag

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 22:44:24 +0000

Yahoo Maps is back with a new vengeance with their new beta. It’s like Google Maps, but with some new features like a tiny overview map showing what your context is from a farther perspective. That’s slick.

Even better, you can superimpose current traffic conditions. Finally! This is going to hold my attention over Google Maps, at least for a while. I like. Now if only I could get my hands on that Yahoo Mail beta to see if it really beats Gmail.

Mac OS X 10.4.3 and a Long Overdue Powerbook/mac Overview

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 20:43:24 +0000

All right, so Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.3. There were a huge number of improvements. The most notable of which Safari passing the Acid2 Test (even though this was attainable before the update by using your own custom WebKit), homepage URLs in the Address Book are synchronized, iChat sessions over .Mac names can be encrypted, and Disk Utility can verify the boot volume.

We saw a new round of Powerbooks that were pretty unexciting without a processor improvement. The screen resolutions were enhanced and DDR2 was added, but only for the 15″ and 17″ models. The 12″ model was completely passed over. The message is clear, nothing big is coming in the Powerbooks until they go Intel.

The Powermacs got a boost with DDR2 RAM (which they can actually utilize). They also got dual core processors which only really benefit the high end model, the only one retaining two processors. However, the clock speed dropped to 2.5 GHz instead of 2.7 GHz processors. They were also outfitted with dual gigabit ethernet ports. AGP and PCI-X were dropped in favor of PCI Express. They also introduced a Quadro FX 4500 (be prepared to mortgage your home).

Hollywood: Same Shit, Different Pile

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:53:00 +0000

Was making the movie Zathura necessary? Really? It’s about a couple boys who find a board game that propels their house into a space adventure. Does that sound familiar? That’s Jumanji, except in space instead of the jungle.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. There’s no Robin Williams, or even young, hot, Kirsten Dunst. Instead, we have Dax Shepard (I’ve never heard of him either) and two young boys. Oh, and Tim Robbins. I can understand the younger actors getting involved, but Tim Robbins. I should send this, if I had his address.

Understanding Good RSS Use

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:32:10 +0000

I love RSS. I subscribe to 243 feeds. I’ve curbed my reading though, so I miss most stuff during the day. However, that doesn’t stop me from being driven nuts on a regular basis.

The first is Day by Day. First, it doesn’t put the comic in the feed. That alone is forgivable. Lots of comic RSS feeds do that. The problem is that new entries show up before the cartoon is uploaded. Hello? This isn’t a once in a while thing. This happens every night. Message received by this reader: I will unsubscribe and stop reading.

House Pictures

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 08:13:35 +0000

I haven’t posted in a while due partially to getting a cat (pictures will follow… someday). As I went to go to take pictures, I realized both my batteries were dead. Charging them takes a while, so I sat down to finally label and describe all the photos I took when I moved into my house, all 82 of them. Now you know why it took me a couple months to get around to it.

iPod Video and new iMac Thoughts

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 12:27:34 +0000

We didn’t see Powerbook, Powermac, and Mac mini revisions like most level headed analysts thought. Macrumors’ Buyer’s Guide still has the bright red “Don’t Buy” description next to the Powerbooks. The typical cycle is 185 days, and we’re now 255 in. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them next revised in January as the first Intel Macs (as they stand to benefit the most, being stuck with maxed out G4s).

Instead, the long-awaited video iPod arrived, the iMac got revised (in a rather interesting way), and the eMac has returned to its proper status as an education product.

iTunes 5 is Dead; Long Live iTunes 6

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:11:34 +0000

According to live news updates out of Apple’s press conference today, iTunes 6 will be introduced today.

You didn’t misread that. Barely a month after its introduction, iTunes 5 has been superceded by iTunes 6. A month. Good lord.

It’s official: iTunes 5 was most meaningless iTunes update ever. Either that, or we can expect iTunes 7 at Thanksgiving, earning it the name “iTunes Turkey Edition”. That will be followed by a Christmas version 8 with an all red and green interface.

I Need More Power Scotty!

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 22:24:44 +0000

My brother called me today, slightly frantic, but calmed. His iMac G4 wouldn’t start up. Normally, I’d recommend zapping the PRAM, resetting the Open Firmware, things like that.

The problem was, he couldn’t do those things. It wouldn’t boot at all. There wasn’t even a chime. The computer was absolutely dead silent.

Little did I realize that the flat panel iMacs also had the PMU (Power Management Unit) like my Powermac and Powerbook had. Apple even has instructions.

Video iPod Tomorrow?

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 22:15:50 +0000

Think Secret has retracted its earlier statement that there would be no video iPods tomorrow.

They’re now calling for them. To quote them:

The rumor business is not always kind. Reliable evidence has corroborated reports of the development of a video iPod, but information until now had pointed to a release date later than October. Recent notes suggest otherwise, however, and tomorrow may in fact see the release of a video iPod, while Mac updates may not be delivered until next week.

The Digg Spammer/Plagiarism Major Throws in the Towel

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 15:01:54 +0000

I finish this project

Thank all visitors for reading my blog all this time. I really enjoyed to post hot “around macintosh” news and rumors, funny pictures. Unfortunately, I decided stop it, and here is a main reason, a part of e-mail was received tomorrow:

“We’ve received a complaint that content in your blogs… infringes upon the copyrights of others…

…with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Chilling Effects…

Netflix Analysis

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 18:54:45 +0000

I came across this article recently, which includes an Excel spreadsheet for analyzing your own Netflix usage.

The problem is that Excel v.X for Mac likes to paste tab delimited data into multiple columns (as it well should). The original sheet was written to parse the data out of a single column based upon character position. That’s clever if you don’t have it separated. It’s a lot more work though.

I made my own clone for Mac users. There are far fewer instructions built into the sheet though because I’m lazy. The first three values in the analysis section can be set as seen fit. To input your data, select the cell just below “Shipped” and paste after copying out of the email you get from Netflix when you request the full history. Make sure that the fourth column is filled in with the formula as far down as your data goes.

Google Reader

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 16:21:38 +0000

Just when I was getting ready to drop Bloglines for NewsGator because it will soon have NetNewsWire syncing, Google released its own RSS reader.

I’m going to check it out soon, but unfortunately, I can’t share anything now because its OPML import facilities aren’t working for me.

Orkut Begging

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 15:37:45 +0000

I noticed Orkut was listed in part of Google’s services once you’ve logged in with a username. A new Google service? I must try it out!

Unfortunately, it’s invitation only. If you’ve got an account, please invite me.

Please?

Fighting Email Spam

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 14:49:53 +0000

A recent Digg submission listed disposable email services. It’s a great idea especially now that spam can overrun your inbox.

I don’t use any of those services personally. I recently made a domain and when I sign up at a new site, I use the name of the service in the email. When I start to receive spam at that address, I have a good idea of who sold my address (though it’s not perfect). Mike takes it a step further. My only qualm with Mike’s method is that because you use a hash, you need to record which hashes match up with what services.

NetNewsWire Acquired by NewsGator

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 15:05:37 +0000

To be fair, I didn’t use NewsGator until this morning when I heard rumors of this move on the NetNewsWire mailing list. I’ve always been a Bloglines fan myself. However, the NNW/Bloglines synchonization left a lot to be desired, mostly due to deficiencies in Bloglines’s API.

Now that NewsGator has acquired NetNewsWire, it looks like I may finally get the cross-computer, cross-platform syncing I’ve been craving (much like what IMAP does for my email). It also looks like I’ll get access to FeedDemon, which was also acquired.

Brew your Own Beer on the Cheap

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 07:55:06 +0000

I’ve always wanted to brew my own beer. Well, I have at least as long I made beer my drink of choice. Lately, I’ve been on a real wine kick, but when I saw a beer brewing kit for $20.

It includes everything you need, even bottles, which usually one has to recycle from other beers they’ve consumed in a drunken marathon (I imagine). You’ll need to add $6.95 for shipping, but considering how low the price is, that’s acceptable. It’s also possible to get additional beer variety canisters from the manufacturer (with a name like Mr. Beer, you know it must be good), should you decide that your beer didn’t taste like ass.

iTunes Says “Keep Up with your Podcasts!”

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 22:55:59 +0000

I regularly have to check my iTunes podcast subscriptions for problems. It’s not necessarily iTunes fault (case in point, Diggnation recently did something to their feed that forced iTunes to download over and over, which I didn’t care about because they can foot the bandwidth bill for their mistake).

From time to time, high volume podcasts such as the Daily Source Code will have their feed download fail. When I saw Accident Hash fail, I was a little perplexed. I clicked the little alert icon.

Digg Spamming

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 08:58:55 +0000

I wrote about Digg, the social news site, a while back. However, for all the cool stuff it affords, it’s also beginning to show some signs of the pitfalls of a fast growing site.

Wikipedia notes a few criticisms, the worst of which seems to be recurring stories. Wikipedia doesn’t note what I think will become an overwhelming problem in the very near future: Digg spam.

I’m not talking about traditional spamming by bots that submit URLs to porn sites, debt consolidation, or poker. It seems like Digg’s staff has that quite well in hand. Rather, Digg spamming (or Damming) for my purposes is a practice by wherein the author of a blog signs up on Digg and submits every single article they write. Sound familiar? It should.

Photo Gallery Updated to Version 2

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 10:41:06 +0000

A couple weeks ago, Gallery 2 was released. I’ve been using Gallery as my photo gallery software on this site for a long time. I probably would use it a lot more if Flickr weren’t so addictive.

The problem is that Gallery is software and not a service. Therefore, I have to supply the storage space and bandwidth. I do have well over 5 GB of storage space and 120 GB of bandwidth at my disposal (thanks Dreamhost, which recently added unlimited domains to all their plans). I probably couldn’t consume that much space and bandwidth, but when I can upload up to 2 GB per month for $25 a year (note to web services: this is a good price point) and the photos can be dowloaded unlimited times, Flickr wins out.

Pen Failures

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 02:28:43 +0000

My HP Deskjet 5150 suddenly decided to stop printing the other day. It reported a “Pen Failure”. The little ink light on the front of the printer started blinking as well.

It happened just before I went to print out some driving directions, so it was rather inconvenient. I decided I’d try HP’s website to explain the error, because it’s rather cryptic, even for me.

That was totally fruitless. I resorted to fruitless Google searching. A couple people complained about it, but no definite answer was found. The best I could find was an ink module issue.

Security Update 2005-008

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:42:54 +0000

First, Security Update 2005-08 fixes the so-called Safari Image of Doom. Can we all move on now? Thanks.

That’s fixed by:

ImageIO

CVE-ID: CAN-2005-2747

Available for: Mac OS X v10.4.2, Mac OS X Server v10.4.2

Impact: Viewing a maliciously-crafted GIF image may result in arbitrary code execution.

Description: By carefully crafting a corrupt GIF image, an attacker can trigger a buffer overflow in ImageIO which may result in arbitrary code execution. Several components of Mac OS X utilize ImageIO including WebCore and Safari. This update addresses the issue by performing additional validation of images.

.Mac Upgrade

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 08:35:30 +0000

Apple bumped .Mac’s storage to 1 GB (1024 MB for those wondering if they’d correctly count). They also released Backup 3.

I’ve been keeping my email allotment steady at 100 MB, but that’s been feeling a bit constricting, especially when Gmail is now allowing more that 2.5 GB and my web host gives me 5 GB. However, I really like using Apple’s Mail.app (Gmail does have POP, but that’s not adequate because I can’t do server side email management that way) and my web host’s webmail package, SquirrelMail, isn’t all that bad, it’s just not all that good, or at least not as good as .Mac.

Red

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 07:20:34 +0000

I’m both throroughly embarressed and relieved. The Mac Genius was able to fix my Powerbook.

The steps he took were:

Re-sat the Airport card. I didn’t know that could be a common cause.
Reset the power manager. I did that.
Reset the open firmware. At this point, the screen was working. When I did it, I had to use my external display.

All is well again and seeing as a little bit of my pride saved me several hundred dollars, I think I can suck it up. I’ll have to hold off a little on applying for a part-time Genius position though.

Big Weekend

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:14:18 +0000

Rather than post separate entries, I thought I’d explain why I haven’t been around with one.

Visiting Hours

My friend Scott finally freed up some time to see the new place, which he now calls a sweet setup. I’m inclined to agree.

He came out Friday night and got the full tour. Naturally, the four floors of my place were a high point. So far, no one has really had a bad word, but then again maybe they’re all being polite and saving the criticism for later.

Football Picks Week 1

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 10:17:57 +0000

So I’m currently 4 out of 5 and Henry forgot to pick confidence so he didn’t get any points (Henry, if you’re reading this, fix it before this weekend).

smudie (101)
Katie (89)
Mike (85)
Me (81)
Henry (**** explained above)

It’s a little embarressing. For a scot living in France, Stuart knows his football. In fact, he did better than anyone in my work football group.

Here’s my picks ordered from least confidence to most. Real winners are bold. Bold are picks that I had right. Italics are ones that I was wrong.

I'm Not Small, the Water is Cold

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 17:48:56 +0000

Earlier this week, Apple released iTunes 5 and the iPod nano. I didn’t write anything about either because I’m not particularly impressed by either. I’m even less impressed with the iTunes phone aka Motorola ROKR. I should say something though.

iTunes 5

This is perhaps one of the most pathetic iTunes’ “upgrades” yet. No, it wasn’t worthy of a first digit number change. 5.0 doesn’t have to follow 4.9 either. They could have continued with 4.10. There’s even an implicit acknowledgment of this by Apple illustrated by the lack of a color change in the icon. Every other first digit change brought a new number. I love green, but it’s getting stale.

Football Picking

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 10:01:04 +0000

I know it’s late notice, but I just got turned on to Yahoo’s Football Pick’em page (like what I did last year, but automated, so scrap that idea).

Anyway, I expect all of you to join and participate especially Henry (that’s two mentions), Dana, and Katie. The group has 50 slots, so if it comes to that, it’ll be first come, first serve.

You need a Yahoo! id and enough time to pick teams to win (no spread) and assign confidence (1 – 16). Each week’s picks have to be in 5 minutes prior to the first game of the week. The Patriots are playing tonight, so you’ll need to enter your choices before then.

Survey Says

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 20:12:12 +0000

When it becomes time to buy a house or condo, you start thinking about the various attributes that properties have. Which is the most important? Anybody will tell you that the top three are location, location, and location. I’ll be extremely methodical about this and dissect them one at a time.

Location

With gas prices at all time highs, being close to work is more important than ever. That’s especially true if you drive a big honking SUV. Hell, it can add up even if you drive an average car. Sure, buying a hybrid or motorcycle might be cheaper than buying a house, but you’re not moving just for that.

Recommended Trident White Usage

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 09:47:50 +0000

I couldn’t hold this one back. I picked up some Trident White gum at Walmart. “White” promises whiter teeth in as little as four weeks. Sounds easy enough. I chew gum and I’d like whiter teeth.

I decided to dig a little further and figure out exactly what was needed to get these results. It’s not written on the package, so I went to the product’s web site. There I found what I was looking for.

Hurricane Katrina

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 20:15:16 +0000

Like pretty much everyone else, the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina saddened me. I have written anything about because I personally wasn’t affected (unless you count gas prices, which I don’t) and because I wouldn’t be saying anything that others had already said in a much more elegant way.

I’m glad that Henry is well.

I suggest donations be made to the Salvation Army.

Doing It the Hard Way

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 22:17:49 +0000

A more common question on the Macworld Forums is about using a Mac as a wireless base station. I’ve done it several times and at one point, it was a cost saving thing to do. That was back when Airport Base Stations cost $300 and WiFi wasn’t a household name. I freaked out my friends by surfing the net wirelessly.

Things are different now. In a pinch, using Internet Sharing to facilitate the use of a Mac as a base station is a good idea. However, using it as a long term solution isn’t. Apple hasn’t really dropped pricing on its base stations much however, causing many Mac users to think that it is a cost effective solution. Really, $129 for an Airport Express is a bit excessive. The Airport Express Base Station has even less value per dollar for consumers at $199.

Safari 2.0.1 and 1.3.1 Released

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:03:18 +0000

This is standard update fare. Fire up software update or download the updates from Apple (1.3.1 and 2.0.1).

Apple’s documentation is pretty light on what’s changed.

Safari version 2.0.1/1.3.1 for Mac OS X Tiger/Panther improves website compatibility, application stability and support for 3rd party web applications.

It sounds like WebKit might have been updated (perhaps to include Acid test compatibility). It could also be that minor parts of the interface were amended, but I didn’t find any such changes. If you use Saft, you’re going to have to update that too.

Get Opera Free

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 05:19:31 +0000

Opera is giving away their excellent web browser away for free today only.

Go get your registration codes now!

D-Link DCM-202 and Firmware How-To

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 14:55:57 +0000

Because I’m a cheap bastard, I decided to buy my cable modem instead of rent or buy from Comcast.

Review

It’s hard to review a cable modem really. Sites like CNet can do group comparisons, but I have neither the cash nor the time to do a full comparison like that. I can use it for a bit to see if I need to reset it and what kinds of speeds I can get.

Macworld Article Deux

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 15:59:42 +0000

I got the opportunity to write another article for Macworld Online (I don’t know if it’ll get used in Macworld Magazine or not). Check it out.

I got to review one of my favorite pieces of Mac software, Growl. In short, it manages all kinds of alerts. It’s still not 1.0, so the review is a “Promising Prospect” piece. I hope that by the time it reaches 1.0, it’s part of every good Mac user’s arsenal; it’s part of mine.

Google Talk

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 11:01:30 +0000

After many rumors, Google has released its own IM and VoIP system, Google Talk (in beta).

Google decided to use Jabber as the backbone. That means you can IM Google Talk users with any Jabber client using their Gmail address as their username. You can even do so using iChat. If I gave you a Jabber account for godlikenerd.com, you can use that as well. Update: Or not. I can’t seem to connect to chat via anything but a Gmail name. That’s not cool. According to Google:

Woburn Cop Powertrip

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 04:19:45 +0000

Lately my car has been making some unusual noise. It got worse yesterday, so I dropped it off at the mechanic and rode into work with my father. We took 128 North, then cut onto Commerce Way.

Somehow we ended up behind a police cruiser. Normally, that’s not an issue because they speed. This morning, we ended up behind that rare police officer that doesn’t. In fact, according to our speedometer, he was below the speed limit (by an MPH or two). We normally end up in the left lane because one has to turn left into Raytheon anyway.

Digg It, Dugg It, Good

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:40:26 +0000

The next big thing in Internet news is digg. According to the site it is:

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

That’s a lot of buzzwords to be sure. It’s much easier to explain in another way. Digg is a site where people post what they consider interesting stories. Other users can agree by “digging” the entry. Each user can “digg” a story only once.

First Amazon Associates Purchases

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 21:09:04 +0000

I’d like to thank whoever bought Meet the Fockers, Pirates of Silicon Valley, and The Bourne Identity through my Amazon links. I really appreciate it. Hopefully this will be the start of a trend. Living in your own place is a little expensive.

Wait to Merge Your Flickr and Yahoo Accounts

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 22:41:46 +0000

When I first read that Flickr was merging accounts with Yahoo! accounts, I thought it would be a good idea.

As of now, anyone can log in to Flickr using their Yahoo! ID. New users will have to use their Yahoo! ID (or create a new one if they don’t have one); older users can continue to use their existing Flickr.com account details to log in, or choose to merge their Flickr.com accounts and Yahoo! IDs together*. One note: Existing users will be able to keep their existing screen names on Flickr whether they choose to merge accounts now or not – you don’t have to change your name.

Slipknot sues Burger King

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 01:22:16 +0000

Claiming that its image and persona have been hijacked as part of a marketing campaign for Burger King’s new chicken fries, the costumed heavy metal band Slipknot is threatening the fast food giant with legal action.

I actually wondered for a brief moment if it was Slipknot, but it’s so blatantly not.

Feedster Claiming

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 06:12:40 +0000

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

Getting Connected

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:51:37 +0000

So, the essential part of moving has been accomplished. I’ve got my cable modem and Vonage working. Screw food and hygiene, net access and phone capabilities are what really matters.

Despite hearing grumbling about Comcast service issues, so far my experience has been great. The installation was quick and easy. The installer simply needed my cable modem’s serial and model number to register it and I was off. I even applied a Comcast specific firmware update to my D-Link DCM-202. I actually flashed it using my Mac, which isn’t supported by D-Link. In fact, because you can’t simply upload the firmware via a form as is normal for most network devices, it’s hidden. Look forward to a how-to with my method. I’m even experiencing 800 KB/s downloads, faster than any other connection I’ve ever used.

Proud Homeowner

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 20:34:14 +0000

Close friends already know that I just bought a townhouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts (reducing my commute time to under half an hour). This is the big secret that I made reference to in earlier posts. I closed on Thursday.

Originally, I planned on posting that day or on Friday along with pictures. However, due to all the work associated with trying to move in, I haven’t had time (as evidenced by my light posting). The pictures are taken, but now I need to download them from the camera and get them properly loaded onto Flickr. That’s another lengthy task I couldn’t get around to.

Blockbuster Bit Off More Than It Could Chew

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 20:48:36 +0000

I’m not surprised at all by this. In fact, I expected it ever since Blockbuster started their strong-arm, undercutting price competition with Netflix.

From CNET:

The price of Blockbuster’s three-movies-out-at-once rental plan will now be $17.99 per month, up from $14.99, the company said Tuesday. The new rate is the same that Netflix charges for three movies–the most it allows customers to have at a time. … The new prices go into effect Aug. 19.

Mega Man Redux

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 16:51:57 +0000

Any good child of the eighties played the original Nintendo and loved it. They loved every cartridge blowing, standing two inches from the TV playing Duckhunt, square, blister causing controller minute of it. Mega Man was a rocking game during that time. It was so popular that he was a character on the awesome Saturday morning cartoon, Captain N.

Do you remember that high quality, 8-bit saturating effect when you started a level? You can see that all the time, even without playing the game, with the amazing MegaManEffect. You’ll have chills when you see the graphics and hear the sounds, or maybe that’s just me.

DRM, Yes, No, Maybe?

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 23:46:30 +0000

Well, after some fairly convincing evidence earlier in the week that the Macintel developer kits use DRM, followed by some vehement opposition and angst to the idea, sites are now feeling confident enough to proclaim no DRM (and again and again).

Controlled Bloom

My head is spinning. Let’s slow it down. First, what is using DRM in the new Apple Intels?

We’ve discovered that Rosetta uses TCPA/TPM DRM. Some parts of the GUI like ATSServer are still not native to x86 – meaning that Rosetta is required by the GUI, which in turn requires TPM.

Mighty Mouse Saves the Day

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 03:35:18 +0000

I’m not as surprised as much as I would have been prior to the Macintel announcement, but I still didn’t expect to see this happen. Apple is making a multi-button mouse with a scroll interface, the Mighty Mouse [Amazon link]. It doesn’t look to be a wheel, but a little nub. Apple’s site mentions rolling though.

Mighty Mouse offers 360-degree scrolling capability, thanks to its Scroll Ball, perfectly positioned to roll smoothly under just one finger.

I’ll need to get one for myself to play with (because I doubt I’ll like it more than my Logitech MX1000) so I can figure it out. Is it a mini trackball? A nub? Please let it not be a nub. My finger hurts just think about them.

What’s really interesting is that it’s not a generic three-button mouse. Apple seems to have jumped headfirst by including side buttons, which act as a fourth button. At $50, it has the same suggested retail price as a Logitech MX518 but will likely stay at that price unlike the Logitech, which can be had for $40 right now.

At any rate, this is likely to satisfy many people that have been crying for years for an Apple branded multi-button mouse. The downsides are the price, no fancy optics, and lack of a bluetooth version (big boo for that one). Hopefully Apple will start offering an option to switch out the regular mouse for this on new systems (for a discounted price of $20 or so) or even be so bold as to make it the standard mouse for Powermacs, leaving the single button for the iMacs and eMacs.

Update: It even makes noises when scrolling. Cute!

Update 2: Amazon has it available for pre-order.

Payola

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 20:20:45 +0000

I pulled the trigger on it. I added Google Ads to Tag Central. I’ve also added a shop section to this site. If you’re looking to buy something I’ve reviewed on the site or anything else from Amazon, please use that page. There is no cost difference to you and I get a percentage of the sale. It’s a great way for you to get some merchandise at a good price generally with free shipping and support the site.

The Dangers of Email Addresses in RSS Feeds

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 17:00:33 +0000

There has been an update, so please read to the bottom of the post. I leave the original entry above for posterity.

Frassle is a neat service. What is not neat is that they seem to resell email addresses. My domain allows me to use any address at it (they all get redirected to a central address). This allows me to tailor a name to each service. The old tact was to use a Yahoo or Hotmail account (which didn’t have any accountability). My convention right now is either service1 or service.login1.

OS X Intel Uses DRM

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 08:09:07 +0000

Found via Slashdot, Apple is using DRM to keep parts of the OS from working on unauthorized computers. The Slashdot story includes links to a wiki on x86 Mac OS X, which in turn pulls its information about the TCPA/TPM DRM from this FAQ.

The problem is that the site is titled Against TCPA (which is also their domain name). It’s not exactly an unbiased source, to say the least. I want to find a slightly less paranoid breakdown of the technology.

Google Maps Plugin

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 19:40:15 +0000

Address Book has some neat built-in features. Some are more hidden than others. Most people find that by clicking on addresses, a menu will pop up offering to bring up a map for that address. Very cool. What is not cool is that it uses MapQuest.

Let me revise that. I don’t like MapQuest. It’s a pain to work with. I like Google Maps. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use it instead? You can with the Google Maps Plugin (donationware).

Grokster Linkage

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 17:45:22 +0000

Back when the Supreme Court handed down their decision on Grokster, I made a few quick conclusions based upon some cursory reading I did. I didn’t really expect to get quoted on Computerworld.

Derik DeLong says Grokster assisted in the act of piracy and that it, “Wasn’t just turning a blind eye.”

I need to find a better way to figure when I get linked. It happened over a month ago.

Apparently, I'm Stressed

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 18:56:28 +0000

My coworkers haven’t seen me without my Morf stress ball since I got it at Staples. I constantly have to do something with my hands and it occupied them. squish squish

I was sitting at my desk, listening to a podcast, and looking at my computer screen. All of a sudden, I heard a squirting sound and something touching my shoulder. I froze. What was that? I looked over at my shoulder and all over my shirt was a bunch of yellow goo. A tiny hole opened itself as I squeezed and the contents were now decorating my shirt.

New iBooks and Mac minis

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 19:14:31 +0000

Apple released new iBooks and Mac minis. All in all, the updates were really minor. The good news is that all Mac models now sport at least 512 MB of RAM. That’s pretty much the whole of the update for the minis.

The iBooks on the other hand, have been bumped to 1.33 GHz and 1.42 GHz. They’ve also moved up to Radeon 9550s in lieu of Radeon 9200s. Oddly enough, the 14″ also gained 9 MHz for its bus apparently. This is the only Mac I’ve read of ever to have a 142 MHz bus. That might be the only thing to make this round of revisions memorable.

Konfabulating Your Life with Yahoo!

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 21:24:53 +0000

Along the lines of their other recent moves, like buying Flickr, Yahoo! has acquired Konfabulator. Longtime Mac fans should recognize the product and its author, Arlo Rose, for his role in creating Kaleidoscope. Recent Mac fans should recognize the debacle surrounding Apple’s creation of Dashboard.

This brings the immediate benefit of making Konfabulator free. Previously, the framework itself cost $20 to register. When comparing Konfabulator to Dashboard, the price difference (Dashboard being free with Tiger) gave Dashboard the edge. Yahoo! effecting this price change will have a dramatic effect upon its market share. Mac users will feel free to compare it directly to Dashboard without feeling obligation. As for Windows users, the new Yahoo! association should bring lots of attention. Those two effects should stimulate Widget developers into developing for Konfabulator again. That’s a good thing because as I write this, there is still no working package tracker. Very lame.

Daylight Savings Time Makes Me Feel Sunny

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 17:36:13 +0000

Our lawmakers are hard at work. This time the pressing issue is extension of daylight savings time. The current plan is to extend it by a month total, three weeks in Spring and a week in the Fall. The goal of this legislation is to reduce oil consumption.

I’m no fan of daylight savings. It just means more work for me to change all my clocks. I’d be more in favor of dropping it entirely and picking one damn time scheme. After all, if extending it will save on oil consumption, shouldn’t moving to that time scheme permanently save us even more?

Shop

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 14:46:56 +0000

Shop

Writing for this site and maintaining its services are a joy for me. However, the webhosting still costs me money, a cost I’d like to cover. Now, asking directly for money isn’t something I want to do. However, if you’re looking to buy something from Amazon, you can do it from here and I’ll get a percentage of the sale, at no cost to you.

As an added bonus, I’m adding links to all the stuff I own or review (that’s available on Amazon). Thanks!

Burned

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 08:57:19 +0000

Some time ago, I used Feedburner to make a new feed for the site. I called it the Superfeed and used their service to add in Flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks. However, I found it way too limiting. There were other sources I wanted to add, such as my Netflix notifications and my Ta-da List. While I used it though, I became addicted to their statistics. I could instantly gauge how many people were reading.

I'm Still Alive, Just Busy

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 08:15:40 +0000

I realized today that between a real lack of Apple/Mac news and having lots to do (relating to the mysterious piece of news I referred to in our last exciting episode) that I likely wouldn’t be posting much, though the supplemental is going to get regular updates.

The good news is that once I get back into the groove, I’ll be adding a lot of content that is in a vein that this site hasn’t explored before. Stay tuned.

All Consuming

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 17:27:50 +0000

All Consuming

All Consuming tracks books, music, and movies that people consume. I’m tracking my stuff too.

Recent Activity

requested list not available

Cable Modem Ordered

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 08:10:37 +0000

Those of you that I talk to daily already know why I’m ordering a new D-Link DCM-202. Please don’t mention it in the comments. I’m going to be all superstitious about it and write a big post about it later.

{.float-right}Anyway, at about $40 with mail-in rebate at Amazon with DOCSIS 2.0, this was the modem to get. I won’t be posting a review for a while, but I’ll do all kinds of testing when I do. I’ll use Skype, Gizmo, Vonage (as I’ll likely be getting that too), Bittorrent, and so on. There won’t be anything too formal (as switching between a couple cable modems isn’t really an option, nor something I want to do), but I will be able to definitively say whether I think it sucks.

iPhoto 5.0.3 Released

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 09:41:15 +0000

Apple released the iPhoto 5.0.3 update yesterday. Normally, iApp updates aren’t particularly exciting. In fact, the details are excruciatingly boring.

Here are the changes according to Apple:

On Tiger, images are no longer color-shifted after editing (Mac OS X 10.4.2 update required)

Book layouts will not change when moving an image on a page

An issue was addressed that caused some book orders to be cancelled

Smart Albums will display correctly in other iLife applications

Normally, I’d ignore this and just install it, but the first bullet is the interesting one. It fixes a problem that has rather profound effects. Generally, it’s referred to as the iPhoto color shifting bug. The linked article is probably the best documentation of the bug I’ve seen (complete with animation). At any rate, it means I can start editing photos again.

Mac OS X 10.4.2 Released

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 18:55:34 +0000

I’ve already updated all the Macs in the house with no ill effects. The most visual difference is the addition of a Widget Manager (for those afraid to fiddle around in their Library/Widgets folder).

Apple has posted a knowledge-base article (#301722), as well as a delta updater and a combo updater. The changes as described by Apple, are as follows.

The update mentions improved Safari scroll speed, so I expected that it was a recent WebKit build (with Acid2 test compatibility). Unfortunately, it seems that this hasn’t gone mainstream yet, so reliance on NightShift, SafariOnAcid, or your own builds will have to continue.

Roll Your Own Safari

Sat, 09 Jul 2005 15:12:13 +0000

Apple opened up a public CVS repository for WebKit, it made it possible to get the latest source, compile, and run it yourself. They even broke the steps to do so into easily digested step-by-step instructions. All one need do is get source and compile it.

You need to make sure that you have XCode installed and be comfortable with running Terminal commands. You don’t need to really understand them, just be able to type them in. If you’d like to avoid all that, there is a shortcut. Boyd Waters has put together and updated version of WebKit in an easy to use container called SafariOnAcid. The name is an homage to the fact that using the updated code, the Acid2 test passes. It’s worth checking out not only for standards compliance, but speed.

Monk Season Premiere Tonight

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 12:27:03 +0000

Fire up your TiVo (or EyeTV in my case). Monk is back. I love the show, but not the way in which they’ve been jerking me around. First it was just on USA. Then it was on ABC. Then back to USA. They changed the time around a couple times.

They had finally settled on 10 PM on Fridays. Then of course that had to be upset by putting Kojak on at that time instead (I wanted to like that show too, but I just couldn’t bring myself to). I was afraid that the replacement of Monk’s nurse had been the death knell for the show. It wasn’t.

London Tragedy

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:02:04 +0000

London has been attacked. Four bombs have been set off in their public transportation systems.

My thoughts go out to them.

43 Places

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 17:32:03 +0000

I recently added a 43 Places page to the site. 43 Places is yet another website that’s under the Robot Co-op umbrella. You can track where you’ve been and where you want to be, something that many people were doing with 43 Things.

However, as it wasn’t designed for destinations, lots of duplicate goals were registered at 43 Things. For example, you might have “See Germany”, “Visit Germany”, “Go to Germany”, and so on. 43 Places is much more exact and allows for places within other places be entered that way (such as having Fenway Park in Boston).

Your Mac Jerks

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 23:57:25 +0000

I’ve been subscribed to Your Mac Life‘s podcast for some time now. I subscribed a long time back before I knew what to subscribe to. Basically, there was a single show, which was a rant by Shawn. It was all right.

Now, after I noticed that another show never made it self available, I did a little digging and found out that they didn’t because they made all their money on Audible, charging just about $4 a show, or $45 for a year’s subscription. Saying that he didn’t want to change their business model is a fine justification. That’s cool.

43 Places

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 14:33:06 +0000

43 Places

I don’t travel often, but I track where I’ve been and where I want to go using 43 Places. You can browse my page there or look below.

Podcasting Done Right… Almost

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 23:57:44 +0000

I stick up for Apple in most cases. This time, they’re on their own. I’m going to bash them for a couple mistakes

Right Here, Right Now

I must admit after having used NetNewsWire so long, I’d gotten used to its somewhat loose connection with iTunes. It would download new episodes and dump them into iTunes (allowing me to specify genre and playlist). I used only the genre option, using Smart Playlists to find two types of podcasts. Listened to and not listened to. This was done by a smart playlist that collected all files with the genre podcast with a play count of zero and another that did the same except looked for files with a play count of at least one.

Gizmo, the Open Skype Alternative

Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:55:44 +0000

Looking through my del.icio.us inbox I came across a link to the Gizmo Project. Basically, it’s a nice face for the SIP protocol, similar to Skype (though Skype doesn’t use SIP).

Skype has always served me well (though I’ve admittedly only played with it). It’s a good OS X citizen, sporting a great interface and utilizing some neat OS X software like Growl. However, you have to pay for the voicemail service. You don’t have to with Gizmo (an interim name). Gizmo has both a Mac and Windows version. A Linux version is in the works.

iTunes RSS 2.0 Podcasting Namespace Additions

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 12:12:21 +0000

Apple, as part of its new podcasting initiative, has added extra metadata for iTunes to use. Naturally, when you touch any existing “open” standard as a corporation, you get a shitstorm of criticism. That’s not to say that sometimes it’s not deserved, but a lot of the time resentment forces out more criticism than is necessary or real. Dave Winer and Edd Dumbill both had some beefs. I know, I know. It’s a real shocker that Dave is pissed. Edd seems to be a little more balanced, but still misses some important points.

Welcome Winecast Listeners

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 07:22:10 +0000

I went through my list of podcasts last night, transferring them from NetNewsWire to iTunes. One of my absolute favorites is the Winecast. Check it out. Even if you don’t drink a lot of wine or know pretty much nothing, this podcast is a pleasure to listen to. I can’t speak for experienced wine drinkers, but for a novice like me, the show is a godsend. It explains the origins of various wine varieties.

iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting has Arrived

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 07:39:22 +0000

I woke up this morning and was alerted to the availability of the much discussed 4.9. Really, it’s the most feature-rich update to iTunes I can remember since version 4 debuted with the iTunes Music Store capability. Every release since has been pretty lackluster.

iTunes 4.8 added the capability to play music videos, but really, there haven’t been any really compelling new features added, in my opinion. I’ll be taking screenshots later as well as reviewing how I’ll be using it. Really, this should have been iTunes 5.0, but maybe Apple has some other really compelling feature(s) to add beyong this, but I doubt it. Here’s a breakdown of what iTunes has added starting with iTunes 4.0.

Grokster Loses

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 18:16:07 +0000

In yet another landmark decision, the Supreme Court has ruled against Grokster. Now, upon first examination, I thought this was a very bad thing. However, reading the Groklaw article on the ruling has put some of my fears to rest.

In fact, the Sony decision isn’t infringed upon. From the decision:

We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promotion its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.

Safari Stand, a New Toy

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 16:21:51 +0000

I revisited PimpMySafari and one of the three must have utilities was Safari Stand. I wasn’t sure I would be impressed and I’m always afraid of slowing down Safari with more stuff. I’ve been keeping it pretty lean with just PithHelmet and AcidSearch.

So far, I like what it brings to the table. It has a lot of neat features, like adding keyword searching, auto download window closing, and my personal favorite, source editing. You can visit a web page, tweak the source code and see the result of your change right in the Safari window.

EyeHome Review

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:59:26 +0000

Earlier this week, my El Gato EyeHome arrived. It doesn’t come with any AV cables. So I had to march down to Wallyworld to pick up some cables. Then the fun began.

I had a few choices when it came to cables. There’s composite, S-video, and component video outputs. For audio, there’s component and optical. Now, if I had the right equipment, the right connections would be the component video and the optical audio. Optical audio: isn’t that an oxymoron? I don’t and I need the most flexibility, so I went with the component video and audio. Note that there is no RF coaxial output, so if that’s all your TV has, you may have to route it through a special adapter box or through your VCR.

Grant G has Passed Away

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 18:53:01 +0000

Twice this week someone I’ve met through the Macworld forums has passed away. I got the email a few days ago from a friend of his. It was by far the saddest piece of news to ever enter my inbox. Chris Breen, who knew him longer than I, has written an excellent forum post about it. Please read it. Chris has far more experience writing and his piece is really touching. One snippet hit me pretty hard.

Do You Blog?

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 09:58:51 +0000

Make sure you take MIT’s survey for blog authors.

Goodbye Passenger, You'll Be Missed

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 08:13:47 +0000

Anyone that’s been a member of Macworld’s forums for a significant amount of time may remember the “Gabbery” forums. They were a haven of off-topic conversation with its own unique flavor. It ultimately had to come to an end. That story is for another time though.

One of the leading contributors was a member named Passenger. He was passionate and believed in what he said. That’s a rare trait now. When the “Gabbery” forums were disbanded, one of the members, Kahloz, started a new forum at his own website. Passenger made the migration with a few others. For months (or a year, I can’t remember), we talked about all topics, routinely getting on one another’s nerves.

Your Duty

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 07:39:32 +0000

I don’t normally encourage people to get involved with causes, but I feel this one is vital. Don’t let Ground Zero become a political war ground. The memorial should be for and about the victims, not some politically correct quest for international popularity.

I’ve been working my butt off the last few days creating an online petition system for [takebackthememorial.org](http://takebackthe memorial.org)

The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary “gateway” to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on “a journey through the history of freedom” – but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC’s organizers, it is not only history’s triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man’s inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich’s Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona.

I've Switched

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 00:56:21 +0000

Not from Mac to Windows, or vice versa, but rather in a more important way. I’ve switched from the fabulous LaunchBar to the very new and slick Quicksilver. Between those two and Butler, if they’re mentioned in the same breath to a large crowd, you can expect some blood to be spilled. You’d see a religious war that would rival the Mac OS X text editor war (BBEdit vs. SubEthaEdit vs. TextMate etc.).

Red Sox Game Three

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:14:48 +0000

I’m sure this will piss off a few people (and already has some others), but I saw my third Red Sox game of the season this past Tuesday night. And this is after the World Series I said that it would be impossible for me to see even a single game. But I digress.

Anyway, Allison invited me to go with her as part of a package deal that her mother had access to. The package was a bus ride into Boston, as much beer as you could drink, a sandwich, and a ticket to the game. Not that bad.

Fast Enough

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 11:08:46 +0000

This is a strange predicament that I’ve been placed in. Normally, I agree with what most Mac pundits say. However, many of them are being over-confident and taking Steve’s word for gospel. They’re not doing any analysis or technical reviews of the transition. Rather, they believe the marketing hype otherwise known as a keynote.

One of the primary concerns was the ability to run PowerPC software. This was addressed with a slick piece of software called Rosetta. Slick though it may be, it’s still emulation. In other words, it’s slow. To put that concern to rest, Steve told us it was fast enough. Fast enough? What kind of vague bullshit is that? I can let that go because, as I said before, keynotes are marketing hype. What’s sickening is the way in which evangelists are parroting this as if it was the result of some kind of scientific study.

EyeHome Coming Home

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 20:36:33 +0000

So, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I’ve finally gone ahead and ordered an Elgato EyeHome. Dealnews alerted me about a deal to get a D-Link 5-port switch for $10. That was a good deal, so I ordered it.

Now, I’ve been looking for a good deal on a switch to attach to my DWL-G810 wireless bridge. Right now, it’s only attached to my Playstation 2. It only has a single ethernet port and because I’m too lazy to switch the cable over between the two devices.

Netflix has Mystery Science Theater 3000

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 10:51:16 +0000

Hacking Netflix had an article on “the worst movie ever”. The article mentioned that Netflix carried the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version.

I never thought of the possibility that Netflix had MST3K. But they do! In fact, they have a large selection (27 by my count) and they’re all in my queue now (which has reached triple digits in size). Does anyone else have the same desire to watch them all?

Security Update 2005-006 Released

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:59:28 +0000

Apple released Security Update 2005-006. I’m not going to do my breakdown this time as I’m pretty busy. However, Apple’s notes should be fairy self-explanatory.

Get Those Scissors

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 20:33:06 +0000

You’re going to want to head down to your local newsstand if you’re not a subscriber to Macworld magazine. The July 2005 issue features an article written by yours truly (it’s the sidebar on page 46). It’s already been published online, but there’s nothing like a physical copy right in your hands.

I plan on buying a couple copies so I can frame it as it’s my first published work. It’s quite an exciting day for me. Hopefully I can make this a more regular thing.

The Waiting Game

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 09:58:43 +0000

It’s not often that I can find fault with John Gruber of Daring Fireball. However, I think he may be downplaying some things in his latest entry Bombs Away. Considering all computer users are always looking towards their next purchase, the issue of when to buy is always paramount. He said:

This transition period is going to be hard on Apple, not hard on Mac users. If you?ve just purchased a machine recently, or need to buy one soon, you?re no worse off than you would have been if Apple had remained committed to producing new PowerPC hardware ? today?s machines would have been obsoleted by even-better machines next year no matter what processors they contained. And no one is abandoning PowerPC software development. I see no reason to expect Intel-only Mac software in the near future. Universal Binaries take full advantage of both Intel and PowerPC Macs. That?s worth repeating: Universal Binaries take full advantage of both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

Rosetta is not a Magic Cure-All, or the Death of Classic

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 09:29:17 +0000

One of the more overlooked aspects of the transition from PowerPC to Intel x86 CPUs is the effect it will have on the software you can run. I’ll be discussing this move and my take on it in a later article, but I think a subset of the transition strategy needs highlighting first.

You Won’t Feel a Thing

Steve made the transition sound utterly painless. According to him, developers will have to do little more than recompile their cocoa software. But what about existing software? Rosetta is the answer proclaimed Steve. Processor emulation will make it all better. Now, for the time being, I’m willing to ignore the ~~inevitable~~ confirmed speed cost, but what about compatibility and functionality? The keynote seems to make it seem like all your old software will just work. Well, I wasn’t buying that, My suspicion was rewarded when I read Apple’s document on Universal Binaries.

Intel Chip Monday

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 22:25:01 +0000

Well, I’m sure most everyone has read the CNet story on Apple switching Macs to Intel, the Wall Street Journal story, the Inquirer version, the Yahoo/AP version, or even the New York Times version.

The number of sources coming forward to confidently say that they are has turned even ardent disbelievers in the rumor, such as John Gruber, the other way (or maybe not). I’m personally in the “I think this is a load of crap” camp.

Netflix Feed Problems, Sort Of

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 18:56:40 +0000

So I alluded to some problems I was having when combining Planet d00dism and Netflix‘s activity RSS feeds. However, based upon how the planet site currently looks, I overestimated the the effect that the deficiency in their feeds would pose.

You may notice that the first entries of Netflix are in a big clump. Obivously, all those movies didn’t go out and leave at the same time. This appears to have happened because Netflix doesn’t use the optional pubDate field of the RSS 2.0 format.

Planet d00dism

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 21:30:30 +0000

After thinking a lot about how to implement my own Erikkregator, Marshall recommended RSSMix. Now, that was an excellent suggestion. However, that only solves the problem of the RSS feed. I wanted to have a webpage to go along with it though.

At that point, if I was going to be programming with an RSS parsing library, I might as well be mixing my own RSS feed. That sounded extremely painful though. That’s why I was glad to come across a slick piece of software called Planet.

Hit and Run

Tue, 31 May 2005 10:09:43 +0000

So my good friend Allison invited me to her house in Worcester for a cookout. Good times. I went home in a good mood.

The next morning, mother woke me up. Did you get in an accident last night? she asked. Now, I didn’t remember an accident. I wasn’t that out of it. It made me wake with a start though.

It turns out that while I was parked on that side street in Worcester, someone managed to hit my car. This is the 4th time it’s been hit while it was stationary. Line right up ladies and gentlemen. See the car that only gets dented when not in motion.

Growl 0.7 and the Endless Loop

Fri, 27 May 2005 21:28:57 +0000

Growl is an awesome piece of freeware that supplies a universal event notification system. Sounds complicated, but basically, it gives applications alternate ways to tell you things.

One of the new features in the 0.7 version is the ability to send these events to networked computers via Bon Jour. For example, let’s say you have a downloading application that issues events upon completion. However, you kicked that download off at your desktop and you want to use your laptop. You don’t want to babysit your desktop to know when it reached completion.

Wait, Who Are You Again?

Wed, 25 May 2005 13:30:10 +0000

I just couldn’t resist posting up this piece of spam.

Subject: please call me Frank

From: “Glenn” azjuoyjxqjhm@aanda.datanet.hu

Hi.,

Would you like at least $1500.00 to $3500.00 per day just for returning phone calls? I do! If you have a telephone and can return calls you are fully qualified for this program.

Thank you,

Johanna

Okay, so which name should I use when I call the number?

All Consuming Consumed by 43 Things

Wed, 25 May 2005 08:08:14 +0000

One of the neatest things I’ve found lately is the proliferation of websites to manage aspects of your life publicly. Seeing as I’m not totally privacy paranoid, it’s a fun hobby. I recently discovered All Consuming which was created by Erik Benson. It’s a neat way to track books, music, and movies that you’re reading, listening to, and watching respectively.

Robot Co-op, the company that runs 43 Things, bought it up. This means that the two services will soon be intertwined. 43 Things is one of the sources on Tag Central but unfortunately All Consuming is not because they don’t supply RSS feed for their tags. Hopefully that will change.

Changing Tires

Wed, 25 May 2005 07:37:36 +0000

I got home really late last night. It wasn’t because of anything even mildly exciting. Rather, my left front tire decided to die. I noticed a slow leak lately (like a couple PSI over a couple weeks) but it decided to shit the bed yesterday.

I stopped at a gas station near work. Guess what. It was broken. I put 75 cents into a broken air pump. That flipped my Hulk rage switch. I had to put the donut on the car and drive home.

Apple News Doubleshot

Mon, 23 May 2005 12:27:57 +0000

Today has yielded two news items from Apple. One is wild speculation. The other is real news. Let’s start with the real news.

iTunes Podcast Support

Steve Jobs, at D: All Things Digital Conference, announced that iTunes 4.9 will have Podcasting support. iTunes will allow you to subscribe Podcast RSS feeds and automatically download the song files into your library. The update is due within 60 days.

In the meantime, I’ll still use NetNewsWire (and I may do so after). Apple adding this is almost trivial now that they have the Safari RSS backbone to use. The question in my mind is whether Apple will try to integrate a bittorrent client. I find podcast feeds that distribute using Bittorrent exceedingly irritating. Currently, the only feed that I subscribe to that does this is This Week in Tech. Ok, ok, so they probably have the largest listening audience out of any podcast, but having to screw around with Bittorrent completely defeats the purpose of podcasts (they’re delivered automatically without user intervention).

Safari RSS Autodiscovery Sucks

Thu, 19 May 2005 22:25:29 +0000

I added my Feedburner feed to the site’s header to make it more easily accessible to users. Firefox users get to see the entire list of feeds. Safari users are less blessed. They can only click the singular RSS button in the location bar.

According to Apple, Safari uses the Atom Feed Autodiscovery standard.

When Safari displays a web page, Safari RSS looks in the HEAD element for a LINK tag that points to an Atom or RSS feed. The schema for these links is fairly standard and is supported by most news readers. It is described on page 40 of O’Reilly’s Content Syndication With RSS, and in Mark Pilgrim’s draft document on Atom Feed Autodiscovery.

No One Will Believe This

Thu, 19 May 2005 09:52:29 +0000

I had to take this quiz because Henry took it. I expected to be classified as KING NERD (the highest rating), but I failed miserably. How can I possibly continue using this domain? It’s no longer appropriate.

Mac OS X 10.4.1 Released

Tue, 17 May 2005 07:14:48 +0000

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.4.1, the first update to Tiger.

In addition to the improvements below, Apple has fixed the Widget exploit that had so many panties in a twist. In fact, they implmented the fix exactly as I would have, by adding a confirmation dialog when downloading.

Dave Winer, an Appropriate Name

Tue, 17 May 2005 05:47:48 +0000

People that are big into blogging will recognize Dave Winer as a hugely important figure. However, like many great people, he suffers from an ego problem.

Wired ran an interview by Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing fame with Adam Curry, famous for various reasons, but currently because of the wildly popular Daily Source Code podcast.

In response to which, Dave Winer threw a fit. You know when people are taking the mature approach to an issue when they say things like:

New AIM Mail

Sat, 14 May 2005 20:32:20 +0000

I recently added a link into the supplement about AOL giving free email to AIM users. I saw Slashdot cover the same story and one comment gave information about how to access it. Naturally I had to try it out for myself.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, Gmail has the ultimate interface (I still have plenty of invites if you want one). So honestly, my expectations for AOL’s new mail service weren’t that great. However, the question is if it’s better or worse than the other webmail providers, such as Yahoo or HoTMaiL.

Tigger with a New Necklace

Fri, 13 May 2005 21:14:56 +0000

Tigger with a New Necklace
Originally uploaded by d00d.

My cat loses fights against inanimate objects. How embarressing is that? There are lots more pictures like this one, so check it out.

Want a Jabber Screenname?

Fri, 13 May 2005 18:14:49 +0000

Tiger users can user Jabber usernames with iChat AV 3.0. What’s the point of that? Well, AOL can’t listen in on you for one. Second, it’s decentralized. Should AOL go belly up, we’d all be fairly screwed. With Jabber, a single service provider can go down or disappear and everyone else can keep jabbering.

Jabber also allows for chat gateways. For example, you can talk to MSN users through it. Melvin Rivera has written an excellent tutorial to get this set up.

Batting 1,000

Fri, 13 May 2005 11:34:40 +0000

Time for me to brag a little. During my softball game on Tuesday night, I got on base every time I came to bat. I’m not talking about just one or two at-bats. I was up four times. One was a triple with two or three RBIs.

Of course, my fielding is still weak-ass, but I’ll sweep that under the rug.

Widget Panic

Wed, 11 May 2005 13:48:08 +0000

No doubt by now you’ve heard about the Widget security issue. Thankfully, most of the Mac news sites have been fairly even-handed in their reporting. This hasn’t stopped from others on the net from proclaiming this the end of Mac security and that it’s no better than Windows (lots of hyperbole, not much substance). I’ve seen bits and pieces of information on this, but nothing that totally consolidates it yet. The MacCentral article linked probably has the best overview, but I’d like to break it down a little differently.

My Second Red Sox Game

Sun, 08 May 2005 19:35:21 +0000

I wasn’t expecting to go to even a single game this year and now I’ve gone to two. I saw the first game of the double header against the Seattle Mariners today with my father.

I know it was Mother’s Day. Hush. The game was supposed to be last night but it got rained out. Also, dad was the one that got the tickets, so taking them a second time to see a game with someone else didn’t seem appropriate.

Spotlight

Sun, 08 May 2005 00:11:13 +0000

The first of my series of posts on Tiger’s new features finally begins tonight with Spotlight. This post is somewhat long because of the pictures that I decided to include. As such, most of the article is in the extended section. At the same time, those pictures actually make it fun to read even for the not so geeky, so definitely take a look.

Screenshot Format Default Changed

Thu, 05 May 2005 07:32:29 +0000

When I took a screenshot of Safari’s contextual menu last night, I expected that it would be output as a PDF (the default format in Panther). I also wanted to take the opportunity to try out the Flickr upload widget that I mentioned before (which is terribly slick). I wasn’t sure that Flickr supported PDF, so I thought I’d have to convert the screenshot file. Much to my surprise, it was formatted as a PNG file. With that, I just went ahead and uploaded it (and it seems to have worked perfectly).

Minor Safari 2.0 Observation

Wed, 04 May 2005 21:38:46 +0000

I don’t think I’m the only one using a Mac that has become really accustomed to using context menus. Until I started using gestures to operate my web browser, I would regularly use the context menu to move back (because clicking the back button is really inconvenient).

Safari continually jerked me around by being the only browser that didn’t have back and forward options. It’s one of the most common functions. This finally changed in Tiger and Safari 2.0.

Tasty

Wed, 04 May 2005 21:11:12 +0000

From a buddy’s away message:

Even my boogers are spicy.

Who else is having seconds?

OK, I Lied

Wed, 04 May 2005 06:59:54 +0000

I promised a feature review last night and between a not so great commute, reinstalling software, and upgrading the Pismo, I never got around to playing with Spotlight, nevermind take screenshots or write it up.

In fact, I barely had time to catch House. I’d promise to get around to it tonight, but I have a softball game, some email regarding getting my own place to reply to, and a W-9 to fill out.

Tiger Installed

Tue, 03 May 2005 09:35:12 +0000

I’ve got Mac OS X Tiger installed on the 12″ Powerbook and the MDD G4 Powermac. Let me tell you, it’s awesome. It’s fast and even more multitasking capable (if that’s even really possible). I have a few quick thoughts this morning. I’ll have a much more complete analysis of Spotlight tonight.

Spotlight may be more like LaunchBar than I originally thought. It served as a decent replacement until I got LaunchBar installed. However, it isn’t quite the same because it groups by kind and it doesn’t indicate location. That’s bad because when I do a search for a certain application, Spotlight is currently bringing up duplicates that exist on my Panther backup.

Tiger… Monday?

Mon, 02 May 2005 10:21:27 +0000

Okay, so the title for this entry would have been much cooler if Tiger were arriving tomorrow. Tiger Tuesday! I could have had fame and fortune. Instead, I’ll have Tiger one day earlier and be a nobody.

Anyway, posting won’t be on the agenda tonight. I hope to cover one Tiger feature a day. The order I cover those features is still up in there air though. Any of you out there interested in seeing my take on a particular feature first, please leave a comment. I plan on taking a lot of screenshots because no one can get enough.

Goodbye My Sweet Brick

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:06:15 +0000

After 4+ years of using the same awful phone, I’ve finally moved into the 21st century. I no longer have the classic Saved by the Bell cell phone, pictured below.

Everyone in my family got their phone upgraded to the LG VX3200. It’s pretty basic (no camera or bluetooth), but it’s a lot lighter and smaller than the old phone. It’s also flip style, which is much better than the older style.

Tiger Frustration Alleviation

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 13:36:41 +0000

My sadness quickly turned into rage last night because I wouldn’t have my toy this weekend. I read at several places, including Macworld’s forums that if you didn’t get your copy of Tiger on time, you could call Apple to get one of three things for free.

iLife ‘05
iWork
$30 Apple Store coupon

Finding this out, I called up and they promptly offered me iLife ‘05. I didn’t hear him offer the other two options, but personally, I didn’t care as that was what I wanted anyway.

I'm Officially Depressed

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:20:47 +0000

I was riding on cloud 9 last night. Today was supposed to be a great day. My day was supposed to be wake up at 9, see some houses at 11, then come home and relax before Tiger arrived late afternoon or in the evening.

Everything went according to plan… except for the last part. My copy of Mac OS X Tiger got delayed for delivery by Apple. I could have driven to an Apple Store to get it, but nooooo, I had to tell Apple ahead of time that I wanted a copy. Rookie mistake apparently.

Damnit Technorati

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 09:18:42 +0000

During a round of service adding last night, I figured out a way to differentiate between no results and an error. That’s good because now users will know when they’ll have to visit the source itself to see the results. The worst error offender by far is Technorati. Probably the majority of the tags will come up with an error message. You can then run their feed through the feed validator and witness for yourself the problem.

Activity

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 18:00:11 +0000

Activity

Follow what I’m doing all around the web. RSS feeds of this activity is provided if possible. Below is a small sampling.

Recent Activity

Read even more at Planet d00dism.

Cancellation Satisfaction

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 20:23:43 +0000

The transition from iPowerweb to Dreamhost is complete. I got an email from iPowerweb telling me that they were happy to renew my subscription to their service for another year. Well, considering I’d already migrated the site I thought that might be a little silly. I had to call them and let them know that they were fired.

As I sat there on the phone listening to muzak, I went over how this conversation would go in my head. I figured that they might ask why and I thought that I’d just mention all my issues from last summer. I’m not an unreasonable person, but after having to explain to their brain dead staff half a dozen times that my problem was not an inherent problem in WordPress or any of the plugins I was using with it. If their attitude was going to be that the problem was that I didn’t use their provided software, I knew I’d be having a problem.

LowEndMac Moves Moves into the 21st Century

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 14:50:53 +0000

I’d like to congratulate LowEndMac on moving into the era of modern web page code, using XHTML and CSS. I guess my old criticism about their website (in reference to them judging the state of web browsers in OS 9) will have to fade into the background, but considering that they recognized that iCab was deficient (putting it kindly):

On the down side, pages may not work as well in older browsers once we fully implement our CSS design. And iCab really shows its noncompliance. But with 98-99% of our visitors using modern browsers, we figured it was time to make the switch.

Redesigned Back End

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 20:23:10 +0000

I took a couple hours, learned PHP’s objects and redesigned Tag Central so that all the information for the sources could be stored in a big array object. Now it’s trivial for me to add a new source, so I can start adding all those sources that everyone submitted. I may started restricting the number of results per source to a smaller number (such as I have done with BlogMarks) to avoid unsightly white space and making the page utterly huge.

Tag Central Reskinned

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 21:09:32 +0000

Peter Parkes reskinned Tag Central using PithHelmet and a custom CSS file. I think it looks simply Sensual as he put it.

I like it so much in fact that I’m going to ask if it would be possible to make it the default and perhaps (if he’s interested) come up with some more skins (which was my plan for my blog here, but I never got around to it). I think some great things are ahead!

I know you are, but what am I?

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:42:04 +0000

Spam is getting less annoying for me, mostly because of its comedic value. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. Here’s the latest supposedly from PayPal (har har har).

You’re Billing Information!

No, I’m not! The last time I pretended to be billing information, I got my hand stuck in someone’s mail slot.

SIMBL Plugin Followup

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 06:56:21 +0000

When Safari 1.3 came out, several plugins broke and were quickly fixed again. That’s cool, but both the PithHelmet and AcidSearch plugin updates were a bit rushed (and with good reason because they were high in demand).

For AcidSearch the bug was mostly harmless. When a channel was dragged around in the configuration window, it got turned into a folder. Oops. The author quickly issued an update.

However, PithHelmet had a more serious problem. Attempting to set the display of a page element to none after probing the dimensions of that object caused Safari to crash. Mike Solomon has a much better writeup for those technically inclined. Basically what this meant for an end user was that Safari crashed… a lot. It bit me with one site in particular. He issued an update which no longer crashes Safari, but unfortunately doesn’t collapse a lot of blocked elements either (which was one of my main beefs with how OmniWeb handles ad-blocking). It doesn’t happen all the time though, so it’s not going to force me into using Camino or Firefox (for now), but it’s a silly bug that hopefully will get fixed.

Alexa Links Tag Central

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 11:25:19 +0000

Alexa, part of Amazon has linked Tag Central very prominently in a recent blog entry. That drew quite a few visits.

I vow that this weekend I will at least get the supporting pages up so the site isn’t quite as mysterious as it is now.

I've Gone (Flickr) Pro

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 20:32:12 +0000

I read a few blogs talking about the recent Flickr bonuses for their early Pro users. Current subscribers get two free years, their upload limit raised to 2 GB a month, and two free one year Pro subscriptions to give to friends.

Well, thanks to the fast friendship I’ve developed to Stuart over at Blethers.com and the fact that I saw his post offering a membership first, I’ll soon have a Pro membership over at Flickr.

Overdue Tag Central Update

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 12:32:36 +0000

Over the past few days, I’ve the site has been in transition to a new webhost. There were lots of reasons I did this, but hopefully the process has been mostly transparent. Probably the most notable change is that Tag Central now has its own domain name, tagcentral.net. I used a bit of URL rewriting trickery to transparently forward all old style Tag Central URLs (http://godlikenerd.com/tagcentral/xxxxxxx) to the new domain.

Moving it also gave me enough motivation to make a few changes that I’ve been meaning to make. First, I’ve upgraded to the latest version of MagpieRSS which seems to be a bit more tolerant of characters in feeds that don’t match the stated character encoding scheme. Right now, that’s the biggest pain in the ass for me because it means that I can’t easily test that the site still validates because those characters make the validator choke. This isn’t a problem in my site, nor is it a problem in MagpieRSS. No, it’s a problem within specific sources of the site. I’m not going to name names, but if one is putting out an RSS feed and calling it UTF-8, it should be UTF-8, damnit.

Xbench Disk Comparison

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 17:52:59 +0000

Using Xbench, I compared the three disks attached to my Powermac.

First, I have the stock drive, a Deskstar 120GXP (80 GB).

Disk Test   100.77  
    Sequential  103.00  
        Uncached Write  90.65   37.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Write  90.87   37.21 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Uncached Read   170.74  27.03 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Read   91.39   36.93 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Random  98.64   
        Uncached Write  101.96  1.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Write  100.45  22.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Uncached Read   95.93   0.63 MB/sec [4K blocks]
        Uncached Read   96.47   19.85 MB/sec [256K blocks]

The next drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (200GB) in an OWC Firewire enclosure.

First Red Sox Game of the Season

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 16:29:07 +0000

I got a chance to go to a Red Sox game last night with my Sox buddy, Dana. We even spanked the Devilrays 10-0.

I wasn’t expecting to get to go this year, so it was great to go so early in the season. If Raytheon has another group Red Sox trip like they did last year, I may go again.

Safari 1.3 and SIMBL Plugins

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 16:08:47 +0000

Upon launching Safari 1.3 for the first time, I got a notification that the version of PithHelmet I was using wasn’t tested with Safari 1.3, so it would be disabled. Safari then promptly crashed.

Well, that indicated one of three things.

PithHelmet wasn’t actually disabling itself and crashing Safari.
Something else was killing Safari.
I had a botched install.

The third option was very unpleasant. I knew PithHelmet was a SIMBL plugin, so I went to where my SIMBL plugins are kept. This is at “/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins/”. I noticed that not only PithHelmet, but AcidSearch was in there. Just to be sure, I moved both out onto the desktop and started Safari. It launched perfectly. Now, considering that PithHelmet said it was disabling itself and AcidSearch made no such claims, I figured PithHelmet might be safe to put back (though there wasn’t much point in doing so). I quit Safari, replaced PithHelmet, and started Safari again. It worked.

Mac OS X 10.3.9 Update Released

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 14:29:32 +0000

Apple has released the 10.3.9 update for Mac OS X.

Here are the changes.

Stickies

Addresses an issue in which Stickies could unexpectedly quit when creating a new note.

Addresses an issue in which new Stickies are invisible.

Stickies windows can now be minimized (an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.4 through 10.3.8).

Safari

Accessing certain websites, such as msnbc.com, mail.yahoo.com, ticketmaster.com, and others, no longer displays a “bad server response” alert that could occur in Safari.

Addresses an issue in which “safe downloads” files are not automatically opened after downloading.

SSL webpages (pages with URLs that start with “https://”) load faster in Safari.

Adds some important Verisign root certificates to Safari, allowing you to connect to certain secure websites that you might not have been able to surf before.

Adds other trusted root certificates to Safari, such as VISA and RSA.

Finder

Migrating Host

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 23:06:19 +0000

The transition is nearly complete. The weblog transition is done, now the other parts of the site must be fixed.

A Famous Blogger Twin

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 08:39:54 +0000

Shamelessly copied from Heather, below is apparently my famous blogger twin.

Your Famous Blogger Twin is Adam Curry

  <font color="#000000"> A little bit rock and roll, a whole lot of geek! There's no other blogger quite like you </font>
</td>

Who's Your Famous Blogger Twin?

Oddly enough, I just recently discovered Adam Curry’s podcast and I’ve become very addicted (which is hard to admit because he did work for MTV). Now it’s Katie and Dana’s turn to do this.

New Hard Drive Hotness

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 20:24:49 +0000

Tiger being released on April 29th was enough incentive for me to rationalize buying a fancy new Serial ATA hard drive. For a while now, I’d been eyeing the Western Digital Raptor, which is still the fastest SATA hard drive you can buy. However, it’s only 74 GB big and costs $185 (lowest price I could find).

Then I saw a Barefeats article comparing the Raptor to a Maxtor DiamondMax 10. The question was which was the ultimate G5 boot drive. Well, I don’t have a G5, but I figure the question is just as valid for a G4 (and I’ll be moving to a G5 eventually). The verdict was that the Maxtor drive was the better drive because the performance was comparable, it was much larger (300 GB), and a little cheaper ($180 at ZipZoomFly).

Tiger Release Date Announced

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 09:23:18 +0000

Imagine my surprise when I read of the Tiger release announcement (April 29th) showed up in Bloglines (which I’m only using instead of NetNewsWire because I’m at work). It was almost anticlimactic. Months and months of anticipation built to a single moment when I read that it was (nearly) here and I let out a soft oh.

As usual, MacCentral has done a nice writeup. I’m sure every other Mac news site will have a piece on it, so stop by then if you’ve got some weird aversion to MacCentral.

Call Me Sometime

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 20:49:07 +0000

So, I’ve heard lots and lots about Skype, the free Internet telephony service. Macworld noticed it early on, but that wasn’t enough for me to perk up. I mean, with iChat AV (which is full video conferencing), why would I care?

I didn’t realize how cross-platform, flexible, and feature-filled it really is. Whether you use Windows, Linux, or a Mac, you can call your friends across town or the globe for free. Remember your hot French penpal that you got tired of writing to? Now you can talk ~~dirty~~ to them without thought of a huge phone bill. In fact, it’s so easy that even your tech stupid relatives can use the software.

Now, what if you want to call someone without an Internet connection or computer? You can buy for a modest fee phone time to any normal phone number. That’s cool, but what if they’re not around when you call? You can buy a phone number for your Skype account (a flat yearly fee). Let’s say you’re not in. You can buy voicemail service from them.

Now I ask you, how cool is that?

The Problem with Podcasting

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 12:48:33 +0000

After listening to Adam at MacCast rant several times about the lack of student discount for high school students (which I think is a banal argument, but I won’t get into that here), a thought occurred to me. There wasn’t a good way to rebut his argument. Now, I could have visited the site after and posted a comment. However, seeing as most podcasts are listened to away from the computer, that’s not an easy or natural thing to do.

Latest Tag Central Update

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 02:22:12 +0000

I’ve been getting linked and written to like crazy for Tag Central. I added BlogMarks, a very neat link site with thumbnails (thanks to Stuart for pointing it out to me).

That makes the current list of supported sites:

Next on the Agenda

More sites! I’m trying to track down more tag using sites. If you know of one that I haven’t added yet, let me know.
Administrative links at the bottom of the page. I’ll have to make about and contact pages at the very least. I’ll also link all the included services.
Automated cleanup. I haven’t yet tackled the issue of cached data, but I’ll be doing so soon.
Related tags. Matt at Oddiophile shared his related tags code and I’ll have to see how it works and preface the results with possibly related tags.
Its own domain name.

A Domain by any Other Name

I’ll admit that “Tag Central” isn’t the most imaginative name for the page. I like Taggregator, but I can’t use that. I’m not terribly imaginative here, but I want the name (and domain name) to be cool. Suggest something groundbreaking! When I make the move to Dreamhost, I get a free domain name, so I want to make it a good one.

Apostrophe? What's that?

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 21:16:57 +0000

im think im sexy. i give too much of myself for love. true love never dies. boys are liars. i love being loved. im a princess. 😉 i love method man. you cant hold me down i will rise above and shine

im think ur stupid.

Me a la South Park

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:56:05 +0000

Pretty much all the pictures of me on this site will be the South Park version I made using the South Park character generator. Tada!

I am #1

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:37:22 +0000

It finally happened. I surpassed Derik Farnsworth (nsfw) in Google as the #1 Derik link. Oh, how I’ve been waiting for this day.

Now I can put my plan for world domination into motion.

Maybe I can sign all my email: I’m #1!!

Why isn't My Internet Working?

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 20:43:51 +0000

I recently got asked a question via email. I thought I’d share my answer.

My problem is in the WiFi category. I have AirPort turned on, and around the corner from where I live is a Starbucks, as well as other apartments that have WiFi, so I get a few connections here and there. Among these are the connections, “default” and “linksys”. I don’t know which one is Starbucks, but I assume “linksys” as I get the strongest connection. “Default” only gives me 3 bars, but it spastically goes to 1 or none every few minutes, which results in me being disconnected from iChat very often.

No Tiger on Friday

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 07:55:54 +0000

Maybe it was an April Fool’s joke on Think Secret’s part. Maybe they were trying to set up a legal defense that they guess a lot (and are wrong). Maybe a delay was introduced. Who knows? At any rate, there was no Tiger announcement which would have made all the wakka-wakka gags almost bareable. Now my problem is that without Tiger as a new toy coming soon, I’m starting to eye a new SATA boot drive (a 300 GB drive). Keep me from spending money Apple!

Apologies

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:37:20 +0000

I will not be doing any lame April Fools Jokes on this site today. Sorry.

The Management

Tiger Tomorrow?

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:10:52 +0000

It’s been rather quiet on the Mac front. Well, that’s not entirely true, we have the continuing saga of Apple versus the rumor sites. Very little has been decided in the courts, but that hasn’t stopped the Mac community at large from giving their fifteen cents. Unfortunately, the battles being waged are being clumped into one, making the debate wandering and unfocused. We have one group shouting “This is a freedom of speech issue!” while the other says (quite accurately) “This particular decision is not.” A pissing contest ensues.

Podcasting is Neat

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 10:25:52 +0000

All right, so I’m way behind the curve on this, but one of the neat side-effects of widespread RSS adoption is a phenomenon known as Podcasting. RSS feeds (at least as of version 2.0) allow for a field called enclosures. It’s a bit of a misnomer, but a useful part of the spec.

It basically specifies the location of a file that’s associated with a post. At the current time, it’s generally an audio file (MP3, WMA, AAC, etc.). In some cases it’s a video file (but that’s much less frequent due to increased cost associated with production and bandwidth). The natural extension of this capability is transfer to iTunes and then one’s iPod (hence, podcasting). New RSS readers aim at handling these feeds (and in particular, the enclosures). There are the open-source iPodder and iPodderX (which are free and $20 respectively).

Tag Central Update: Smugmug

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 16:32:12 +0000

I got an email from Don MacAskill, CEO and Chief Geek (his words, not mine ;)) over at Smugmug. He informed that they are working on feeds for their content, which is absolutely terrific. I’ll be able to add more pictures and eliminate my little lack of inline-block support problem.

As a little side-note, Don was also very friendly in his email, so anyone passionate about sharing their photos should check out their service.

Wizbang Needs to Clean House

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 11:17:18 +0000

I like to read a variety of blogs and get a variety of opinions. Instapundit is still the best way to do get a full sampling. I forgot how I found Wizbang, but I enjoyed reading a lot of the content.

Fast forward to a few days ago. Contributing Editor Paul decided to go into “I told you so” mode because a news story suggested that evolution was more complex than simple genetic inheritance. His expert interpretation was that evolution was severely flawed. Naturally, he got lots of flak for this. Instead of letting it go, he made felt the need to post again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. Notice a pattern? This is immaturity at its most embarrassing. He continued to get lambasted with criticism in the comments.

Writing 10,000 Posts

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 21:20:39 +0000

I’ve hit a major milestone in my involvement in Macworld’s Forums. I’ve written 10,000 entries there. I’ve learned many, many things. I’ve taught and told people many things. I was even afforded the opportunity to have the prestigious title of moderator.

To celebrate this moment, I’d like to share what I’ve learned.

The way to learn to love writing is the act itself. Would you believe that I wasn’t a big fan of writing prior to my involvement in the forums? The only reason I didn’t despise it was the encouragement I got in my college writing class. The problem was that the class ended and I didn’t really get to explore the subject matter that excites me. I found myself an outlet. I started sharing the bits and pieces of knowledge I had accrued from troubleshooting my own machines and obsessively reading Mac news and software sites. Sharing this information was my passion. All that reading I did wasn’t satisfying, it’s fuel for my writing.
Patience takes time. As curt as I am now, I once had a lot more contempt for some people. Whether I perceived ignorance was caused by stupidity or laziness, it didn’t matter. Now I realize that some people really lack the knowledge to even research answers, even if it is as simple as running a Google search. I’m still impatient with some people, but that usually because of an attitude.
Don’t participate to get moderator status. Becoming a moderator was incidental to me. If you go into it trying to get something, you’re not going to get anything. It’ll feel like a job and you’ll ultimately resent every other member.
Don’t post just post count. You’re going to sound like an idiot if you post every thought you have. It’s annoying. Here’s a good rule of thumb. If your entire post is I wholeheartedly support X, then it’s probably not worth saying. Give a fresh perspective or an interesting view point.
Know when you’ve said all that you can say. This will get you out of a lot of pissing contests. I still haven’t mastered this. It’s easy to get caught up in an argument and want to get the last word in. When you start repeating your arguments, it’s time to move on. Some people think that developing a reputation is about winning every argument (and starting them if they don’t already exist).
Some people don’t want to be your friend, but most do. It’s hard to tell when someone is being a troll or is just really frustrated. The best way to figure this out is offer solutions to what they’re bitching about. If they don’t find value in any of the suggestions and thank you, they’re a troll. Either ignore them or tell them you’re sorry you couldn’t help and get out of the conversation. They’re not interested in discourse.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

It's Official

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 13:09:19 +0000

I’ve finally written something officially for Macworld. It’s a fairly proud moment in my life. It’s almost like seeing my name in lights.

Firefox Inline-Block Frustration

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:53:32 +0000

I’m making Tag Central prettier. I can do all the colors and styling I want just fine. I think it’ll look super when it’s done (but then again, I’m not an artist and that will probably be painfully apparent). Anyway, I want the Flickr pictures to line the right side of the page. Then I want all the other sections to be contained within their own boxes, two per row.

Old school webmonkeys would immediately think of using a table based layout. It seems natural and it would be very easy. The problem is, this is an abuse of HTML tables (and heresy when making an XHTML page). Only actual tabular data is supposed to go into tables. All presentation must be managed using CSS. There are many, many good reasons for this, not the least of which is that it makes the site more accessible. Besides, I’m new school.

Security Update 2005-003 Released

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 21:23:23 +0000

Apple has released yet another security update. Fire up Software Update.

Here’s what’s updated, followed by my explanation:

AFP Server

Available for: Mac OS X v10.3.8, Mac OS X Server v10.3.8

CVE-ID: CAN-2005-0340

Impact: A specially crafted packet can cause a Denial of Service against the AFP Server.

Description: A specially crafted packet will terminate the operation of the AFP Server due to an incorrect memory reference.

Basically, if you use Apple File Sharing, someone can knock down the program serving the files. This is more of a pain in the ass than a security risk.

When to Upgrade

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:40:15 +0000

How does one know when to upgrade one’s computer? The answer is apparently very simple according to an upgrade forum post.

😉 if u up grade ur comp do it when ur redy. 😕 😕 😕 😕 😕 😕 😀 😀 😀

No, I didn’t add those smilies after the fact.

Tag Central

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 09:11:25 +0000

I’ve started work on the Tag Central project I talked about previously. It currently uses the various RSS feeds that the suppported sites spit out. Unfortunately, this also means no Technorati tags. Unless I’m totally out of my mind, they don’t supply easily accessed RSS feeds.

Right now, I’m not using a database, but instead just using the standard file based caching built into MagpieRSS which is processing all the feeds for me. Space may become an issue if this site becomes popular. I’d hate to not cache, but as I’m not getting paid for this yet, I can’t afford to use gigantic amounts of space.

Yahoo! Buys Flickr

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 12:54:20 +0000

I honestly had no idea that Yahoo! was interested in buying Flickr. I’m not entirely surprised though. It’s the business model that was born out of the Internet bubble of the 80’s. Almost.

At any rate, the folks at Ludicorp announced that Yahoo! has bought them up.

Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr

Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!! Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!

New Sections

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 17:48:41 +0000

Listed under Pages and Site Sections are some new additions to the site.

I’m giving you all the tools to stalk me online. You can see what I’m doing with 43 Things, the music, movies, and games I have in my library, if I’m sitting in front of computer with the webcam, the movies I’m getting from Netflix, an assortment of pictures at Flickr, and now the music I’m listening to at the music section.

Web services at 43 Things, Netflix, and Flickr supply the data in those respective sections. The library is powered by Delicious Library and DeliciWeb. The webcam is powered by EvoCam. Finally, Recent Tunes supplies the data for the music section.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:14:34 +0000

I have to extend the obligatory St. Patrick’s Day greeting. So, Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

I’d try a Guinness tonight, but considering my recent surgery, I may hold off until this weekend. At any rate, tip one back for me!

Goodbye Appendix, We Hardly Knew Ye

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:10:23 +0000

Well, it was confirmed. I had appendicitis and they removed my appendix. I’m appendix-less. Is that a turn-on or -off for women?

Ouch, My Appendix

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 06:58:48 +0000

I might now be able to write for the next few days. After dinner last night, I started having some abdominal pains. It all shifted to my right side shortly before bed and it’s still there. I’m feeling pretty woozy right now, so I’m going to have to deal with it.

Yikes.

New Beta Versiontracker

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 10:01:13 +0000

As I am a .Mac member, I get a free Versiontracker membership. That was the main reason that I stuck with it over MacUpdate. Lately though, I’ve been getting fed up with the rendering bugs of the site.

Those of you who also use the site might remember its earlier designs. Back when I first started visiting, it was extremely simple. It came up fast and there was no complicated code that screwed up. Over time, the site has slowly gotten more complicated and not for the better. Today I noticed that they have put up a new beta version of their site. It’s much improved. It loads faster, looks cleaner (though extremely similar to MacUpdate), and makes me feel better about visiting.

My Formac, My New Radeon, and a Whole Lot of Cuss Words

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 09:19:22 +0000

Yesterday evening started out wonderfully. The video card had arrived and dinner was pastrami sandwiches. Delicious. I probably wolfed it down too quickly to actually enjoy it, but that’s what happens when I get a new toy. Ask Dana how much attention I paid her after I used her student status to get my Powerbook.

So I ran upstairs to my room and carefully installed the new card. I plugged everything back into my computer, removed the ADC to DVI adapter on my Formac display and plugged that in, and let her rip. The computer seemed to start up as normal. Good.

Rejoice!

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:15:49 +0000

My video card was delayed yesterday, as the UPS site described. It was nowhere to be found. I cried and cried. Very sad.

I’ve been watching the tracking status intently today (with an updated delivery estimate of today). Just a few short minutes ago, I noticed that the status had been changed to delivered.

I finally get to play with my new toy. Seriously, I’m like a kid at Christmas with this stuff. To quote myself: “Weeee!”

Damn Snow

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 09:41:24 +0000

I live in Massachusetts. Snow is not a weather phenomenon here; it’s a way of life. Due to that fact, I’ve learned to accept snow and snowstorms. They can’t be avoided, only dealt with. Every time the white stuff hits the ground, I know I’m going to have to shovel it off the driveway and the deck. I know I’ll have to clean off my car. I know there’s going to be so much salt on the road that I’m going to go through a gallon of windshield wiper fluid (because, unlike peanuts, windshields are best when unsalted). I know traffic is going to be terrible going in to work.

More Lazy Journalism at LowEndMac

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 15:16:25 +0000

It may start to look like I have a personal jihad against the fine folks at LowEndMac, but I really don’t. I enjoy a lot of their content. Their archived Mac technical information is pretty good. Well, it used to be. It’s now filled with missing files (Error 404 abound!) and all attempts to notify them seem to be directed into /dev/null (or “sent into the void” for my less geeky readers). Some of their articles are interesting and inspiring.

Google Desktop is Now Wicked Cool

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 11:28:51 +0000

When Google Desktop first came out, it was moderately cool. You could search Outlook Mail, your files, Internet Explorer web history, and AOL IM chat history. I use Windows at work, so I tested it out. It worked from what I could tell, but I use Thunderbird for mail, Firefox for web, and Gaim for AIM chat. I totally forgot about Google Desktop.

Then Google Desktop came out of beta. Not only did they add Firefox and Thunderbird support, they supplied a plugin interface. This is huge. That enables developers to add Google searching to any product. For example, someone could write a plugin to search Gaim logs. It’s tempting to get a free t-shirt, but as I don’t have a Windows box at home, I doubt I will even attempt making a plugin.

Radeon 9800 Pro Ordered

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 22:36:38 +0000

After spending a lot time surfing the net looking for the best upgrade for my Powermac, I decided on an ATi Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition video card. It’s the best video that will ever work in my Dual 1 GHz G4 Powermac. I know you’re all very excited for me.

What’s even better about it, is that it will likely correct the KotOR problems I was having. There was an update that was supposed to correct it, but I was too disheartened to try it again. Besides, I barely have time for anything lately. I haven’t even been playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

www. is Deprecated

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 18:33:08 +0000

You may or may not notice that all attempts to load any address on this site starting with “www.godlikenerd.com” will now be forwarded to the same address with the “www.” stripped out. I like it that way. It keeps the addresses shorter and it hasn’t been necessary to put that on anything since the middle 90’s.

This is of course explained better at no-www.org. Anybody running their own domain name with the ability to use .htaccess files should check it out.

Tag Central

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 09:18:48 +0000

I’ve already run this idea by a couple people, but I thought I’d write about it so there’s some record that it was my damn idea. If you’ve read someone write about this or actually do it already, let me know in the comments.

Tag, You’re It

Many of you are already familiar with tagging, or folksonomies. Popular services use this categorization/organization paradigm to help users manage their content. For example, there’s del.icio.us for bookmarks, Flickr for pictures, 43 Things for goals, and even Technorati for blog posts such as this one. Some of these services are even beginning to list content from these other services when browsing tagged content.

Reason 10,467 that Wired is Losing Respect

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 10:51:54 +0000

Wired magazine has been steadily losing favor in technology circles. This isn’t because they’re a commercial giant. It’s because of piss poor reporting. In New Browsers, Same Unwanted Ads, we get to read all the same FUD that has been spread by Microsoft about other operating systems, just in the sphere of web browsers now. In other words, Firefox (and others) are only more secure now because of security through obscurity. You’re only safe because you’re using something that attackers don’t know about (yet).

Brain Dead Cheerleading

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 05:23:50 +0000

Don’t you just hate it when supposed “authorities” on computing can’t get their facts straight?

Why yes, yes I do Dan Knight of Low End Mac. That’s why I’m taking you to task for ‘Creaky Operating Systems’ Good Enough for Millions. There were some mistakes in the original Washington Post article, but “correcting” them with more mistakes is plain irresponsible and loses you all credibility. Then again, Dan also wrote Apple does us a favor by not shipping a better mouse, so perhaps credibility isn’t on his agenda.

Compliance

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 14:38:47 +0000

Compliance

This website was once extremely compliant and no longer is due to repeated WordPress and template updates. Some day I’ll get around to fixing it again.

Firefox Updated to 1.0.1

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 08:21:48 +0000

Mozilla has updated Firefox to 1.0.1. This is primarily a bug and security fix release (recommended for all users).

If you’re familiar with bittorrent, please use the Mozilla provided torrents. If not, visit their main download page.

There is an unofficial changelog for the update.

Spam Stats

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 22:18:01 +0000

The new comment spam plug-in automatically tracks caught spam statistics. Before that I used WP-Blacklist, which worked pretty well. Now for the shocking data. It caught over 2900 spam comments (doesn’t include spam trackbacks). With that number recorded, I will now delete them as the mail notifications of them take up 2.9 MB. Yikes.

Newsweek is Smaht

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 21:55:16 +0000

Tonight on Dennis Miller, Gersh Kuntzman of Newsweek appeared on the Varsity discussion panel. I didn’t get a chance to get the entire quote but he said about Arnold Schwarzenegger:

He speaks Austrian better than….

Apparently, Austria has decided to rid itself of the German language and adopted its own new language. I’ll have to subscribe to Newsweek because I’m missing some major stories.

Microsoft Shuts Off External Access

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 19:41:54 +0000

Truth be known, I do have a HoTMaiL account just for registration to sites that almost certainly will spam me. There have been rumors that access to Hotmail accounts through things like Outlook Express, Entourage, and third party plugins, such as the one for Mail.app would be shut off. You’d be forced into using the web interface (which still sucks).

It became official today:

Dear MSN Member,

Recently, Hotmail announced that in order to improve customer experience and reduce spam and junk e-mail abuse on MSN services, Hotmail will no longer allow new e-mail accounts to be accessed via Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express.

Security Update 2005-002

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 05:35:09 +0000

Apple’s sticking with the new security update naming convention. Security Update 2005-002 is primarily a Java fix.

According to Apple:

Security Update 2005-002

Available for: Java 1.4.2

CVE-ID: CAN-2004-1029

Impact: Updates Java to address an issue where an untrusted applet could gain elevated privileges and potentially execute arbitrary code.

Description: A vulnerability in the Java Plug-in may allow an untrusted applet to escalate privileges, through JavaScript calling into Java code, including reading and writing files with the privileges of the user running the applet. Releases prior to Java 1.4.2 on Mac OS X are not affected by this vulnerability. Further information is available in Document ID 57591 from Sun.

iPods in $50 Increments

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 01:29:53 +0000

Apple updated its line of iPod MP3 players. Specifically, the iPod mini and the iPod photo. The mini now comes in two sizes, and the photo had some pronounced price changing. In fact, it’s created an interesting pattern. For the most part, the pricing of all the models and sizes are separated by $50.

iPod shuffle 512 MB $99
iPod shuffle 1 GB $149
iPod mini 4 GB $199
iPod mini 6 GB $249
iPod 20 GB $299
iPod U2 20 GB $349
iPod photo 30 GB $349
iPod photo 60 GB $449

What’s really interesting about this is that while Apple has established a linear pricing structure, the sizes are exponential. Of course, the biggest bang for your buck change is still the difference between the high-end mini and the regular iPod (14 GB for $50). Apple has bent over backwards to woo the various MP3 player customer types.

Drop the Job to Blog

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:02:52 +0000

Blogger icon Jason Kottke of Kottke.org has decided to make blogging a career. It’s a bold move to say the least. I must admit that I only recently (and by recently I mean in the last couple months) got turned on to his website in full. His remaindered links blog was the inspiration for my own supplement.

Pen for Hire

It’s been interesting to watch various weblogs have gotten acclaim for various reasons. The most notable and recognized by the public being the exposure of the CBS memos as fakes. However, in computer culture, other sites have earned more attention and respect from their respective audience. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has built a huge following using little more than a spartan web page and thought provoking commentary. I say thought provoking, but really what I mean is that his logic is so utterly relentless that any thought you might have had contrary to his generally gets a thorough beat down. He parlayed that following into a way to build revenue through ads and now subscription only content.

Those Daffy Spammers

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 13:52:53 +0000

Just when you think those porn pushing, pill selling, poker playing swindlers had done everything in their power to try to get into your email box (and my comment system), I get the below message:

Hello, I’m a regular visitor to your site so i finally decided its time to sign your guestbook, so here i sign !

I assume the thought here is that I won’t notice the URL that the bot signed with and assume from the message text that it’s a real person. It does say that he is a regular visitor, right? Thing is, the blog isn’t a guestbook. Hell, I don’t even have a guestbook (how 90’s is that exactly?).

My New Favorite Show

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 01:35:09 +0000

Yes, it’s geeky and there isn’t really much defending it, but my new favorite show is anime. It airs Thursday and Saturday nights on Adult Swim. Check their website for current showtimes.

The show of course is Fullmetal Alchemist. It’s about a pair of brothers extremely interested in alchemy, the science of making anything as long as you have the correct ingredients. They try revive their mother using this science/art, which is forbidden. They find out why. The older brother loses two limbs while the younger loses his entire body, being bonded to some empty armor.

USB Overdrive Update Coming

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 00:22:22 +0000

As Logitech provides rather piss poor drivers for their mice, I’ve been using USB Overdrive. It’s a great product, but it lacks support for the MX1000’s horizontal scrolling features. No one had heard from the author since some time in 2003 (when the last version had been released). I tried writing to him, but like many others, got no response.

Good news for those that have been waiting (for side scrolling and Bluetooth support): he is still very much working on USB Overdrive and it shouldn’t be too long before a new version is released. He wrote the below on Versiontracker:

Changed Anti-spam Packages

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 20:30:59 +0000

I was using Kitten’s Spaminator to supplant WordPress’s built-in spam fighting abilities, but unfortunately, it was being far too aggressive. It said that Katie‘s recent comment was spam. It said the referrer was bad (it wasn’t). It also thought that the lack of email or URL was bad. Those three things were enough to label her post as spam. Not good. I had to retire the plugin from this site. If you tried to post and got rejected because of that, my apologies.

Theme Update

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 18:05:35 +0000

I’ve almost got the site’s theme to the point where I’m ready to start distributing it. There are still a few rough spots I’m sure, so please let me know any weird things going on.

Once I’m totally satisfied, I’ll be making the theme available through one of the site’s about pages.

Participation

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 17:10:35 +0000

Participation

This website participates in several web communities. They are listed below.

Resume

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 13:13:39 +0000

Resume

My resume is available in PDF format. Contact me for more information.

Software

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 21:47:11 +0000

Software Used in This Site

The bulk of this site is generated using the wonderful WordPress. The posts are written using Markdown which gets run through Michael Fortin’s PHP Markdown port. I generally post at home via MarsEdit.

I use a series of WordPress plugins.

Acronym Replacer automatically adds acronym tags.
Auto-hyperlink URLs automatically turns URLs into links.
Search Hilite highlights searches that come internally and from Google.
RSS Fetched Link List generates most of the automated lists on this site (including the supplement).
Witty Text puts the quotes into the footer.

The OS X Forum FAQ is served using phpMyFAQ. Currently, the forums are run using phpBB, but I may soon move to bbPress when it gets more stable. The webcam is driven by EvoCam. The main photo gallery uses Gallery and pictures are posted with iPhoto using the Gallery Export Plugin. The contact form uses FormMail.

Ordering the Pickaxe II

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 14:41:06 +0000

For my first step in learning Ruby, I'm ordering Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition from Amazon.com. With free shipping, that'll only be $31.40. Not bad for a 862 page book.

<p>If I can find the time to read all those pages, I should do well.</p></div><div class="goalprogresslink">See more progress on: <a href="http://43things.com/people/progress/d00d?on=94649">Learn Ruby</a></div>

Our First Gem

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 14:24:53 +0000

Starting now, I will be adding a new feature to the blog. Tidbits of exceptional brilliance will be posted to all to read (and attempt to decipher). More regular updates to the site will ensue.

With that, our first contribution:

u blaze, ur sexy n u know it lol… nah but if u cool peoples, have anything in coomon with me… go to job corps or have gone… lyk the same music as me n jus lyk to chill n bug out.. smoke.. laugh… w/e.. than holla at me..

43 Things Supports WordPress

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 09:29:05 +0000

Robot Co-op announced today that they are supporting WordPress blogs (adding to Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, and Type Pad). As of this entry post time, it was still rough. The description texts are still not filled out right (making it apparent that they simply use the same method as for Movable Type, hardly a surprise), but I assume it works. This should be have been trivial for them to do (as all the major blogging packages use XML-RPC and Movable Type APIs).

Contact

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 21:18:25 +0000

Contact Me

Email me at webmaster at this domain name.

Speed Improvements

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 12:02:46 +0000

Between upgrading to WordPress 1.5, adopting a new page layout, moving Scott and Bob’s blog data into a separate database, and rebuilding my blog database, I’ve reduced the page generation time from well over a second (sometimes close to two seconds) to a mere third of a second (for the main page).

It should feel like the entire site is flying now. Things may bog down as I customize, but it was still a nice little surprise.

Subscription

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 09:28:00 +0000

Subscription

There is a variety of ways to get your daily fix of this site. The Feedburner feed, aka Superfeed, combines all of my content and doings as collected at Planet d00dism. Eagle-eyed users will notice that the RSS2.0 feed is actually at Feedburner as well, but that’s for statistical purposes only. No extra content is added.

Enjoy!

The Author

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 08:27:32 +0000

About Me

My name is Derik DeLong and I’m a 29 year old senior software engineer. I’m currently employed writing code in Woburn.

I graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. I spent an abnormally short four years there.

I leave droppings all over the web and my about.me page has a decent list of the more popular places that I leave them.

About this Site

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 08:24:57 +0000

Welcome to Godlikenerd.com

This site is dedicated to general geekery, like many other sites. However, I, Derik DeLong, have my own spin. I’ll break down the fast and furious world around you into digestable chunks. I’ll also assault you with things that I find interesting.

As the site develops, more site sections will be added (and be available in the sidebar). I will give you all the tools necessary to stalk me.

Upgrade Complete

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 22:28:51 +0000

Don’t worry. I will not be leaving it as it looks now. It’s a work in progress. I just didn’t want to screw around installing WordPress a thousand times.

Anyway, please litter this entry with recommendations. I already have a picture in mind for the top, so don’t worry about that. Everything else is fair game though!

WordPress 1.5 Released!

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:30:23 +0000

I know all of you haven’t been waiting like I have been for this, but the fine folks over at WordPress have finished work on WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn.” This means that I’ll be taking the site down later. I’m not sure if it will be tonight, tomorrow, or sometime later this week. First, I need to finish at least one new theme. I’ve already started working on it on my test blog. It’s a modification of the fabulous Kubrick. When I’m done, I’ll be letting Michael know that I borrowed from him (though I tried to limit that as much as possible).

A Quick Note about Protected Entries

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 14:05:15 +0000

From time to time, I’ll be putting up protected entries (such as the other post today). If you want to read it, contact me.

This is mostly a measure to keep some of my more personal stories away from the general public that’s probably here simply for my tech analysis. Don’t feel intimidated about asking. I’ll give you the password most likely.

Happy Valentine's Day

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 09:25:17 +0000

Today, I’m going to be myself and reduce a day that’s based solely on feelings and break it down mathematically in Mastercard commercial style. It’s completely unoriginal, but hey, it works.

Fuzzy box of chocolate truffles: $13

Driving yourself into work so you can go straight to your sweetie’s place: $6

Getting dumped the morning of Valentine’s Day: Priceless

It’s not often that I’m going to post anything in depth about my lovelife. The reason for this is several-fold. First, I’d like to keep this site fairly professional. Let’s face it, my post teen year angst just isn’t something that’s going to get CNET to ask your opinion on something. Second, it’s not interesting to the Internet at large. Very personal blogs are only interesting to friends. Finally, the subject of your post may actually read the post. I’d rather not broadcast this to her.

My Frickin' Eyes

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 09:00:31 +0000

I have a habit of getting very little sleep during the week and sleeping excessively on the weekends. It was a system that worked great from the beginning of high school on. At some point though, this changed. If I really cut my sleep short, like less than five hours a night for several nights, my eyes start getting really irritated.

I honestly can’t figure it out. First, my right eye starts to feel really itchy. I rub my eye to try to get rid of what seems to be an eyelash, only nothings really there. Naturally, it gets all red and bloodshot. Super. Naturally everyone notices and feels some kind of irrepressible urge to tell me. Hey, Derik, your eyes are really bloodshot. Gee, thanks, I had no idea. I’ve just been rubbing it all day because it feels so damn good. The next question is Is that pinkeye? Well, I don’t know, but considering I don’t have any of the symptoms other than redness and an itch and that it goes away after a good night’s sleep (or two), I don’t think so.

Gmail Invites Out My Ears

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:00:34 +0000

A few days ago, Dana told me she had 50 Gmail invites. I naturally got a little irked as I was the one that invited her to begin with. That’s the way it goes I guess. Well, I checked today because I read that one Gmail invite spooler had over a million and a half invites to hand out. I had 50! I sent one to Bob who didn’t want to be left out and added 9 to the spooler.

Mac OS X 10.3.8 Update

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 08:30:00 +0000

The Mac OS X 10.3.8 update is out and ready for consumption. You know the drill, fire up software update, download the delta updater, or the combo updater. The delta updater weighs in at 27.7 MB and the combo is a hefty 103 MB. Software update will deliver a variable size updater dependent upon the machine you are running.

Update Details

Addresses an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.7 in which iChat, Mail, or other network-based applications could take a long time to open.
Addresses an issue in which a computer wouldn’t always restart automatically after a power failure, even when the Energy Saver preference option “Restart automatically after a power failure” was selected.
Improves the performance of Blizzard World of Warcraft’s “Full Screen Glow” video feature.
Improves DVD Player compatibility when playing a movie (using certain ATI Radeon cards) to an external widescreen TV with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Resolves an issue in which a “flicker” could be seen when navigating DVD menus in DVD Player on certain PowerBook G4 computers.
Addresses an issue in which a PowerBook G4 computer would, on rare occasion, wake from sleep with a black screen and not respond to any keyboard, mouse, or trackpad input.
Addresses “jumping cursor” issues that might occur when using your portable computer’s trackpad with your thumb, side of thumb, or a “flat” finger.
Resolves an issue on certain Power Mac G5 computers where a fan cycles erratically at unexpected times, such as when Seti@home software is running.
Speeds up Address Book and Mail LDAP lookups that are performed by a Cisco DistributedDirector DNS server.
Addresses an issue that could prevent clients using the Active Directory plugin from binding to their Active Directory server.

Observations

Mail.app seemed to load much faster for me, as was described above. I suspect that the difference lies in using a non-blocking network call. The rest largely don’t affect me, especially because I don’t have a “flat” finger.

Maps Done Right

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 09:06:34 +0000

Google‘s services are growing quickly. Very quickly. First it was just a web search engine. Then they added image searching (of course, it still has its kinks). They added newsgroups, news, and price searching, aka Froogle. That wasn’t enough though. They added a free email service (I have 6 invitations sitting around doing nothing for anyone interested) and desktop searching which still doesn’t support Macs, Firefox, or Thunderbird. I’m still leaving out countless other products and services.

Very recently, their new “local” service added things like finding restaurants and other businesses. As I played with it, I noticed something. They had their own maps embedded in those searches. It wasn’t Yahoo Maps or MapQuest based. I personally preferred the former to the latter. My suspicion was well founded as Google is publically beta testing their new Map service. It uses some very new browser tricks (standards based) to make the maps interactive without any heavy Java or endless page loading. My words can’t do it justice, so check it out for yourself.

The Patriots are Officially a Dynasty

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 09:14:55 +0000

Hurrah for the Pats! I managed to survive the Superbowl party I went to. I even posted up some pictures. No pictures of me, for those of you curious.

At any rate, it was a great time and a pretty good game (from what I can remember). Now where’s Freddie Mitchell’s big mouth?

Football Picks Superbowl

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 11:49:50 +0000

There is only one possibility for a Superbowl win. The Patriots will beat the Philadelphia Eagles. The Pats will soon join the ranks of other great teams like the Cowboys in the 90s.

Go Pats!

Thank you Dana

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 23:06:38 +0000

Dana has brought something to my attention. I love churros as much as anyone else, but I think Google might be a little confused.

One of these things is not like the other. Look carefully. I think y’all can figure it out.

I'll Show You Mine if You Show Me Yours

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 22:04:13 +0000

Just a quick one today. I’m sure most people have already heard of Flickr and so had I, but up until recently I hadn’t done anything with it. The buzz is well deserved. They fully support RSS, Creative Commons, as well as a million other features. I’ve barely scratched the surface. They’ll always have a free version in addition to premium accounts. I’ll probably stick with Gallery for some time to come, but this is definitely a more than worthy replacement for WebShots. So boys and girls, put up some pictures and let me see the goods.

CNET G5 Powerbook Article

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 10:49:13 +0000

I thought I’d link the CNET article on G5 Powerbooks as David Becker was kind enough to email me and ask my opinions. Unfortunately, it seems that they couldn’t use any of my ramblings, but I thought it might be of interest to publish what I wrote, considering my rather short, lackluster writeup on the new Powerbooks.

David sent me the below email with questions.

Hi–my name is Dave Becker, and I’m a reporter for CNET News.com. Saw your bloggings on matters Mac and hoped you might be willing to offer your comments on possible/planned G5 PowerBooks.

An Open Letter to the Web

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:32:54 +0000

Dear Web Community,

Hard wrapping is stupid. This is important. Hard wrapping is stupid.

I’m begging everyone to stop doing it. Allow me to be a bit pedantic for a moment and explain what I mean. Essentially one of the first features added to computers when they were being made was to automatically start printing text onto the next line once the current line was overfilled. This is known as wrapping. When people used typewriters, it was necessary to manually wrap and a little bell told one when to do so.

New Powerbooks Today

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 20:52:37 +0000

After a little hiatus this weekend, I’m back. So is Apple with exciting news. They’ve updated their Powerbook line of computers. Don’t get too excited though, they’re still G4s. However, it’s a nice solid revision. The bus speed is the same, but there’s a whole host of new statistics.

For the 17″:

1.67 GHz G4
512 MB RAM
100 GB hard drive
8x SuperDrive
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 (128 MB) dual-link DVI
$2,699

For the 15″:

PC Keyboards, the Mac mini, and You

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:24:05 +0000

The Mac mini has spurred large amounts of interest in the PC community. With the mini’s lack of a bundled keyboard and mouse, the natural question becomes “Can I use my existing mouse and keyboard with the Mac mini?” Given that they are USB, the answer is yes. For mice, this is largely trivial. Just plug it in and use it. Optionally install drivers if it’s a Logitech or Microsoft product.

Mac OS X Security Update 2005-001

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:13:24 +0000

Apple has released the 2005-001 Security Update for Mac OS X. This update fixes several important vulnerabilities.

at Commands

The at commands (at, atrm, batch, atq, and atrun) allow a user to specify commands be run at a later time. That’s not the inherint bad thing. Being able to schedule things on a whim without using cron is good because it’s a one time deal. Want to run permissions repair in an hour while you’re on lunch, but afraid you’ll forget to initiate it later? Use the at command.

Ever Doubt Bias in Mainsteam Media?

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:32:42 +0000

Now you can’t. I read this out of CNN:

During the committee hearings, Boxer said the Bush administration had changed its rationale for the Iraq war from eradicating weapons of mass destruction after no such weapons were found.

In response, Rice asked Boxer to “refrain from impugning my integrity.”

That sounds pretty damning for Rice. It also seems very clear cut that she was avoiding a question. However, it doesn’t seem so when we examine the actual question posed (or at least what appears to be what Rice was responding to).

Getting a Fancy New Mouse

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 14:12:28 +0000

I’ve been thinking about replacing my Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer for some time now. It’s a great mouse and has always served me well. However, considering it was a gift from my ex, it carries some emotional discomfort with it. Besides, it only has five buttons and is wired. Wired peripherals are soo 2003.

I’ve done so well with Microsoft mice thus I thought I’d continue to throw business their way. I looked at the Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 in the “Night Vision” color. I found it listed at Buy.com for less than $20. Kick in a mail-in rebate and a store coupon and the price was $12. I couldn’t afford to not get this mouse. Sadly, it seems that the mouse has been discontinued by Microsoft, catching nearly every retailer carrying the mouse off guard. Nearly every retailer I visited showed the mouse as in stock, but in the several days following my order, all of them marked the mouse as discontinued.

Heart of the Blizzard

Sun, 23 Jan 2005 17:21:53 +0000

I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for an update from yours truly to make sure I survived the blizzard. I have.

I spent a good portion of the day cleaning several feet of snow off our deck. Sounds easy enough, but it’s far more involved than it seems. First, I had to use the regular scoop shovel to make a little path and level the snow down enough to use the wide push shovel. Then as mother was using that, I had to try to level down the rest of the deck. After a couple hours of that, the deck is almost finished.

Overlooking TextWrangler

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:59:08 +0000

It’s tough for Mac software and hardware developers to make announcements at events like Macworld Expos. The all encompassing Stevenote will always overshadow them. Some of the more overlooked announcements this year are:

Elgato and ATi teaming up for the EyeTV Wonder: Finally a lag-free external TV device for Mac. People can finally play their Playstation 2 and other consoles on their iMac (or any USB 2.0 capable Mac). While I can’t live without my original USB EyeTV, the lag made it useless for much other than TV watching (or maybe VHS tape digitizing). This is huge. Imagine a Mac mini coupled with a nice LCD monitor, one of these bad boys, and your game console of choice. You have a tiny, modular media center.
Elgato EyeTV 500 adds digital cable support: My primary concern about moving up to digital cable when I finally get my own place (damn down payment takes too long to build up) was that I couldn’t use my EyeTV to record the enhanced content and in order to enjoy it, I’d either have to actually be watching when the show was on (god forbid) or shell out the money for the cable company’s DVR. That’s no longer a concern. Unencrypted digital cable stations can be watched and recorded with this. Cool!
Elgato intros EyeConnect streaming software: Last Elgato plug, I swear. This software lets you use standard UPnP AV hardware devices to view your content. You can watch your movies, listen to your music, look at your pictures, EyeTV recordings, whatever! Elgato already has their Eyehome product to fill this niche, but now you can get or use your existing device (such as D-Link’s) to look at this media on your TV.
MacMice intros lots of new products: This infamous company seems to have finally come into its own. They now offer such distinctive products as a bluetooth trackball.
MacBU reaffirms Mac support: Mostly expected, but it’s still good to hear.
Griffin shows BlueTrip, Filewave: iPod music streamed via Bluetooth to your home stereo? How cool. Is it $150 worth of cool? I don’t think so.

However, that all pales in comparison to Bare Bones software‘s announcement.

Football Picks Playoffs Week 3

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 09:07:16 +0000

Seeing as there are only two games next week, I think I can pick them now.

New England vs. Pittsburgh
Atlanta vs. Philadelphia

Atlanta looked really strong and I think their run game may destroy the Eagles. Pittsburgh simply didn’t look that good against the Jets (who would have won save for two missed kicks).

Go Patriots!

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 20:15:44 +0000

You can suck on that Vanderjagt!

Who’s up for a road-trip to his house to rub it in?

Jets vs. Steelers

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 20:39:15 +0000

The Jets:

S-U-C-K

SUCK!

Football Picks Playoffs Week 2

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 09:08:18 +0000

Last week my picks were poor and the only one I got right was the one I was hoping would be wrong.

NY Jets vs. Pittsburgh
St. Louis vs. Atlanta
Minnesota vs. Philadelphia
Indianapolis vs. New England

8-8 teams should not make it beyond the second week.

Mac mini, Meet Google Mini

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 11:55:30 +0000

It’s but a few days since Apple released the Mac mini and we already have a product from another cool company with a similar (ok, exactly the same) name. Google has released the Google Mini.

Before you plunk down $4,995 to get one of these neat blue boxes, you have to know that this isn’t a consumer device. Rather, it’s a server to index a business’s documents and facilitate searches of those documents.

How much RAM?

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 22:33:40 +0000

Michael wrote to me:

Any idea how OSX runs on the 256 MB of ram model? I’ve heard arguments go both ways. What about Panther?

Michael is of course asking about the new Mac mini. He’s considering one as he describes in his blog entry:

I’m seriously considering purchasing the new Mac-Mini. Ultimately I am in Apple’s target demographic of devout PC users who are considering in dabbling in Macs but are standoffish about the price of Macs.

Expo Product Thoughts

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 13:16:31 +0000

I’m going to review the new Apple product announcements inwhat I consider increasing importance.

iLife ‘05

To me, this is pretty incremental. I don’t use anything in iLife (sans the free iTunes and iPhoto). Garageband fans will be overjoyed with a full 8 tracks to manipulate. At $79, I’m not sure I’ll be getting it though. I don’t need the new version of iPhoto that badly.

iWork

Apple finally tried to update AppleWorks for the new millenium with iWork ($79). Apparently though, they only had two tickets for the trip, taking along a word processor (Pages) and a slideshow app (Keynote). Spreadsheets and database manipulation were sadly left at the station with their heads hanging dejectedly. Pages looks really cool, like a publishing application more than a wordprocessor. However, if I’m going to have an office suite, I want a speadsheet application. End of story.

Expo Announcements

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 14:47:38 +0000

New from the expo:

The other announcements aren’t terribly exciting and the lack of a Tiger release date was disappointing. More tonight.

Can you feel it?

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 08:18:47 +0000

The Macworld Expo San Francisco keynote is less than 4 hours away. The whole Mac community is waiting with baited breath. Personally, I want to find out more about Tiger. In particular, a release date more specific than “first half of 2005” and hopefully sooner rather than later.

We also get to find out which rumors were worth something. The current most popular rumors are:

iWork Apple’s new office suite
flash-based iPod
headless iMac the $500 Mac
Mac OS X Tiger info and release date
Powerbook updates with slightly faster processors

I still don’t get the head-popping excitement being generated by the flash-based iPod. Shortly after the keynote is done, I’ll do a quick summary. Later tonight, I’ll do my little rant on what all the news will mean for the future.

More Neflix Stuff

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 11:00:58 +0000

I swear I’m not getting paid for this. At any rate, Netflix just added two very cool features to their service.

Profiling

The first is profiles. This is going to catch like wildfire. I’d wager a guess that most Netflix subscriptions are shared by multiple people. Just think about families, roommates, and couples. The original implementation of Netflix didn’t really take this into account. Everyone had to share the same queue, same ratings, and same recommendations. Having the same queue meant constant manipulation so that everyone got their movies instead of just one person. The downfalls of the other two are self-explanatory.

Fix Slow Stuffit Startups

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 08:48:42 +0000

This weekend, I was downloading some software that was compressed. I have those files automatically open with Stuffit Expander (as is the default on most setups). I noticed though that Stuffit Expander was bouncing over and over… and over… and over again. I assumed it had hung, force quit, and tried opening it again. Same thing occurred. I tried reinstalling Stuffit. It kept doing it. I left it going for a while and eventually it started. I thought that was mighty strange. I was starting to get worried that it was particular to my Powerbook and that I’d have to think about reinstalling the OS.

Football Picks Playoffs Week 1

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 13:26:00 +0000

No Pats this week. Very sad.

St. Louis vs. Seattle
NY Jets vs. San Diego
Denver vs. Indianapolis
Minnesota vs. Green Bay

I picked Indy, but after the shameful way that they threw the last game of their season so they could play Denver, I hope Denver whoops them. Irony is delicious.

A Bluetooth Trackball

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 11:40:03 +0000

The infamous company MacMice has announced a new product called “The Ball”. I’ll admit, it sounds a little dirty to me (and would probably illicit a snicker or two from less mature audiences).

It follows its brother product, “The Mouse”, not in nomenclature, but in appearance. It’ll fit in with your other Mac peripherals. What makes this trackball cool though is the fact that it’s Bluetooth. In fact, it’s the first Bluetooth trackball I’ve ever seen. That alone makes it pretty cool. However, I’m not sure that it’s $90 worth of cool. I never really understood the practicality of wireless trackballs either, so this isn’t something I’m likely to get.

CNN Goes RSS

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 10:57:37 +0000

All I can say is finally. Paul Beard brings us the news that CNN has finally joined the rest of modern online society and started offering their content in RSS feeds. It works great. I find it particularly useful because although the New York Times offers feeds, they’re woefully inadequate. The Front Page feed is only six long. That means for most people that unless they continually check their RSS reader, stories are likely to slide off the feed before you get a chance to look at them. Such a fast moving page needs more history in the feed. CNN’s is much longer and I honestly prefer their reporting.

LiveJournal Belongs to Six Apart

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 23:14:26 +0000

LiveJournal, or more aptly its parent company, Danga, was bought by Six Apart. For those not entrenched in the blogging community and its politics, Six Apart makes Movable Type, the most popular blogging software out there, and TypePad, one of the most popular paid blogging services.

Six Apart essentially sets the standard for what a blog is, and what its features should be. In particular, Movable Type supports Trackbacks which allow blogs to reference entries in other blogs. Most major blogging systems support them (including my software, WordPress).

There's No Business like Snow Business

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 20:18:07 +0000

A large part of living in New England is learning to either love (or at least tolerate) snow. Normally, I’m thrilled by it. I’m not a skier; I just like the way it looks. Sometimes it’s fun to wad up and throw at your friend as he stammers out a greeting to a pretty girl. That or stick it in the tailpipe of the car that he’s brushing off. Best of all, going out in your friends Ford Taurus as he does donuts and makes his car smell like an old boat.

An Old Truncation Issue Lives On

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 13:23:57 +0000

The stability and speed of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) built a strong userbase that continues to this day (even with 10.4 Tiger right around the corner). It haunts developers, keeping them from using neat tools like Cocoa bindings which are present in Panther but not Jaguar. It also haunts its users with old issues that many of us have simply forgotten.

A poster in the Macworld forums recently posted that he mistyped his password and much to his surprise, it was accepted and login continued like normal. Disturbing, no? Even more troubling was that not all passwords were accepted either. This problem was a result of an old authentication mechanism, which used at maximum, 8 characters. But OS X (and more importantly, Keychain) supported longer passwords. The (rather half-assed) solution was to simply truncate the password for comparison. In other words, if my password was areallylongpassword, then only areallyl was necessary for login. Additionally, input passwords were also truncated (therefore making this normally completely transparent for the user). That meant you could tack on extra chracters and it would be acceptable. So, all of the following would work:

When in Doubt, Go with the Old Favorites

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 09:07:21 +0000

As we draw close to Macworld Expo San Francisco, the number of rumors generally increases. The reason is multiple fold. First, supposedly more leaks happen closer to the expo. Second, people’s desire for rumors increases exponentially. Finally, it’s a quick and easy way to draw traffic as a Mac based website. Yes, I’m a traffic whore too, so let’s review

Flash-based iPod

For almost as long as the iPod has been around, this has been the popular rumor. And why not? It seems like a natural progression. Flash memory based MP3 players tend to be smaller and cheaper than hard drive based players. The ridiculous, respect-less rumor wells throw caution to the wind, ignoring hard real analysis (done by such people as John Gruber). It combines tiny size (as if the iPod mini’s compact flash hard drive is bloating it terribly and flash memory is that much small) and low costs (as flash memory is so cheap, still hundreds of dollars for any significant size) to make for a some people’s wet dreams. Ignore the fact that the iPod’s main attraction is having your entire music collection in your pocket. We’ve got a rumor to foist upon the public and get attention. To make the situation worse, iPod sites such as iPodlounge are encouraging the rumor with iPod flash Concepts contest. Dangle some expensive headphones in front of work starved artists and watch as you get hundreds of designs that are either physically impossible or hopelessly stupid. Yeesh.

A Netflix for Everyone

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 20:04:04 +0000

Little known fact about Netflix, they have multiple plans (beyond their $17.99 3 at a time plan). In fact, they also have a 5-at-a-time for $29.99 and a 8-at-a-time for $47.99. Like the normal plan, that also includes unlimited rentals.

For the frugal user, they also have a 2-at-a-time plan. However, that comes with a caveat. You only get 4 movies a month total. However, at $11.99 it may still be worth it to some users.

WordPress 1.3 is now WordPress 1.5

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 19:16:04 +0000

Following what could best be described as absolute confusion for its users, the WordPress developers have clarified that WordPress 1.3 will be known as WordPress 1.5 due to extensive changes. It’s completely a placebo effect, but I feel a little more comfortable waiting for WordPress 1.5 instead of 1.3. True, it’s the same thing ultimately, but I’m feeling better.

In related news, they’ve also released a pre-release version of their upcoming bulletin board software, bbPress. I may just move over to it once a more formal version is released as PHPbb is overkill for what I need (due to extremely low volume).

Happy New Year

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 14:41:27 +0000

All the best to you and yours in 2005. Special thoughts go to those affected by the tsunamis.

Football Picks Week 17

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 17:04:08 +0000

The last regular season week of this. After doing it this entire season I’ve decided something. I have to make some software to do this for me next year. I’ll be looking for help from anyone with PHP and MySQL experience (or those with some interest).

Miami vs. Baltimore
Pittsburgh vs. Buffalo
New Orleans vs. Carolina
Green Bay vs. Chicago
Cleveland vs. Houston
San Francisco vs. New England
Cincinnati vs. Philadelphia
NY Jets vs. St. Louis
Detroit vs. Tennessee
Minnesota vs. Washington
Tampa Bay vs. Arizona
Atlanta vs. Seattle
Indianapolis vs. Denver
Jacksonville vs. Oakland
Kansas City vs. San Diego
Dallas vs. NY Giants

Adobe PDF Plugin Comes to Mac

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 15:12:17 +0000

Probably one of the most frustrating aspects of moving from Mac OS 9 or Windows to Mac OS X was the lack of a PDF browser plugin. It can be almost maddening in academic environments such as U-Mass as most assignments and documents aren’t published in HTML. They’re published in PDF because of the guaranteed formatting and handling of special symbols (such as the formulas that plague a young computer scientist).

Football Picks Week 16

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 12:26:10 +0000

Just two regular season weeks left!

Green Bay vs. Minnesota
Oakland vs. Kansas City
Denver vs. Tennessee
NY Giants vs. Cincinnati
Chicago vs. Detroit
San Diego vs. Indianapolis
Houston vs. Jacksonville
Atlanta vs. New Orleans
Baltimore vs. Pittsburgh
New England vs. NY Jets
Buffalo vs. San Francisco
Carolina vs. Tampa Bay
Washington vs. Dallas
Arizona vs. Seattle
Cleveland vs. Miami
Philadelphia vs. St. Louis

DIRECTV Is a Bunch of Scumbags

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 22:31:30 +0000

I’ve been fighting comment spam for a long time now. The majority of those sites are selling prescription drugs to fight erectile disfunction and poker sites. I long for the days when spam was ads for pornography. At least I could get some use out of that. But I digress.

These spamming sites have been mostly no name, fly-by-night outfits that don’t have a reputation to maintain. They don’t care that the public at large hates them. They make some quick profit and then die as a company.

Making Safari Livable Post Firefox

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 08:45:17 +0000

I’m indecisive about my browser on my Macs (the choice is easy for PCs, Firefox all the way). Pre Safari and Firefox, the choice was easy. Camino (formerly Chimera) was the end all for Mac browsers. Now my choice switches between Firefox and Safari. Firefox is fast most of the time, but after some use seems to slow down. Safari is fairly fast, but tends to have pregnant pauses when connecting to servers (or at least this is what the status bar tells me).

KOTOR Performance Problem Update

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 13:42:02 +0000

To follow up on my old post, Brad Oliver has posted a new beta build of the Knights of the Old Republic game. Of particular note is that even in its current rough form, users with Radeon 8500, 9000 or 9200 cards will see double framerates. However, in some cases, this is doubling 2-3 frames per second to 6-7 FPS. I’ll probably just keep playing with my Powerbook, although the initial problems have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I haven’t returned to the game since discovering that fact.

Football Picks Week 15

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 12:12:42 +0000

Two Saturday games. Yay!

Pittsburgh vs. N.Y. Giants
Washington vs. San Fransisco
Carolina vs. Atlanta
Buffalo vs. Cincinnati
Dallas vs. Philadelphia
Denver vs. Kansas City
Houston vs. Chicago
Minnesota vs. Detroit
San Diego vs. Cleveland
Seattle vs. N.Y. Jets
New Orleans vs. Tampa Bay
St. Louis vs. Arizona
Jacksonville vs. Green Bay
Tennessee vs. Oakland
Baltimore vs. Indianapolis
New England vs. Miami

Mac OS X 10.3.7 Update Released

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 17:03:55 +0000

Fire up software update or download the delta or combo installers. The enhancements, straight from Apple are:

Applications

Allows TextEdit to open certain RTF documents that previously wouldn’t open, resulting in a “TextEdit Open Failed. Couldn’t open file” alert.
Resolves an issue in which Safari, Mail, and other networking applications that use DNS lookups could experience intermittent connectivity issues with Security Update 2004-09-30 and Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later installed.
Addresses an issue with Blizzard World of Warcraft in which the game’s frame rate could drop considerably when in “Ghost mode,” if the computer uses an nVidia graphics card.
Resolves an issue in which enabling Vertex Shaders in World of Warcraft could lead to unexpected graphics issues when using an nVidia graphics card.
Addresses an issue with World of Warcraft in which incorrect colors or unexpectedly flashing objects could appear when using an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card, making gameplay difficult.
Improves compatibility for Pacific Tech’s Graphing Calculator 3.5—some 3D surfaces might not render in Mac OS X 10.3.6.

Other

Addresses an issue in which a brief “flash of lines” may appear on the screen when waking the computer from sleep after the “Flurry” Screen Saver has run, if the computer uses an ATI Radeon 8500, 9000, 9200, 9600, or M9 graphics chip.
Improves compatibility for FireWire-based audio interfaces, including the Edirol FA-101 FireWire audio interface.
Enables E*TRADE PDF account statements to be viewed in Preview.
An Apple Cinema 22″ ADC display, when connected to certain PowerBook computers, no longer shows random “stuttering” or other graphics anomalies in the Finder and DVD Player.
Addresses an issue in which shadowed text in a PDF file may print differently than it appears on the screen when printing to a raster printer.
Filenames longer than 31 characters are no longer shortened when the file is saved on a server via Apple File Sharing.
Resolves an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.6 in which some FireWire hard drives would not appear (“mount”) on the desktop.
Addresses an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.6 in which DVD Player might not open on some Power Mac G4 computers that use an ATI Radeon 9800 AGP video card.
Resolves an issue that prevented printing to some Windows-based print servers.

Late Fees are Dead; Long Live Late Fees

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 09:45:33 +0000

Following my post about Netflix, a new story about Blockbuster came to my attention. Blockbuster has announced that it will no longer charge late fees, or at least that’s how everyone is reporting the policy change. Putting it this way is a little misleading.

They are using this necessary change to their business model as a way to promote their own business. The growing popularity of Netflix (and even their own similar service) has demonstrated a strong consumer interest in being able to retain videos for an extended amount of time. Getting burnt by late fees once or twice is enough to drive any consumer to another system. Additionally, the way in which late fees were assessed made little sense. My roommate in college rented a movie and didn’t return it for three weeks. When he finally went to return it, they charged him in excess of $20. This is obviously more than the video cost to begin with and he didn’t even get to keep it. The fees weren’t based upon what it would cost to replace the copy of that movie, but instead based upon the amount of profit lost due to being unable to rent it to another member. Obviously, this was a broken system.

Apple Locks Out Real

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 09:05:53 +0000

There was quite a stir when Real announced that they would make songs for their new online music service available for use on iPods. What made this so provocative was that their music service uses Digital Rights Management (DRM) to prevent copying, exactly as Apple does with FairPlay and Microsoft does with their own scheme. However, Apple didn’t license FairPlay to Real.

That was the rub. Real was maintaining DRM without a license to use FairPlay. In order to accomplish this feat, they reverse engineered FairPlay. They got to use software that Apple supplied without paying for it in some way. The fact that Apple didn’t want to license at any price is a moot point. They are the legal owners and it is their decision whether to sell licenses or not. Just because I’m not willing to sell my car to you doesn’t give you the right to jack it.

My Condolences to Mike at Accelerate Your Macintosh!

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:14:24 +0000

I was sorry to read about his loss. What happens following a tragedy can make things even worse. My best wishes to him and his family. I (and his other readers I trust) can wait while he takes the time he needs.

You Should Join Netflix

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 17:17:20 +0000

I’m sure you’ve all heard of Netflix, the online movie rental service. In case you haven’t, I’ll explain how it works. You pick a number of movies that you’d like to see. Netflix sends you 3 of those movies at a time (this is the default plan). They mail them to you along with return envelopes (with prepaid postage). You send those movies back whenever you feel like it (no late fees) and when they receive one of your movies back, they send another from your list (queue). To top it off, it costs only $17.99 per month regardless how many movies you get.

Football Picks Week 14

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 13:02:30 +0000

And again:

Oakland vs. Atlanta
NY Giants vs. Baltimore
Cleveland vs. Buffalo
New Orleans vs. Dallas
Indianapolis vs. Houston
Chicago vs. Jacksonville
Seattle vs. Minnesota
Cincinnati vs. New England
Miami vs. Denver
NY Jets vs. Pittsburgh
Detroit vs. Green Bay
San Fransisco vs. Arizona
St. Louis vs. Carolina
Tampa Bay vs. San Diego
Philadelphia vs. Washington
Kansas City vs. Tennessee

First Post with the Brand New MarsEdit 1.0

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 23:16:29 +0000

The blog editing software I’ve been using for a while now, MarsEdit, has finally gone 1.0. I consider it the second most essential software I use on my site (right after WordPress). It works with a variety of blogging packages, so if you use a Mac and blog, you need to check it out.

Congratulations Brent. I look forward to future development of this software.

Sad Day in the News

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 09:29:13 +0000

It didn’t pay to roll out of bed early this morning to catch the news. Even with the Christmas (and other holidays) closing in quickly, we have to deal with the harsh reality that is, well, everything outside of the holiday advertising that we get inundated with every year.

Former Pantera Band Member Death

At a show in Columbus, Ohio last night, Damage Plan’s Dimebag Darrell, formerly of Pantera, was shot and killed. A deranged gumnan rushed the stage and accused Darrell of breaking up Pantera before pulling out a gun and killing four others before being shot and killed by a police officer.

WordPress 1.3 Update

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 22:45:56 +0000

Much like most of the WordPress community, I’ve been waiting with baited breath for the release of 1.3. I’d all but forgotten about it until I recently discovered Blogsome in an attempt to get Dana into a quality blogging package.

Blogsome is a little known free blogging site. And it’s run with WordPress 1.3 software. They even give you your own subdomain name in the format: yourname.blogsome.com. How sweet is that?

At any rate, seeing the new features in 1.3 resparked my interest. I know it’s only a matter of time before it’s released (and hopefully soon). As such, I’ve put up a testing installation. It’s going to be in a state of flux as far as format and looks go, but the content will be static as I simply copied the data from this 1.2.1 installation into a new database for testing.

Waterfield Sleeve Case

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 22:36:08 +0000

I made a startling realization when I got my 12″ Powerbook. It’s a lot smaller than the classic Pismo that I’d been lugging around for 4 years. My L.L. Bean saddle bag’s laptop slot was actually too big for my shiny new Powerbook. The sides of the compartment are padded, so they naturally hold the shape. There’s so much room that the new ‘book flops around in it. It’s unsettling.

After a brief quest of asking for opinions on sleeves to insulate my Powerbook as well as some searching forums, a name that kept coming up was Waterfield. Much like Apple, the agreement was that the bags were pricey, but worth it. I liked the styling, so I bit the bullet and got one of their sleeves for my recent birthday.

I wasn’t let down.

Myth and Reality: 32-bit Bus on Single Processor G5s

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 12:10:00 +0000

Sometimes a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It gives someone the ability to make a bogus assertion about something while sounding somewhat authoritative. Even worse, it makes laypeople think the entirely wrong thing about a subject that has lots of subtlety. The nightly news does this every night, breaking complex issues down into sound bites.

The technology news is no better, saying things that are outright wrong in order to break it down for their readership. An example of this was the reporting on the latest G5 model, a single 1.8 GHz tower. Macworld reported that this model has a 32-bit bus instead of 64-bit like its brethren.

Football Picks Week 13

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 18:34:11 +0000

And again:

Cincinnati vs. Baltimore
Minnesota vs. Chicago
New England vs. Cleveland
Arizona vs. Detroit
Tennessee vs. Indianapolis
Buffalo vs. Miami
Carolina vs. New Orleans
Houston vs. NY Jets
San Fransisco vs. St. Louis
Atlanta vs. Tampa Bay
Kansas City vs. Oakland
Denver vs. San Diego
Green Bay vs. Philadelphia
NY Giants vs. Washington
Pittsburgh vs. Jacksonville
Dallas vs. Seattle

December Security Update

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:11:55 +0000

Apple has released a security update for both Panther and Jaguar. You can get it at the download section of their site or by using Software Update. It weighed in at 12.7 MB coming in through mine.

As always, Maccentral has an excellent writeup.

You've Got the iTunes Music Store, Now Stop Protesting

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 09:54:00 +0000

It’s amazing what some people will do for their iCrack. Ever since Apple announced the availability of the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) in Canada, those crazy canucks have been going crazy waiting for it.

In fact, they’ve been protesting as Bush came to town. While the mainstream media has been widely reporting that this is due to policy concerning Iraq, this is entirely wrong. Such immature angst could not be explained by anything but concerns about the iTMS being available late. It even looked like it would be late, but everyone’s favorite computer company made sure that the delay was minimal, delivering on its promise last night, a mere day late.

Medal of Honor: Breakthrough

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 23:51:02 +0000

Perhaps the greatest thing about first person shooters is that they inevitably have expansion packs which cost dramatically less than the game originally. You essentially get more of the game you liked originally.

Then sometimes, they don’t give you more of what you liked. They give you something loosely based upon something you liked. It’s sort of like the new Star Wars movies. Breakthrough features the same great gameplay, graphics, and weapons of the first two. It even seems to have better performance than Spearhead. However, it’s not quite as good.

Knights of the Old Republic Performance Problems

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 10:04:58 +0000

It’s no secret that my birthday was last weekend. My parents were nice enough to get me several gifts. I got a Waterfield Powerbook sleeve, Medal of Honor: Breakthrough, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. You can look forward to a full length review of the bag and a short review of Breakthrough. In the mean time, you can get a review of Breakthrough from Inside Mac Games.

However, I soon discovered to my own displeasure that Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) ran rather poorly on my Dual 1 GHz Powermac G4 with 1.25 GB RAM and Radeon 9000 Pro video card. The very first scene (which is a simple tutorial) stuttered. If the game weren’t turn based, I wouldn’t have been able to play it effectively. The problem only worse when I got to the game’s first cantina. This isn’t a very intense scene (unless you count the moderate amount of people as intense). This Powermac has handled all the other games I’ve played on it (Halo, Medal of Honor series, Call of Duty) expertly. I was so disappointed that I decided to put the game away for a little while and go back to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

I'll Do It; I Swear!

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 11:02:10 +0000

Seeing as I haven’t written anything meaningful since I started my pseudo vacation last week, I thought I might get right back into the swing of things with something near and dear to my heart: a rant.

It’s no secret that I spend a lot of time posting in and reading forums. Like any public forum, it attracts idiots who feel the need to unload things that are either totally uninteresting or useless. One of the more obnoxious types is the “leaper” as I am going to refer to this type of individual. Much like people who climb to the highest stories of the tallest buildings to stand on the edge and threaten to jump, these morons explain how they’ve come to stand on their very own ledge.

Happy Birthday to Me

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 02:21:10 +0000

I turned 23 as of midnight (EST). I’m a year older, a year wiser, and a year closer to being able to rent a car (the last major milestone in a person’s life as far as I can figure).

I had a few drinks at a local watering hole, so I’ll be cutting this entry short.

AOL Mobile Devices

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:17:21 +0000

I’ve had it with AOL’s mobile device feature. I come online and I don’t inspect all my buddies to see if they are regular AOL or mobile. Certain users are always forwarding their IMs. I send a message expecting to get back a meaningful message and instead I’m greeted with the standard forwarding response.

Now, that wouldn’t be so bad if I then got back an IM from them while they were on their phone, but most often I get nothing. What’s the point? Is having a phone number not enough? Maybe I’m just getting old.

The Supplement is now Del.icio.us Powered

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 17:01:40 +0000

After struggling with Bloglines rather limited blog interface (which did make linking fairly easy), I’ve decided to give it up and go to del.icio.us to host those links and data. I couldn’t pull the list directly into the main site with direct links to the real things I was linking to. To top it off, they never even responded to my questions about fixing their blogroll publishing (which features completely incorrect structure.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 13:09:21 +0000

Enjoy your turkey, stuffing, football and pumpkin pie!

Football Picks Week 12

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:07:52 +0000

I almost forgot there are games tomorrow.

Indianapolis vs. Detroit
Chicago vs. Dallas
Tampa Bay vs. Carolina
Cleveland vs. Cincinnati
Tennessee vs. Houston
San Diego vs. Kansas City
Jacksonville vs. Minnesota
Philadelphia vs. NY Giants
Washington vs. Pittsburgh
New Orleans vs. Atlanta
Baltimore vs. New England
NY Jets vs. Arizona
Miami vs. San Francisco
Buffalo vs. Seattle
Oakland vs. Denver
St. Louis vs. Green Bay

It Started so Innocently

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 16:00:16 +0000

Call me a terrible person, a monster if you will. I just couldn’t stop once it started.

13:40:37 amos282002: Hello Derik!

13:40:45 amos282002: how r u doing?

13:40:59 amos282002: I’m Amos Michel

Mmmmm, Stuffing

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:24:43 +0000

Katie posted another quiz from the same site as the last. Seeing as the question was “What part of Thanksgiving are you?” and that it’s a mere few days away, I couldn’t resist.

You Are the Stuffing

You're complicated and complex, yet all your pieces fit together.
People miss you if you're gone – but they're not sure why.

What Part of Thanksgiving Are You?

Libertarian for Life

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 16:29:01 +0000

An online quiz just confirmed what I already knew. Fuck the two parties!

You Are a “Don't Tread On Me” Libertarian

You distrust the government, are fiercely independent, and don't belong in either party.
Religion and politics should never mix, in your opinion… and you feel opressed by both.
You don't want the government to cramp your self made style. Or anyone else's for that matter. You're proud to say that you're pro-choice on absolutely everything!

What political persuasion are you?

What is the Best Free Hosted Blogging Service?

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 14:39:48 +0000

Some of my friends (Katie and Dana) use free blogging services, namely, LiveJournal and Blogger/Blogspot respectively. I personally went straight to Movable Type and then WordPress hosted on my own domain.

Of those two choices I’d tend to go with Blogger. It’s owned by Google now, so there’s plenty of growth potential. Probably the main reason would be that I actually dislike LiveJournal because: it’s slow, its themes are applied only to the front page (comment pages are the horrendous style of the rest of the site), it’s slow, you are forced into a long address (even blogspot gives you a subdomain), it’s slow, everyone and their brother has an account there so you’re forced into an obscure AIM screename-ish username, and did I mention it’s slow? Yeah. I don’t like LiveJournal… at all… in any way… shape… or form.

My Favorite Subject

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 17:40:32 +0000

I love when I get mentioned in other people’s blogs. In particular, when it’s a sexy context as at Dana’s blog.

WordPress 1.3 Closes In

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:44:40 +0000

The WordPress Development Blog has been updated with information about WordPress 1.3. It looks like they’ve been making some great strides and good improvements, but consipicuously absent from their goal list is per-post formatting support. This makes me very sad.

Blog Change Bot

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 09:42:04 +0000

Some may have noticed the Blog Change Bot button I added to the sidebar some time ago. It was part of an experiment to see how well it worked. Until recently, it simply didn’t work at all. Sure, I could IM it at blogchangebot. I could even send commands. It even seemed to recognize my subscriptions and list their last modification.

The problem was that it never notified me of changes (and I’m online more often than not). I was just about to remove the button and link when, this morning I actually got an update notification from blogchangebot8. Recently, I noticed that the bot had gone down frequently and I’m guessing that the developer was having scalability issues (though you couldn’t tell this from the website).

Is It Time for a Blog System Standard?

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:06:20 +0000

Brent Simmon’s, developer the excellent MarsEdit, has asked a very important question. Isn’t it time that a common weblog system feature set was agreed upon?

This is related to my earlier entry about the fact that WordPress doesn’t entire support Movable Type’s API. For the record, it is very close. This isn’t horseshoes and computers are far less forgiving than any person I know. By leaving something as “minor” as post specific text formatting, it becomes impossible for external editing software to determine how to format posts, particularly for preview purposes.

Phishing Can Happen to You

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 20:19:41 +0000

Phishing (which is explained at Wikipedia) has become very commonplace, particularly on the Internet. It even happens over the phone.

Up until this morning, I thought only morons became the victims of these scams because they were so obvious. However, this has changed somewhat. Not only has it become much more common (hell, more than half of my spam is phishing attempts), but they’ve hidden themselves very well.

My father received an email this morning from Amazon.com supposedly asking to verify his credit card information. Yesterday, he had placed an order for him. The email even had an “@amazon.com” return address. It contained a link that was of the structure: {http://www.amazon.com@service02.com//exec/obidos/subst/home/home.html/102-9382243-7140932}. Looks like Amazon, right? Wrong. Everything preceding the “@” is considered a username for the domain that follows, which is our scammer.

Football Picks Week 10

Sun, 14 Nov 2004 09:34:46 +0000

I’m getting progressively worse, but here we go:

Tampa Bay vs. Atlanta
Pittsburgh vs. Cleveland
Houston vs. Indianapolis
Detroit vs. Jacksonville
Kansas City vs. New Orleans
Baltimore vs. NY Jets
Seattle vs. St. Louis
Chicago vs. Tennessee
Cincinnati vs. Washington
NY Giants vs. Arizona
Minnesota vs. Green Bay
Carolina vs. San Fransisco
Buffalo vs. New England
Philadelphia vs. Dallas

Shame on you WCVB

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 18:15:17 +0000

WCVB, here in Massachusetts, has decided not to show Saving Private Ryan, the award winning film. I’d list the awards, but honestly, they would make this post huge. That is how many awards we are talking about.

What is there reasoning and excuse? There’s too much violence and profanity in the film. Too many kids might watch it in the 8PM time slot originally allotted. What kind of society do we live in when children watching an award winning film with genuine social value is a problem? It’s absurd!

Can Every Day be Veteran's Day?

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 09:23:24 +0000

Because nearly every business gives Veteran’s Day off (save for Raytheon obviously), my entire commute took only 40 minutes, as compared with the normal hour and ten minutes to two hours. People left space, one could change lanes to pass someone if they wished, and I didn’t have the urge to jump out of my car and clobber anyone.

Amazing.

I know my ride home will be nice and I’m just glad that I’m not working tomorrow because I couldn’t take dealing with the normal traffic again so soon after my best ride in to Woburn ever.

Keyspan's Remote Control for Airport Express: Not Quite

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 11:02:43 +0000

From a Keyspan Press Release for its Keyspan Express Remote:

Keyspan, America’s number 1 brand of USB connectivity products, announced that its new USB infrared remote control includes support for Apple’s groundbreaking Airport Express.

I don’t have an Airport Express, but nonetheless, this sounds compelling. Perhaps the most heavily wanted feature as part of the Airport Express and Airtunes was the inclusion of a remote (and apparently being able to walk around with your laptop doesn’t count). I still maintain that Apple didn’t do this because it would destroy the absolute simplicity of the current design and require expensive modifications to it.

WordPress and the Lack of mt.supportedTextFilters

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:08:49 +0000

I’ve adopted the excellent Markdown to format my blog entries. It’s makes it much easier to write and maintain entries. However, because WordPress has to filter each post every time, it slows down my homepage considerably.

That is something I’ve come to live with and accept.

What is not acceptable is that WordPress still doesn’t support mt.supportedTextFilters. This is what tells external editing apps like MarsEdit know what formatting is being used so it can properly preview entries for you. As a result, Brent had to put in a custom preference (that one must manually add in) to force preview of Markdown formatting for all posts. This is rather unacceptable, but not Brent’s fault.

Firefox 1.0 Tomorrow

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 20:06:23 +0000

I don’t care what you are doing tomorrow. You’re going to make the time to get Firefox 1.0. Places that will most likely have download links:

It’s likely to be a bandwidth bonanza, so be sure to find a mirror or BitTorrent feed.

BitTorrent Finally Getting Used

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 10:52:01 +0000

As reported on MacCentral, MacGameSeed is starting to distribute Mac game files via BitTorrent. Blizzard has been doing this a little while now (primarily with the upcoming World of Warcraft beta).

It’s good to see more companies embracing this content distribution model (with 35% of the traffic on the Internet coming from BitTorrent). What I am surprised by is the lack of attention companies like Akamai have paid to it. Instead of paying these companies for mirrors for new files, they can simply set up a BitTorrent feed with a few seeds and let it rip. It may be that because BitTorrent is still a little rough around the edges for novice users (who don’t know about opening up ports to facilitate greater speeds, etc.) gives them reassurance. However, this will change (and already is, as Azureus has made some incredible strides into diagnosing performance problems for newbie users).

Football Picks Week 9

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 17:54:48 +0000

Here we go again.

NY Jets vs. Buffalo
Oakland vs. Carolina
Dallas vs. Cincinnati
Washington vs. Detroit
Arizona vs. Miami
Philadelphia vs. Pittsburgh
Kansas City vs. Tampa Bay
Chicago vs. NY Giants
New Orleans vs. San Diego
Seattle vs. San Fransisco
Houston vs. Denver
New England vs. St. Louis
Cleveland vs. Baltimore
Minnesota vs. Indianapolis

Mac OS X 10.3.6 Released

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 18:05:15 +0000

Apple released Mac OS X 10.3.6 just a little while ago. Fire up Software Update or visit the technote page for the update, which includes links to Combo and Delta updaters. Below are the enhancements listed by Apple.

Internet and .Mac

Resovles an issue in which Safari might not load webpages correctly when the hard drive name included a non-ASCII character such as a symbol, diacritical, or two-byte character.
Safari no longer times out after 60 seconds when attempting to connect to a webpage or to submit form data. With this update, Safari will keep trying indefinitely (or until you cancel the attempt).
With this update, a synchronized iDisk correctly resizes .Mac storage after its allocation changes.
Addresses a kernel panic issue that could occur when using an external, wireless USB broadband modem with Mac OS X 10.3.5.

Networking

Improves AFP service performance.
Addresses a situation in which a file name change that occured on a server while a client was running Terminal resulted in the client Terminal’s failure to recognize the change.
Addresses an issue that could prevent login via a network user account.
Resolves an issue for Mac OS X 10.3.5 in which, sometimes, network-based applications could not open an application from an automounted AFP volume, such as /Network/Applications/.
SMB/CIFS servers in /Network no longer suddenly disappear and reappear after the network changes.

Applications

Addresses an issue that could occur when using some scholastic information management applications with Mac OS X 10.3.5; this alert could appear: “Another module has ‘locked’ the MS Tx file. You will gain access when their task is completed.”
Addresses an issue in which “zooming” in Halo 1.0.5 could lead to blurry video when using certain Nvidia video cards.
Many calculating and conversion features within Calculator are improved by this update.
Addresses an issue in which TextEdit could unexpectedly quit when changing text from Euphermia regular to italic.
Addresses an issue for Mac OS X 10.3.5 in which Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 could unexpectedly quit.

Other

Improves ColorSync calibrating for Apple Cinema HD Display (23-inch DVI) displays.
Resolves an issue in which the display could sometimes remain dark when waking from display sleep (the mouse pointer might appear, but normal function could not be restored) if using Screen Saver password on a portable computer.
Adds WMC connectivity capability for Nokia 7610 phones.
Addresses an issue for Mac OS X 10.3.5 in which some glyph fonts, certain “Expert” or “dingbat” fonts, would no longer appear in some applications.
Resolves a situation in which incorrect characters could show up for some fonts.
Addresses some issues that could cause Classic to unexpectedly quit when starting up.
This update makes it easier to scroll through a long list of user names in the login window.
Includes recent Security Updates.

Using NetNewsWire to monitor for Opener

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 15:05:46 +0000

The most significant Mac news lately was the discovery of the Opener malware. Antivirus makers scrambled to protect against this “virus” which as I said, isn’t really a virus. It’s malware showing what one can do once they’ve compromised a machine.

I was reading the Cult of Mac Blog and they had an entry about a novel idea. Use NetNewsWire‘s new ability to read scripts as feeds to make a feed that will notify you upon new items being added to the /System/Library/Startup Items folder.

Late Unless You're on the Left Coast

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:36:02 +0000

Just like everyone else, I’m going to encourage everyone to go vote. It’s too late for all of you in MA (not that it matters anyway).

I hope you all made your presence felt in the polls. I personally made mine felt by writing in Scott Daugherty for all unopposed candidates. Good times.

Rob's Blog Debuts

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 19:35:36 +0000

I’ve set my good friend up with a blog on this site. Keep an eye out for exciting changes. He’s always got something going.

Now Presenting: The d00dism Forums

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 18:46:13 +0000

I figure a lot more people will visit if they can do more than just comment on my babbling.

So go do it up in the forums. I even made a politics forum for people to fight. If you have anymore ideas, drop me a line.

GTA: San Andreas Comes Wednesday

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 20:57:11 +0000

I tried calling on Thursday about my order of GTA: San Andreas. The customer service representative had just talked to another person that ordered it from them.

From the way he talked about it, a lot of people had. They had almost 700 outstanding orders and only 290 copies coming in that they knew of. He was so frustrated with people calling and checking that he almost had a speech for me and it was extremely impatiently said. It’s not that I was getting belligerent (as I have been known to do).

An Afternoon with the Secret Service

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 10:11:37 +0000

Brought to my attention by Wizbang, a LiveJournal user got visited by the secret service following an entry about wanting the president dead. Luckily for her, she has (as of the writing of this entry) about 86 pages of comments, the majority of which are in support.

Shock

This is just reinforcement of the idea that my generation refuses to take responsibility for what they do and say. She wished Bush dead, Cheney dead, and everyone in the administration dead.

Football Picks Week 8

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 20:13:09 +0000

I’m back after a hiatus last week. I forgot to write down my picks because I was going to my friend’s apartment for game one. The good news is that I’m going to remember for this week. Without further ado, they are:

Arizona vs. Buffalo
Detroit vs. Dallas
Jacksonville vs. Houston
Indianapolis vs. Kansas City
NY Giants vs. Minnesota
Cincinnati vs Tennessee
Green Bay vs. Washington
Baltimore vs. Philadelphia
Atlanta vs. Denver
Carolina vs. Seattle
New England vs. Pittsburgh
Oakland vs. San Diego
San Fransisco vs. Chicago
Miami vs. NY Jets

If you’ll notice, I actually picked the two undefeated teams to win again this week. The odds are against them, but the Eagles and Patriots are my two favorites for the Superbowl at this point. However, if another NFC team starts to pick up the slack, I will pick them over the Eagles simply because the Eagles always suck in the post season.

Integrity in Journalism: What's That?

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 13:21:42 +0000

Curt Schilling is one of the most popular players in Red Sox Nation. His last two performances showed gritty determination and incredible ability.

The Magic Sock

Or did it? According to Laura Vecsey at the Baltimore Sun, it was a ruse. It’s good to know that Laura knows where the real news is. She’s getting down to the real issues. We can only hope that Bud Selig notices and forms an investigation team, a la the 9/11 Commission. This is important stuff. Forget that it’s wild speculation and the fact that the only evidence she seems to have comes out of New York:

Comment Spam Gone Bezerk

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:07:45 +0000

No sooner than Peter Cohen mentions getting more than 11,000 comment spams than I realize that I had been hit. I previously had less than five spam comments. I now had about 50. Ugh.

Luckily, setting WordPress to moderate comments with more than 3 links in it did the trick. Considering the success he had with MT-Blacklist and MovableType, I thought it was time I got WPBlacklist which is the equivalent for WordPress. Installation was quick and easy.

Firefox 1.0 RC1: Tabs Done Right

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:53:48 +0000

I recently dumped Safari on my Macs in favor of Firefox. Nearly everything worked as I wanted, but one very important function was still misbehaving (at least as far as I was concerned). Every, and I mean every, link I clicked on in an external program would open a new window. This was slightly annoying at work with Windows, but it was a genuine PITA on my Macs because Firefox would attempt to offset the new window, inevitably resulting in part of the window being off screen.

New Themes

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 21:09:47 +0000

Check out the new styles. I’ve made “blue” the default, but I’m partial to orange myself.

What Curse?

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 21:08:57 +0000

That’s right. It was the year!

All you naysayers can put that in your hash pipe and smoke it!

Call Me Your Latin Lover

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 14:56:54 +0000

Just for fun, I decided that I would check Bloglines related feeds feature on my weblog. The results were rather surprising. Every single “related” feed was “en espanol.”

For the life of me, I can not figure this out. What exactly about my site makes it similar to these sites? I certainly don’t use any spanish.

Opener Malware: The Straight Deal

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 17:23:38 +0000

After days of reporting about this story, I’m still rather disappointed by the coverage. Most writers have been pouring out pages of worthless hyperbole. Of most note and worthy of the most criticism are Cnet with Mac users face rare threat and ZDnet with Destructive OS X malware spies on Apple users. Leave sensationalism to the tabloids, boys.

Let’s get down to what Opener, or as Sophos calls it, SH/Renepo-A, is. First notice that Sophos reversed its name. Clever. Anyway, as linked to from the MacInTouch article, the script itself can be viewed at the Macintosh Underground Forum. The current latest version known is 2.3.8. Let’s lay out exactly what it does:

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Released Today

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:10:07 +0000

Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas today. I’ve been waiting for this game since I pre-ordered at eCost on July 25th earlier this year. They were offering the game for $38.95 at the time (with a $3.95 handling charge) which has since gone up to $41.49 (shopping cart special).

Yes, I’ve been waiting a long time. If you count the time since I completed GTA: Vice City, it’s been even longer. Now I must wait for eCost to deliver it (which will feel like an eternity especially because they’re still estimating 10/28).

Satisfaction

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 14:39:55 +0000

I think I may finally get satisfaction from my webhost.

There are some problems currently being experienced by the apache servers at this time. Our admins are working on upgrading them to avoid these problems in the future. We apologize for the inconveniences caused by this and your site should be working shortly.

I’ll know that they’ll finished these upgrades when the upper right hand corner of my web page stops giving the fsockopen error message (which I had to implant). Hopefully the upgrade will also improve some speed issues as my page takes well over a second to be generated now (just a little sluggish).

Site Breakage, Link from Macsurfer, and Pictures!

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:08:32 +0000

My server is acting wonky again. I’ve sent my fourth request for service to my webhost. This is a downward spiral. If anyone knows of a good cheap host with support for PHP, MySQL, Perl scripts, Python scripts, etc. (basically the works), please drop me a line. This is getting out of hand.

On a happier note, unbeknownst to me, my website has been linked to by MacSurfer. In particular, my entry on Jef Raskin has been picked out (which I did not expect when I wrote it). That would explain the exceedingly large number of comments I’ve been getting (including some rather angry/vengeful ones, go me). If I can get this kind of response simply by saying I wouldn’t want someone at a party, I might pass out if I try to think about how many hits I’ll get by actually criticizing someone in a meaningful way.

Shapeshifter: It's Magic

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:12:38 +0000

To be honest, I don’t use Shapeshifter, but I figure some of you might might be interested in a theme system for OS X. Especially recent converts, like you Katie (I did it again). Unsanity does some great work with their haxies, despite what anyone says. I’m a big fan of FruitMenu personally.

The reason I mainly bring it up is that the image in a recent blog entry changes (you have to force the image to reload by holding shift and clicking the reload button). So far it just changes color, but who knows what tomorrow will bring! Besides, maybe the new 2.0 version will have features that will draw me in.

Riots ‘R Us

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 15:56:20 +0000

I wrote an entry about how our society and, I’m ashamed to say, my generation treats the current state of privilege. In particular, I remarked upon how privileges are now being confused with rights. This, I can safely say, is the cause for the recent riots at U-Mass and in Boston. The vast majority of rioters were either college students or of that age. In other words, they are part of my generation.

Jef Raskin: Not a Guy You Invite to Parties

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 15:54:45 +0000

In a recent story at Macminute Jef Raskin pans Mac OS X: Unfortunately, the Mac is now a mess. It seems that Jef is now suffering from crotchity-old-man syndrome.

The Guardian article is full of vague criticisms of both the current state of the Mac and computers in general.

There has been immense progress, primarily in the richness of applications. But all this power is lost on many people, and impedes the utility of it for the rest, because of the unnecessary complexity of using computers. The quest for CPU power has been largely defeated by bloated software in applications and operating systems. Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times sharper.

Important Mac Security Advisory

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 12:12:13 +0000

A nasty little script has appeared on someone’s machine. I suggest reading the entire page about it, though some sections are a little more technical than others.

This script does not exploit a known security hole in OS X. Rather, it does things that are all possible as an administrator and should be taken more as a warning about being careful about what you download and install. Not downloading software from services like LimeWire would be a good start. This is essentially a Trojan horse attack (like the Microsoft Office Installer Trojan). However, it’s more insidious in that its effects are not immediately visible, opting instead to facilitate things like allowing remote control and indentity theft.

Go Red Sox!!

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 00:40:02 +0000

Red Sox rock so hard! Yankees suck!

Woooo, we overcame a 3 game deficit to win the ALCS.

U-Mass Makes Me Proud

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:12:53 +0000

In response to the Red Sox victory in game six, thousands of University of Massachusetts gathered in Southwest, only to have 35 arrested.

Who says we don’t still got it? Tonight will be incredible. I’d expect thousands more to gather at the conclusion of the game. I hope my brother and the rest of the U-Mass police are ready.

Kerry: Stem-Cell Research May Hold Cure to Ailing Campaign

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 09:33:21 +0000

Ha ha. I love it.

Steinbrenner to A-Rod…

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 00:13:40 +0000

You’re Fired

In a bonehead maneuver, A-Rod’s swipe at Arroyo’s hand (and attempt at cheating) probably just cost the Yankees game six and possibly the ALCS.

I couldn’t have written it better myself.

Adium 0.7 Ready for General Consumption

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 19:13:59 +0000

I’ve been a big fan of Adium for some time now (ever since its very first release so long ago). It was the first and only Instant Message client to properly use the dock. With a quick glance, you could tell who just signed on or off, who was messaging. Because it was in the dock, you didn’t need to switch out of your current application to see notifications. The effect was also minimal, causing little distraction or taking up any screen space.

Alas, it was not without its failings, most prominently its lack of file transfer support and the ability to read away messages. The latter was nearly impossible to go without. It was an unfortunate side effect of the protocol being used. I was forced to move to iChat until this was addressed.

That brings us to Adium 2 (whose current number is less than 1, which I agree is confusing in many ways). Adam Iser, the author of the original program, made Adium into a Sourceforge project. This doesn’t work for all projects, as some just get neglected. However, after a slow start, their team started making headway, allowing users to download and compile their own copy off the development CVS. They now churn out regular milestone builds like any good open source project.

The most recent milestone (0.7) which is available at their website has some impressive features and though they may not agree, I think is ready for primetime and general use. The level of customization is unparalleled in any other product and save for audio/video and file transfers, is feature complete.

To go along with this customization, Adium has an excellent “Xtras” site to host them all. I personally have my own preferences, which I will post screenshots of once I get home.

These customizations include: * Dock Icons * Emoticons (Smileys) * Contact (Buddy) List Styles * Message View (Chat Window) Styles * Sound Sets * Of course, AppleScripts

Adium isn’t just an AOL Instant Message client either. It also supports: * MSN Messenger * Yahoo Messenger * Jabber (which according to rumor will be added to iChat) * Gadu-Gadu * Rendezvous * .Mac * and more

It also supports plugins, including one for the previously mentioned Growl. The possibilities are truly endless.

Honestly, this is the single project I’d like most to get involved with if I could only motivate myself enough to get Cocoa and Objective-C down pat.

Keep reading for pictures.

Help Firefox Get a Full Page Ad in the New York Times

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 12:15:12 +0000

I’ve been preaching about Firefox for some time now. Most everyone I know has switched from Internet Explorer and loved the change.

With the Firefox 1.0 release fast approaching, Spreadfirefox.com (caution, it’s currently being slashdotted, so you may not be able to get the page) is raising money for a full page advertisement in the New York Times to gain even more users. $30 will get your name in the ad (only $10 for students; I’m looking at you Dana, Katie, and Scott). Donate here.

Apple Releases New iBooks

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 09:23:32 +0000

I know you’re all very excited boys and girls. Apple has bumped their iBook computers.

We now have: * A 1.2GHz 12″ iBook with 30GB hard drive and a combo drive * A 1.33GHz 14″ iBook with 60GB hard drive and your choice of combo or super drive

All three models sport: * 512KB of Level 2 Cache * 133MHz system bus * 256MB of PC2100 RAM built-in (with a single slot free, allowing for 1.25GB total) * ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of SDRAM * One Firewire 400 port * Two USB 2.0 ports * Video mirroring (no spanning) * V.92 56Kbps modem * 10/100Base-T Ethernet port * Airport Extreme on all models * Optional Bluetooth * Display supporting 1024×768 resolution

Updated Football Prediction Record

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 13:03:29 +0000

I figure I might as well take my lumps now while I’m riding high on this past weekends picks.

I had the horrible misfortune of have a 6-8 record during week five. Sad. Week six thus far has been much better. So far, it’s 11-2. Houston always surprises me and I’m glad to see Green Bay on the road to recovery.

I now have a 37-18 record for the season.

Fixed Again

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:48:06 +0000

In what is becoming a bi-weekly tradition for this site, I’ve gotten my website fixed again.

The real question is how long will it hold up. It’s rather frustrating for me as this website has become my main hobby and any time I think I’m beginning to make headway in some kind of readership, the site goes down. What’s worse is that I’m paying for this service. This is the first time that I actually went out and bought hosting for this purpose and I’m getting worse results than I got on free hosts. It’s unacceptable.

Website Broken: Third Time is the Charm?

Sun, 17 Oct 2004 21:21:21 +0000

I give up.

I tried to check my football picks to see how I’m doing this week, only to be greeted with the “No data” error. Super.

I tried to get my host to do what they did last time to fix it and instead, I got the brilliant response that my website was working and that pinging it worked. This is after I referenced the old incident number where they actually figured out the problem.

Jon Stewart: My Hero

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 15:40:58 +0000

Jon Stewart recently appeared on CNN‘s Crossfire. As someone who’s been disgusted with essentially all of this year’s presidential campaign season, it was the single most refreshing appearance on TV. He challenges the hosts to answer why they are “hurting America”. They naturally dodged the question (political commentating hosts are politicians too apparently).

If you want to see it for yourself, you’ll need a BitTorrent client such as my personal favorite Azureus. Once you have one, you can download it in either WMV or AVI formats at bitflood.

Football Picks Week 6

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 13:29:44 +0000

I’m not going to comment upon my picks from last week. They were bad.

This week’s picks:

San Diego vs. Atlanta
Miami vs. Buffalo
Washinton vs. Chicago
Cincinnati vs. Cleveland
Green Bay vs. Detroit
Kansas City vs. Jacksonville
Seattle vs. New England
San Francisco vs. NY Jets
Carolina vs. Philadelphia
Houston vs. Tennessee
Denver vs. Oakland
Pittsburgh vs. Dallas
Minnesota vs. New Orleans
Tampa Bay vs. St. Louis

I’ll update my record next week.

“i dont expect u to understand”

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 02:16:13 +0000

I was recently told this lately by someone I knew in high school. Let’s for a moment, ignore the fact they couldn’t be bothered to capitalize “i”, spell out “u”, or use an apostrophe. The complete and utter arrogance in this statement infuriated me to levels that I should have let it. It’s not worth getting my blood pressure up over. Still, I feel the need to vent on why I got so angry.

More Google Stuff

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 16:00:45 +0000

Picasa and Hello! are cool!

PithHelmet, Shareware Fees, and Update Site Backlash

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 11:23:13 +0000

The author of PithHelmet recently wrote a short piece on shareware fees and software update site feedback. It’s disheartening to think that this is becoming increasingly common. Mike worked very hard on PithHelmet 2 to make it far suprior to the open-source, free PithHelmet 0.7.3. He added quality features like Machete (which allows you to filter web pages through a perl or Python script) which I have not seen on any other browser. He continues to distribute 0.7.3 for free, but apparently that’s not good enough for some users.

My New Favorite Firefox Extension

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 22:21:36 +0000

I’m big into Firefox right now, but I’m still a fan of Safari (if only they’d speed it up). I still miss (among other things) the reload/stop button. Apple was so clever as to realize that they were mutually exclusive (you can’t choose both at the same time at any time). That reduced them to a single button.

My prayers were answered with the Stop-or-Reload Button extension. Do it up.

My Theme Will Be Bundled with NetNewsWire

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 21:38:28 +0000

I can’t quite explain how excited I am, but Brent Simmons likes my NetNewsWire theme and will be including it with NetNewsWire. I’m quite thrilled and didn’t expect it to be worthy of that honor. At any rate, I’ll be referring to it as Autumn from now on.

Trackback Ethics

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 09:12:28 +0000

Trackback Ethics But this isn’t about squabbling between bloggers. I’m more interested in the question, “What is trackback for?” or “What is ethical Trackback?” I’m not sure. From what I’ve read, Trackback is just a ping to tell someone that you’ve written / blogged / quoted something similar or on the same topic (Wikipedia). I was continuing Scoble’s discussion of blog promotion. I tracked back discussions of it. Was that wrong? Elliott Back asks some interesting questions about trackbacks. I think the concept and its appropriateness is all too often not explained well. I’m new to the blogging game so I won’t pretend to know everything. I will say that this problem is likely to get much worse as blogging packages are becoming increasingly accessible to laymen. It might be time for blogging package makers to take a little responsibility to explain these concepts better to new users.

The Onion | Cheney Vows To Attack U.S. If Kerry Elected

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 08:54:31 +0000

The Onion | Cheney Vows To Attack U.S. If Kerry Elected

GREENSBORO, NC%u2014In an announcement that has alarmed voters across the nation, Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that he will personally attack the U.S. if Sen. John Kerry wins the next election. Ha ha. I needed this.

mozparty2: It's 1.0 time… again!

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 08:51:58 +0000

mozparty2: It’s 1.0 time… again! Remember the Mozilla 1.0 Release? Mozilla supporters were partying all over the world! But now, it’s 1.0 time again – for Firefox and Thunderbird! Join the parties and help making the next browser statistics way different 🙂 Needless to say, I find the impending Firefox 1.0 release very exciting. What’s even more exciting is the number of people I’ve turned on to it and can no longer stand Internet Explorer. Take that, subspace.

Hoax or Reality?

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 16:30:59 +0000

The current Internet buzz is about CherryOS (Cheerios?). They claim to have a Mac on x86 hardware emulator that runs at 80% of the speed of the host processor with full hardware support.

I was almost tempted to make a new category to file this under: Bullshit.

Late to the del.icio.us Party

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 20:26:13 +0000

I’ll admit it. I read about del.icio.us several times, but I largely ignored it because it wasn’t immediately obvious what it was. Explanation by others and even the site itself left me even more confused than I was already.

I had largely given up on figuring it out before scriptygoddess mentioned it in her blog. It was enough to prompt me to give it another shot.

I finally figured out what it was, despite the impossibly vague description on their site, which reads “a social bookmarks manager”. What the hell does that mean? The “social” part of it threw me. It simply means your bookmarks are public and processed by their system. You categorize them with tags (which are simply labels) and their servers compile lists of who linked to what, the top references for a tag (category), supplies RSS feeds of your bookmarks, basically all kinds of neat stuff.

Pats Win 19th Straight

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 17:51:30 +0000

The Patriots wrapped up their 19th straight win today while playing the Miami Dolphins (Yahoo! Sports story).

Go Pats!

My NetNewsWire Style

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 22:07:11 +0000

The new NetNewsWire 2.0 (currently in beta) allows for definition of your own style sheets to define how news is displayed. I made my own (which was mean to be a fall styled theme, but ended up looking more like a Southwestern theme).

Install the expanded archive at ~/Library/StyleSheets/. Enjoy my theme.

Unfortunately, in order to connect and download from my FTP server, you need to attach “@godlikenerd.com” to “anonymous”. The password is your email address (or any email address). My webhost seems to have missed the entire point of anonymous FTP (every browser assumes just “anonymous” as the username). I’ll deal.

Addendum 1: Apparently Brent Simmons found this post. Color me flattered. Someone requested that I post a screenshot and considering that I now have high visibility on this item, I’m definitely going to have to. I should also warn that I haven’t cleaned this up for the combined view. I’m also going revise it for that today.

Addendum 2: I’ve updated my theme to 1.1. Below is a screenshot. I’ve moved the picture to the extended entry to keep homepage load time light.

Addendum 3 10/13/2004: Changed the name to Autumn for inclusion with NetNewsWire.

Gmail Atom Feed

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 17:27:02 +0000

Like RSS/Atom feeds? Have Gmail? Let’s combine the two!

Fire up your RSS reader and plug this URL into it: https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom

If your RSS reader is done right, it should probe you for a username and password. Plug _username_@gmail.com (the entire thing) into the username field and your password in the, no surprise, password field.

Please note that any changes you make in your RSS reader will not be reflected in your Gmail inbox. This feed is simply a listing of the currently unread contents of your inbox.

Football Picks Week 5

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 16:06:16 +0000

I’ll admit it. I screwed up a bit with last week’s picks. 9-5 is not good. This makes me 20-8 overall.

Hopefully this week is better.

Detroit vs. Atlanta
NY Giants vs. Dallas
Minnesota vs. Houston
Oakland vs. Indianapolis
Miami vs. New England
Tampa Bay vs. New Orleans
Cleveland vs. Pittsburgh
Buffalo vs. NY Jets
Jacksonville vs. San Diego
Caroline vs. Denver
Arizona vs. San Fransisco
St. Louis vs. Seattle
Baltimore vs. Washington
Tennessee vs. Green Bay

d00dism Supplement

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 09:47:38 +0000

I’m using my Bloglines account to host a supplemental blog which is going to be clippings that aren’t worthy of the front page.

Votergasm

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 08:48:13 +0000

I had to link to Votergasm. How sad is it when you have to withhold sex in order to get someone to vote?

And ladies, I will be voting on November 2nd….

Mac OS X Power Tools

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 21:26:11 +0000

Thanks to my continued participation in Macworld’s Forums, I’ve gotten to know some of the Macworld writers. One of them is, of course, Dan Frakes.

He’s done me the favor of sending me a copy of his latest book, Mac OS X Power Tools. It arrived in the mail to today. The sheer size of it surprised me, but I am no less determined to read it cover to cover.

Once I do, you can look forward to a thorough review.

Upgraded to WordPress 1.2.1

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 11:33:00 +0000

The wonderful people over at WordPress have updated the latest version to 1.2.1 to address some security concerns among other things.

My upgrade seems to have been successful.

Give Me Wings

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 11:21:10 +0000

As I have only been to U-Mass once this school year, I haven’t had a good chance to get all the fabulous local delicacies. Yesterday, Sheila, my coworker, had wings.

That was enough to spark an intense craving for a big tray of honey barbeque wings from Wings in Amherst. I’m going out there Friday to get a huge tray of wings dripping in sauce that I can gorge myself on.

A Beginner's Introduction to Blogs

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 10:15:45 +0000

My obsession as of late has been RSS and blogging in general. To that end, I’ve been preaching about getting an RSS reader, etc. For most people, that’s a bit daunting. I think I may have found the solution. Check out Bloglines. There are other websites that give web access to RSS/Atom feeds, such as Blo.gs.

Let’s face it though, Blo.gs’ interface Blo.ws. It’s ugly, slow, and hard to deal with. It also assumes, for the most part, that users are already familiar with RSS and how it works. It also relies on the authors of those feeds pinging those services (though Ping-o-Matic has made this easy for conscious bloggers).

Ballmer: “I don't know what I said exactly, but it was bad”

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 09:41:41 +0000

Following a lambasting on the web normally reserved for politicians, Steve Ballmer has conveniently forgotten what he said. Nevermind the fact that his comments are recorded in nearly every iPod, Mac, and computer based new source, or the fact that they are also in perhaps hundreds of blogs, he just can’t remember what exactly was said.

This says two things:

He knows he was wrong.
He doesn’t have the balls to stand up and admit that he said it.

“I don’t recall” doesn’t hold up in court and it certainly doesn’t hold up in the media. Microsoft’s public relations people should tackle and wrestle him to the ground before he makes another colossal blunder.

Which Blogging Tool Are You?

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 21:31:04 +0000

This is admittedly geeky and probably only 1 out of 10,000 people will get any real enjoyment out of it, but I bet almost everyone will take this quiz anyway. Just because.

Thus, I pose the question, which blogging tool are you?

You are a very conservative and introverted person. You live in your own world and you're not very easy to approach.

Which Blogging Tool Are You?

Boston Traffic

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 10:58:48 +0000

For some time now, I’ve been dealing with Boston commuter traffic, relying on TV and radio traffic reports. For the life of me, I couldn’t find a website that gave up to the minute status information. Well, I found one. Sweet.

Gmail May Never Go Public

Tue, 05 Oct 2004 10:04:09 +0000

This is a strictly opinion piece and I have no inside knowledge as to Google’s plans.

I think Google may have hit on a great idea when they designed Gmail and the way in which their “beta” distributes Gmail addresses. It may be too short lived because of attempts to circumvent the system.

Perhaps one of the most prevalent problems with free email addresses is that it takes minimal effort to get that account. As a result, we get AOL syndrome. There are too few string combinations to go around. Instead of getting simply “derik” as one’s login, you’re forced to come up with an obfuscated version, with the most obvious one being attachment of numbers to the end of it (such as one’s birthday). So, instead of “derik” you’d end up with “derik112881” (please send presents).

I'm #2!

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 16:33:34 +0000

This site has successfully reached the number two slot in Google’s search engine when looking for “Derik“.

Of course, this still makes me a girly man in comparison to Derik Farnsworth – IFBB Professional Bodybuilder (who is #1 ~~sadly~~).

Some day my muscle bound friend….

Google Fight: How does it work?

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 12:17:47 +0000

Another good way to waste one’s time is to play with Googlefight. Type two things, and using Google, it will proclaim the winner.

Neat, now how does it do that?

Google spits out approximate matches for any query (you know, 1-10 of about some number). One method would be to parse this from Google’s pages. That’s a kludge though which may break.

A better idea? Use Google’s SOAP interface once again (just as I did for my Google cache utility, and as I will use for my custom search interface). One of the results fields is this value. This can be captured quickly and compared. Part of Google’s appeal for now and some time to come is the fact that it not only has a great and accurate engine, but it supplies all imaginable information to third-parties. That may be it’s saving grace as monsters such as Yahoo! come charging like a bull.

Whoa, that's Good Squishee

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 11:22:46 +0000

I found some neat optical illusions (via Slashdot). Good for a few minutes of entertainment.

Slashdot | Ballmer Says iPod users are Thieves

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 11:19:02 +0000

Slashdot | Ballmer Says iPod users are Thieves

I think this speaks for itself. Ballmer is crying that the iPod and iTunes Music Store are doing so well. boohoo

I'm a Jerk

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 22:44:55 +0000

I can’t really elaborate on this any more. Hopefully the person this is meant for will see it.

Football Picks Week 4

Sat, 02 Oct 2004 18:30:12 +0000

It’s week four of the football season and the Patriots are back from their bye-week. Here are my predictions:

New England vs. Buffalo
Philadelphia vs. Chicago
Washington vs. Cleveland
NY Giants vs. Green Bay
Oakland vs. Houston
Indianapolis vs. Jacksonville
Cincinnati vs. Pittsburgh
New Orleans vs. Arizona
Atlanta vs. Carolina
NY Jets vs. Miami
Tennessee vs. San Diego
Denver vs. Tampa Bay
St. Louis vs. San Fransisco
Kansis City vs. Baltimore

So far, my record is 11-3.

Jury Duty, Done for Three Years

Fri, 01 Oct 2004 20:37:33 +0000

I haven’t been posting too much lately because I’ve been spending nearly all my time for the past two weeks serving as a juror in Worcester. It’s over (finally).

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, but let me make this clear, after two weeks of it, I can safely say I’m ready for the guaranteed three years off. I’d be a little more verbose about the experience, but I feel like it’s not entirely appropriate to post all the details onto the web.

.Mac Now Sports 250 MB of Goodness

Wed, 29 Sep 2004 21:52:29 +0000

After months of being derided for a relatively small amount of space (100 MB of iDisk space, 15 MB of mail space), Apple has finally bumped up the space for .Mac to 250 MB combined (which you can allocate in any way you see fit).

I’ve been waiting for this for some time now. I use a .Mac address as my main one and some other services for other stuff. The main reason for this was that 15 MB wasn’t enough to keep all my mail for all time on the server. As a result, I use Gmail for all my mailing lists. Now I can rethink this and maybe use one address for everything.

Get Yo Google Cache

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:33:58 +0000

Thanks to Python and Google supplied SOAP API’s, you can now access the Google cache for any site here. I’m only allowed a thousand access per day, so if this gets popular, it may stop working later in the day.

Enjoy!

Make Any Mailing List into an RSS Feed

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 17:54:20 +0000

I love keeping track of my favorite news sources in NetNewsWire by using RSS feeds. However, a lot of stuff I read is still distributed via email. This isn’t too much of pain with a mail client that does threading or Gmail.

That said, it’s not nearly as convenient as using NetNewsWire (or your favorite RSS reader). The solution? It’s a neat, new, novel, free idea called dodgeit. There are no passwords or setup involved, but it’s easy to sign up and you instantly have RSS access to email there. This is perfect for mailing lists whose content can be publicly accessed by anyone. It can even be used by mailing list administrators to instantly add RSS access. Nifty!

Units, Units, Units

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 22:26:21 +0000

We’ve now reached a time where most people are fairly computer savvy. However, despite knowing how most of the parts of a computer interact and work, the units are still seemingly impossible to master. Let’s review shall we?

Hard drives and memory are measured in storage units. They based upon the unit byte (which is in turn 8 bits). A long, long, long (did I mention long?) time ago, hard drives were measured in MB (megabytes). Once they reached one thousand megabytes (or 1,024 depending on how anal you are), they started measuring them in GB (gigabytes). This has been true for the better part of a decade. It’s time to force yourself to type GB. As for memory, most people don’t get this wrong yet. Most users still have less than 1 GB and as such, will refer to it in MBs.

Who Wants Gmail?

Sat, 25 Sep 2004 17:05:56 +0000

Lately Google has been really generous with invitations to their free email service. I keep getting back up to maximum six invites, almost as fast as I can give them out. If you are interested, leave a comment.

Please make some kind of case for it if I don’t already know you. Saying “Please stranger, I really want one” is not a way to endear yourself to me.

My Football Picks – Week 3

Sat, 25 Sep 2004 14:29:18 +0000

Here are my picks for week 3. Bob, etc. post yours in the comments.

Atlanta vs. Arizona
Baltimore vs. Cincinnati
Philadelphia vs. Detroit
Houston vs. Kansis City
Pittsburgh vs. Miami
Chicago vs. Minnesota
Cleveland vs. NY Giants
New Orleans vs. St. Louis
Jacksonville vs. Tennessee
San Diego vs. Denver
Green Bay vs. Indianapolis
San Fransisco vs. Seattle
Tampa Bay vs. Oakland
Dallas vs. Washington

Wake Me Up When It's Over

Sat, 25 Sep 2004 14:25:00 +0000

After all these months of political rhetoric (a quarter of each President’s term being taken up with this is a bit much), I’m ready for it to be over. There’s still a month left. Doesn’t anyone else feel the same way?

Stupid Quiz

Sat, 25 Sep 2004 14:18:14 +0000

This is probably going to invalidate my site as far as xhtml goes, but oh well. At least I got my favorite color.

            <td valign="center" align="center" width="30">
              <table border="0" bgcolor="#000000" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0">
                <tr>
                  <td valign="center" align="center">
                    <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#339900" width="15" height="15">
                      <tr>
                        <td nowrap="nowrap">
                          &nbsp;
                        </td>
                      </tr>
                    </table>
                  </td>
                </tr>
              </table>
            </td>
            
            <td valign="center" align="center" width="30">
              <table border="0" bgcolor="#000000" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0">
                <tr>
                  <td valign="center" align="center">
                    <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#66CC33" width="15" height="15">
                      <tr>
                        <td nowrap="nowrap">
                          &nbsp;
                        </td>
                      </tr>
                    </table>
                  </td>
                </tr>
              </table>
            </td>
            
            <td valign="center" align="center" width="30">
              <table border="0" bgcolor="#000000" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0">
                <tr>
                  <td valign="center" align="center">
                    <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#33FF00" width="15" height="15">
                      <tr>
                        <td nowrap="nowrap">
                          &nbsp;
                        </td>
                      </tr>
                    </table>
                  </td>
                </tr>
              </table>
            </td>
            
            <td valign="center" align="center">
              <font face="arial,helvetica" size="4" color="#66CC33"><b>Green</b></font>
            </td>
          </tr>
        </table>
        
        <br /> <font face="arial,helvetica" size="2" color="#000000">You are a very calm and contemplative person. Others are drawn to your peaceful, nurturing nature.</font> 
        
        <center>
          <a href="http://quizme.stvlive.com/color/quiz.php" target="_blank" style="text-decoration:none; color:#66CC33;"><font face="verdana,arial,helvetica" size="1"><b>Find out your color at Quiz Me!</b></font></a>
        </center>
      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>
  
  <p>
    </td> </tr> </table>
  </p>

How the Site Was Fixed

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 21:15:57 +0000

From my webhost:

Â It is an error that we are working on and fixing. But the current fix out be to restart apache. This error is rare and shouldn’t rear it’s head again. Thanks for patience. There you have it. If you are having trouble with WordPress sending back zero-sized replies/no data/connection reset by peer, then you may need to restart Apache. I’ll write more when I find out more.

Boo to WFXT!

Fri, 24 Sep 2004 17:46:57 +0000

WFXT (aka Channel 25, the local Fox channel) has cut back on the number of times it shows the Simpsons. It formerly aired reruns at both 6:30 and 7:30 (about which no one complained). In fact, nearly all my friends watched both airings, because, let’s face it, you just can’t get enough Simpsons (and with more than 13 seasons, it’s likely you haven’t seen them all either).

Like they did with Sunday nights (canceling my beloved Futurama), they decided to fix something that wasn’t broken. They’ve shoved Malcolm in the Middle into the 6:30 slot. Don’t get me wrong, I like Malcolm. Only in small doses though. Every Sunday is almost too much already.

David Ortiz: Olympic Sprinter?

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 21:23:29 +0000

I just thought I’d mention a play from tonight’s Red Sox game that was really inspiring. David “Big Papi” Ortiz managed to run all the way home from first base on a single.

Way to move that big caboose of yours, big boy!

The Next Great Mac Software

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 21:52:36 +0000

While it has mostly gone unnoticed until this point, Growl is some of the coolest new software around. It doesn’t do much on its own right now, but it won’t be long before lots of your software utilizes it.

Growl provides a notification system for all your applications. All a developer need do is send notifications to it. Current applications that you can use with it are:

Adium
Fire
iTunes
Mail
gCount
…and more

Growl has been around for a little, but only recently was a build offered to the public. Some warnings need be said. gCount will need an update to use the newly released build. You’ll need a version of Adium 0.7 (currently in beta).

MarsEdit and NetNewsWire 2.0 Public Betas

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 21:27:47 +0000

For some time now, I’ve been using MarsEdit to post to my weblog. It’s the standalone version of the blog editing capabilities that were part of NetNewsWire (Pro). I didn’t get to talk about this because it was private. With the now public beta releases I am freed of that obligation.

You can see more information on Brent Simmon’s Blog (which should be part of your RSS subscriptions by now). Simply said, it’s pure perfection. You can use it with any of a number of blogging software packages. This includes:

Fixed! Again!

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 20:57:18 +0000

The real question is for how long. I am noting this because again, it’s proof that WordPress works fine and great.

Now I’m waiting for the explanation.

Want Proof That I'm Not Crazy?

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 18:01:17 +0000

After another series of exchanges with my webhost, I’ve reduced one of the problems I’ve been having to a single PHP command.

This should connect to NOAA, disconnect, print a success statement, and finish gracefully. The source can be seen here although you may need to use your browser’s “view source” command.

PHP or Apache hangs on this simple code. If anyone has seen this before, please comment.

Help Me, I'm Losing My Mind

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 09:56:21 +0000

Jon, if you’re still reading my site, I seem to still need your help. Please comment or email me directly at ddelong !at! gmail dot com.

I will take any and all help. One very small section of WordPress’s PHP code seems to be messing up and I can’t diagnose why.

Thank you.

My Blog Was Broken Again

Sun, 19 Sep 2004 18:47:26 +0000

After days of troubleshooting a couple weeks ago, I got my Blog fixed. Apparently, my host is having a relapse. I won’t be able to do much until I get it fixed, so stand by.

sigh

Going on a Trip

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:54:17 +0000

I’ll be visiting Ithaca this weekend so I may not post until Sunday (unless I have something super important to post). I’ll see you all then.

Looking for a Job at Google?

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 11:14:20 +0000

Slashdot | Google’s Math Puzzle

It’s too bad I already have a job. I’ll have to keep this in mind for a few years down the road though.

Windows Internet Explorer Bug

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 09:38:30 +0000

Katie revealed a bug in Windows Internet Explorer that WordPress exposes. The comment box following articles will span the entire length of the page instead of the box, and as such, the sidebar covers over part of it.

The solution is either to wait for Microsoft to fix it (*snicker* *snicker*) or get pretty much any other browser. Safari and Firefox both render it correctly.

The funny part is that even Internet Explorer for Mac handles it correctly. It’s pretty amazing how Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit got so many things right when writing that browser that didn’t get passed along to the Windows version.

Hockey Lockout Starts

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 22:19:00 +0000

With Lockout Official, Both Sides Hunker Down

(Via The New York Times.)

Well, it happened, as predicted for months. Whom the blame should be placed upon is not clear. What is clear that both the owners and players have their own respective share of the blame at this point.

I was really looking to forward to hockey this year as I didn’t have time to follow last year with all my senior year responsibilities. Now I’ll be reduced to following the U-Mass Hockey Team with almost stalker level obsession. That’s not what anyone wants.

Firefox 1.0 PR and Thunderbird 0.8

Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:40:45 +0000

Mozilla has once again updated its software offerings. The new Firefox Preview Release (PR) gives us a taste of what we can expect in the fourth quarter when the full version is released.

New features include:

RSS Sensing If the page you are visiting has set the right tags, an RSS button will appear in the status bar, listing available feeds (RSS 0.92, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3).
Live Bookmarks Once an RSS feed is found, it is captured as a Live Bookmark. The bookmark then looks like a folder with the contents being that of the feed. Slick!
Improved TypeAhead Find which now shows an unobtrusive search bar at the bottom to help control your searching.
Slight UI Improvements Although the changes are slight, overall they much improve the experience of using Firefox. The URL slot turning beige when at a secure site is a nice touch.

Thunderbird also sports some great new features. In particular, it adds RSS feed support. You may think: So what? You just told me about Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. Well, hold on a second. While it’s a nice new feature, it still doesn’t address the problem of managing many feeds and keeping track of what you’ve read. Thunderbird lets you treat them like email, with each article being a message. You can make them read, move them, copy them, and even delete them. Sweet.

Contest: How to Improve This Site

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:39:12 +0000

I’ll give a Gmail invite to the person with the best idea on how to improve my site here. In the case that there are several really great ideas, I may give out a couple.

Valid types of ideas are:

Adding a WordPress plugin of some sort to my blog here.
Adding a new section of content.
Something original.

And… Go.

Software Piracy: Fighting Back

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:00:02 +0000

The Unsanity blog recently featured an entry on a shareware author that took a slightly more aggressive stance on software piracy.

Slightly might be the wrong adverb for this case as the mechanism employed had the ability to wipe out the offending user’s entire home directory. The author reportedly decided this was too harsh and removed the code a few hours later.

Why do I bring this up? Well, Unsanity wanted to keep quiet what the product and who the author was, but Slashdot ran a story today revealing the identity. The cat is out of the bag, as they say.

Ask the Libertarian Presidential Candidate a Question

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 13:27:01 +0000

Living in Massachusetts makes my vote largely impotent (thanks to our electoral college system). This year I think I’ll be voting Libertarian because ideally, that’s how I’d want to vote anyway.

Slashdot has a story on asking the Libertarian candidate some questions. This should be fairly interesting and anyone that has been entertaining thoughts of voting Libertarian should probably take a swing and ask a question.

12 Beers and Some PHP Later

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 18:32:58 +0000

I visited Amherst to spend some time with Scott and to see bob’s new apartment. Friday night’s plan was to do a little drinking in the dorms and reminisce. Well, one beer begot two, two begot three, and so on until I finally finished all twelve beers I had. I was feeling great at that point, but that didn’t last.

I woke up in the middle of the night feeling sick, but I was barely awake and still quite intoxicated. Because of my recent troubles with my blog here and the fact that my host suggested it was the PHP code, I was having a dream about dealing with some troublesome PHP code.

Partriots Win Season Opener

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:49:18 +0000

After a nail-biting three hours, the Patriots pulled out a win against the Indianapolis Colts.

It was nail-biting, of course, only because of some sloppy play near the end by both teams. A couple fumbles and a botched punt return put Indianopolis in good position to score with a first down. After a couple weak downs, Indianapolis tried once more on their third down to jockey for better position. To Manning’s chagrin, McGinest sacked him for a huge loss.

The Last Broken Site Update

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:31:35 +0000

At least, I hope this is.

After finding a couple test entries successfully entered in my test installation, I tried it on my own and I confirmed posting works again. Well, that to me said that the problem was fixed. I added my weather plugin back and guess what. That’s right, it worked and it didn’t break the site.

Remember this day, because this is normal operation and proof positive that WordPress works and the code isn’t broken.

It's Fixed?

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 15:14:29 +0000

I just tried posting with the web interface and it looks like things are back to normal.

Experienced PHP Programmer Needed

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 19:58:43 +0000

I’m trying to track down the problem with my weblog that recently cropped up. My host’s support staff have largely pointed the finger back at me. I’d love to isolate the problem myself either to fix it or have a firm place to point my own finger. If you know PHP and how to debug, send me an email or comment (as long as the comments are still working).

Update: Now attempts to post result in thirty copies. I can’t win. At least I can still post with my external editor.

The Long Road to Recovery

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 12:32:46 +0000

Last night, I put in a completely isolated new installation of WordPress in. I made a new database, didn’t change anything but the configuration files necessary to point at the database. WordPress still shit the bed when trying to post new entries. All I can say is, at least they still go through.

I’m waiting help from my host and hopefully I’ll get things back in working order soon (especially since I’d like to put my weather plug in back).

Weather Plugin Broke The Site

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 14:21:35 +0000

Earlier today, the weather plugin (which told you the weather in nearby Worcester) broke my blog earlier today. As of yet, I don’t know how or why, but needless to say, hunting it down wasn’t easy or fun. I nearly gave my host some crap which wasn’t their fault. Arg!

Update: Apparently more is going on than just with the weather plugin because attempting to post this returned document empty errors. Why must things break on me?

Review: Macally BTMouseJr

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 16:06:27 +0000

Following a lengthy search for a good Bluetooth mouse (see entries one and two), someone mentioned the Macally BTMouseJr and the fact that it recently was released. I decided to check it out.

I hadn’t heard much about it, which seems like a marketing blunder considering the demand being generated by new Powerbooks with Bluetooth built-in. Wireless has become an attractive option for laptop users because the surfaces users may work on may not allow for cords. Cords also tangle and are a pain to put away repeatedly. This prompted some companies to come up with solutions for travelers. For example, Kensington made the PocketMouse Pro which features a mechanism to wind the cord within the mouse. The also made a wireless mouse with a compartment to put the USB dongle. Why not use the wireless already built into many laptops, including Windows-based ones? In addition to others, Macally has.

TheBostonChannel.com – News – Dog Bites Politician On Campaign Trail

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 10:40:00 +0000

Dog Bites Politician On Campaign Trail

(Via TheBostonChannel.com .)

After being subjected to a million signs and bumper stickers for both candidates involved, this brought a smile to my face. Call me sadistic.

OS X Terminal Tutorial: Part 2

Sun, 05 Sep 2004 22:41:54 +0000

After an extended break, I’m adding a second installment into my Terminal Tutorial. This time I’ll be going into the structure of Unix commands.

Notice Any Changes?

Sat, 04 Sep 2004 14:33:26 +0000

The last few days, I’ve been playing with the CSS that renders the site for me. I’ve now given the weblog a page-like look (notice the border on all sides). Normally, that bugs the crap out of me on websites, but I’ve tried to keep it a small border to make things look nicer. I’ve also removed the numbering of the comments and gave them dashed line separators.

Next up is to add a logo of some kind (and a favicon because I’m sure all of you are tired at looking at the generic icon for this site). I’ll have to try my hand at designing them both myself as no one offered to help this artistically stupid programmer.

Move-in Day for the Old Roommie

Fri, 03 Sep 2004 22:41:15 +0000

My friend Scott (yes, I know his blog is empty, I’m trying to get him to change that) moved into his new room at U-Mass today. He’s staying in the same building, Field, but he’s moved down to the second floor.

That, first of all, made moving him in ten times easier than normal. In fact, we spent most of the day wandering around Amherst. We even had time for a stop at Amherst Brewing Company (ABC), which is a great place to stop if you’re ever in the area. They even have sampler packs so you can try a variety of their beers. I’m going to stop now because I could go on all day about beer.

BBEdit 8.0: Evolutionary

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 14:16:31 +0000

Many of you may be familiar with the uber text editor, BBEdit. I recently upgraded to the 8.0 version of this fine utility.

My verdict? Well, it’s pretty similar to 7.0. There are a few key new things that made it worth the upgrade price to me. The first is the document sidebar. Instead of having a few dozen windows open, you can have just one and switch between them. This is a big win for small screen users (like those of us with 12″ Powerbooks). It also highlights the current line, which seems minor, but is amazingly useful. Hunting down the cursor can be a real chore, so this is a real time-saver. It also lets you the system spell-checker (which I’ve become addicted to.

September Arrives

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 11:23:45 +0000

For the first time in my life, I will not be going back to school at the end of the summer. My parents asked me if it felt weird. As of yet, no, it feels perfectly natural going to work every morning and come home every evening. Perhaps it’s too early to judge how I will feel, but I’ll say this: I’m feeling fine.

I won’t have to return to the world of academia, with its self-imposed sense of importance, lack of real world relevance, and absurd idealism. I can finally interact with other people in a real way. I’m not saying I hate school. I’ll probably start on a graduate degree sometime soon. It’s just that after 16+ years of education, every little bugaboo about its culture has turned into frustration. They become all you focus on. I’m sure the “real world” will be the same way after some time, but I’m hopeful that its downfalls will cause less friction with my personality.

Watson Updates TV Pane and Restores EyeTV Functionality

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 21:38:29 +0000

I recently criticized Watson for removing EyeTV functionality from Watson’s TV Pane. Dan Wood has restored this and the iCal functionality (with caveats). I must applaud him for this. I think most Watson users would have taken the TV pane as was and thought nothing more of it. It’s great to see such dedication.

G5 iMacs Arrive

Tue, 31 Aug 2004 10:51:58 +0000

After a long iMac-less summer, Apple has announced the new iMacs with full specs and pictures.

I’d list them here, but I figure there’s not much point. You can all read. Of note is the fact that the iMacs are using a system bus that is a third of the processor speed. This is a first for G5’s, but probably won’t have a large effect upon performance. They’ve also adopted a new form factor that has essentially moved the entire guts of the machine into the LCD frame. This begs the question, why couldn’t they make a G5 Powerbook again? I won’t go off on a rant about misplaced priorities at Apple again. I’m sure that can come back another day.

HP Begins Selling the iPod

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 09:02:15 +0000

Months after the announcement that they would do so, HP has begun selling the iPod. Different faceplates can be gotten through HP (thought I believe they are actually sticker; I couldn’t get a picture of them because I refused to wade through their flash based iPod site).

This is a win-win situation for Apple and HP. Apple spreads its market dominence while increasing public visibility. HP gets to sell an existing product (meaning no reasearch and development costs) that’s already dominating the market. This allows them to sell the iPod at lower prices as well as bundle it with their own systems.

MacCentral Undergoes Re-Design

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 17:16:00 +0000

As probably nearly all readers of this site know, I am a volunteer moderator over at Macworld’s Forums. Macworld recently revamped their website and accompanying website, MacCentral, which a new design. It’s a radical change for sure, but uses CSS heavily to improve portability and loading speed.

It has also moved Macworld’s news site into the main site and pointed the comment system for those stories into Macworld’s existing forums. This had couple changes that went along with it. The first being that existing MacCentral users had to get new usernames at Macworld’s forums (resulting in 0 post counts). It also meant that existing discussions were in a different forum system.

Leggo my Medal!

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 13:37:01 +0000

Following a Paul Hamm’s dramatic recovery from a mistake during the overall gymnastics competition at the Olympics, we all learned of a scoring error that would have meant only second place for him, giving the bronze medalist the gold.

Naturally, it’s a sad turn of events for the South Korean, but the Federation of International Gymnasts (FIG) has refused to step up to the plate to rectify their mistake. Instead of giving Yang Tae-young another gold or telling the world that they made a mistake and that it is final, they are calling upon Paul Hamm to turn his medal in and “do the right thing.” Suddenly, the competitor who has no hand in the scoring, is being asked to rectify the situation? He is being called upon to fix things. It’s absurd!

Finding an Apartment

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 00:01:35 +0000

The week after next I’ll be working in Woburn instead of Bedford. This makes for a longer commute from my home. My parents will also be selling this house and moving up to Maine.

This adds up to me needing a new apartment of my very own. I’ve never gotten an apartment before so this will be a new experience. My friends that have gotten an apartment have done so through people they knew at school.

Busy Day

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:14:23 +0000

Building up hours to prepare for some mandatory vacation time next week is sucking up my time this week. Working 10 hours a day sucks up most of my free time and drains any energy I have to post anything. Making matters worse, today was a slow news day in the Mac world. We probably won’t see anything too major until September when the new iMac is introduced.

From MacCentral: .Mac users get Virex 7.5

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 22:07:43 +0000

.Mac users get Virex 7.5: “Following McAfee Inc.’s July announcement that its Macintosh anti-virus software utility Virex would be updated to version 7.5 and released in August, the new version of the software is now available for download for subscribers of Apple’s .Mac online service. .Mac has offered previous versions of Virex as part of its basic service. Virex 7.5 incorporates new features including a background scanner, an “active” scanner that maintains connections to the local network and the Internet, new tracking and reporting capabilities, a schedule editor that lets you automate scans and updates and more.” (Via MacCentral.)

OS X Terminal Tutorial: Part 1

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 16:11:13 +0000

I’m feeling particularly saucy today, so I thought I’d start in on a series of entries about how to do things with OS X’s Terminal application. This is the first lesson.

Omniweb Tabs, It's a Love/Hate Thing

Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:34:01 +0000

Many Mac users are familiar with Omniweb, the web browser. When I first started using OS X, Omniweb was the best game in town. Looking back, that was a rather sad state of affairs, but then again, Mac OS X 10.0 was pretty sad in terms of software support.

Soon Mozilla’s browser started shaping up as it approached 1.0. IE got a little better when it hit 5.2. Then Apple released Safari. We finally had a full array of viable alternatives. Mozilla lured me away from Omniweb’s substandard javascript support. Apple lured me away from Mozilla’s non-standard interface.

Perl and Shell Scripting: More than just for geeks

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 22:10:37 +0000

My work requires me to work on a Unix box for a good part of my time. For some of you, that may sound daunting, hard, or archaic, but really it isn’t. It sure beats trying to develop things on Windows every hour of every day.

It actually makes working with others exceedingly easy. We all look at essentially the same filesystem thanks to the wonders of NFS. One can log into another machine if their machine is loaded, or even into much larger computers that have no physical terminal. Very handy.

No More EyeTV Functionality with Watson

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 22:38:30 +0000

For some time now, I was using Watson to look through TV listings, look at show descriptions, change the channel on my EyeTV, and schedule recordings.

Due to changes at TVGuide.com, all those features have been lost. I originally bought Watson solely for those features. I’ll be surprised if the EyeTV support is kept for the product that is succeeding Watson due to its cross-platform and Java nature.

I know the changes to TVGuide.com are outside of Mr. Wood’s hands, but the sudden disappearance of the EyeTV features just smacks of the lack of support that I expected to come after he announced the end of support in October.

Rant: How do I do this? X does it.

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 10:51:59 +0000

A large part of my time is spent reading and responding to posts at Macworld’s Forums. I enjoy learning new things, helping others, and generally raising the level of knowledge. It’s all very fulfilling.

All except a few select kinds of posts. Some of my personal pet peeves are fairly evident, cross-posting, repeatedly posting “It’s not working” and nothing else, calling a (forward) slash a backslash, etc.

Much less evident and I don’t mention because most people would interpret it incorrectly. That is the fabled “Windows does this” line. To give a little perspective, let me give an example:

From iPodlounge: Backstage: 42% report 4G iPod audio problems

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 23:42:31 +0000

Backstage: 42% report 4G iPod audio problems: “Exclusively for Backstage readers: This is an advance version of a news story that will appear on the main iPodlounge web site tomorrow morning. Having problems with your fourth-generation (4G) iPod? You’re not alone. Three weeks after the release of Apple’s newest iPods, iPodlounge readers have reported that approximately 42% of their 4G units have manifested an audio defect identified by iPodlounge, while others have complained of receiving soiled or physically damaged hardware….” (Via iPodlounge.)

When a “Grass Roots Movement” Goes Horribly Wrong

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:21:31 +0000

Apple news lately has been dominated by recent interactions with Real and in particular, concerning their new Harmony technology (note: that link won’t work on a Mac) which threatens to penetrate the “closed” iPod (one can read more at Daring Fireball as to why calling the iPod closed is silly).

Up until this point, Apple and Real have sounded like two playground kids arguing over who is the “doody-head”.

Real: I’m going to play on the iPod.
Apple: No, you’re not.
Real: Yes, I am. You’re a jerk.
Apple: Am not.
Real: Are too.
Apple: Not.
Real: Too.
Repeat as necessary.

Up until this point, this has just been a lot of posturing done through press releases.

From Maccentral: Netscape 7.2 improves pop-up controls, security

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 16:51:27 +0000

Netscape 7.2 improves pop-up controls, security: “Netscape Communications released on Tuesday Netscape 7.2, an upgrade to the company’s Web browser that improves control over pop-up windows and adds security enhancements. This is a free download for all users; you can also order it on CD, with a guidebook, for US$14.95. System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.1.x or higher, a G3 running at 400MHz, 256MB RAM and 60MB free hard drive space.” (Via MacCentral.)

Ghost in the Machine

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 15:27:52 +0000

For any of you using an EyeTV, be wary of its automatic recording checking. This feature will check your TitanTV account for any remote scheduling you’ve done. That sounds well and good. It even works as advertised.

The problem is how persistent it is in trying connect to the site. Current EyeTV users are familiar with a feature that allows one to wake or start up the computer to record a show. Unfortunately, the TitanTV account checking function also uses this mechanism. You may wonder why I would warn about such a thing. Well, if you turn it on to do it hourly, it will start up every hour if it is off. My computer has been keeping me up at night, freaking me out for several nights now.

Spell Checking with Firefox

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 21:40:08 +0000

I’ve recently started using Firefox instead of Safari. My two leading problems are spell-checking and the fact that Firefox insists upon opening external links in a new window.

I finally a solution for spell-checking. Although it’s not nearly as nice as OS X’s system spell checker (which checks on the fly), this is an acceptable stop-gap solution. Long term I think I may have to go back to Safari though (if only PithHelmet would accept new rules from me, damnit).

Review: Aliens vs. Predator

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 00:49:51 +0000

I went to this movie with high hopes of something original, something unexpected.

I was let down. This movie was fairly predictable. Once you watch the first couple minutes, you can guess the rest of what happens. As much as Alien Resurrection was berated for being a weak sequel to the other Aliens movies, I feel it was a piece of art compared to this film.

The only saving grace of the film was Lance Henriksen of original Alien fame. He’s captivating to watch no matter his role (and yes, I still miss Millenium). I’d say more about how I’m disappointed with his use, but that would spoil the (small) plot for any of you wanting to see the film. Let’s just say that they didn’t use him or his character to their fullest.

Aliens vs. Predator Tonight!

Sat, 14 Aug 2004 16:26:11 +0000

I’m going to show my inner geek tonight and see AvP tonight. I’ll probably post a review later on tonight if I’m feeling up to it.

Calling all Artists

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 21:46:48 +0000

After continued use of NetNewsWire, one thing has become painfully clear to me. I need a logo for my site. This isn’t just for the front page, but so I have a favicon because until I do, my site is going to look second rate.

I have zero artistic talent, nor do I have any idea what would look good for my site. I need help. I’m begging. Any artists or graphic designers interested? Leave a comment or send me an email at webmaster [at] godlikenerd [dot] com.

Sleeping until 2 PM is a Wonderful Thing

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 14:51:36 +0000

After another week of work and 5 hour nights, I got to sleep in this morning. I woke up at the early hour of 11 AM, but went back to sleep another 3 hours.

I can’t articulate how wonderful this is (well, except essentially losing the entire day). I had dreams I could remember for the first time this week.

Maybe it’s because I still have the collegiate habit of staying up too late, but weekends are better than peanut butter and fluff.

Various Improvements to the Blog

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 08:40:49 +0000

I’ve added several key improvements to my blog. The first is the set-up of permalinks. Now instead of http://godlikenerd.com/index.php?some=arguments&here=1&etc=2, URL’s for the articles follow this format http://godlikenerd.com/weblog/year/month/day/article-name/ which is certainly much more readble. It should also be a very transparent change for users.

I’ve also added a local (to me) weather indicator to the right (which I thought was a nice addition). This was made possible through WordPress’s plug-in system. Readers may have also noticed the acronym plug-in which makes common acronyms such as USB and CSS show their full text in a tooltip (hover your pointer over the dash-underlined word). I’ve also added a plugin which will automatically turn URL’s into links.

Who Needs Nomar? Not Me

Wed, 11 Aug 2004 22:11:15 +0000

While apparently scores of children are crying about his departure, I’m glad Nomar is gone. Not only did he have a bad attitude (as teammates revealed), but he was frequently hurt and really didn’t want to be here (as is evidenced by his refusal of a $60 million 3 year deal while hurt).

His bat may have finally started to return just before his trade, but I don’t care. His errors hurt the Red Sox efforts more than his batting helped. Cabrera may not be the best hitter (currently floating just above a .200 batting average) but his fielding skills are excellent and is the key difference between the Red Sox winning and losing.

Apple Update Frenzy and Verizon Can Lick My Nuts

Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:53:18 +0000

Apple has not only released an OS update for Panther and a security update for Jaguar, but they’ve also included several other key updates:

iPhoto 2.0.1
Java 1.4.2 Update 1
iSync 1.5

I don’t feel like linking them up, so hit Software Update or your favorite software update site (like Versiontracker).

iSync 1.5 brings support for new devices, including the Motorola V710 (Verizon’s first Bluetooth phone). The bad news is that Verizon will be crippling the V710 to promote sales in their own ring-tone service. That means that syncing will take place over a USB cable only. While this is better than nothing, it means I’ll either be waiting to see if a Nokia Bluetooth phone will grace Verizon’s lineup with fully functional Bluetooth or get a cheaper Motorola with USB syncing (like the V60s). It’s disappointing to say the least.

Obligatory OS X 10.3.5 Update Notice

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 23:00:16 +0000

You know the deal. Hit up Software Update.

More information is available here.

For those of you using 10.2 or want to stick with 10.3.4, Apple has also issued security updates, available here.

Slow Day

Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:11:35 +0000

Other than continuing to play with CSS some, I have nothing new to report today.

I think I may write up a guide to using CyTV later, which is by far, one of the most useful pieces of software out there today (if you have an EyeTV).

CSS is Cool!

Sun, 08 Aug 2004 14:10:41 +0000

I wanted to add some neat appearance effects to my resume’s page without having to make images and use tables, etc. Instead, I thought I’d try my hand at CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) as it seemed to do a good job with both this blog and the FAQ.

It turns out CSS is a lot easier than I’d originally thought. Using objects and inheritance to propagate style changes, it’s a natural language (and I use that term loosely in this case) to pick up for an OO programmer.

Archiving Your IMAP Mail using Mail.app

Sat, 07 Aug 2004 17:58:18 +0000

I’ve gotten into a habit of periodically reducing the number of emails I keep on the server with my IMAP addresses because, unfortunately, I don’t have a huge amount of space with them.

This is a relatively simple task. You create a local email folder (in the “On My Mac” section) and drag all your messages there. This will create a .mbox file (a very standard format) in ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes.

Take those files and back them up to a stable medium like CDs and you’re done. It’s quick and easy. Entourage does have the advantage of allowing you to drag straight from its windows to somewhere in the Finder, but I find this one extra step insignificant.

WordPressing the FAQ

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 20:45:10 +0000

After seeing how strong the muliple users feature of WordPress is and how easily it can make it for users to post, I think I’ll be turning the OS X Forum FAQ into a blog. This will have the advantages of being easily updated (even without my attention), allow for individual posting, keep the pages small and fast loading, as well as add a search engine.

I’ll be posting a notice onto Macworld’s site calling attention to this entry. I want comments, lots of them. All opinions are important to me.

Apple posts iPhoto 4.0.3 update

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 08:36:55 +0000

Apple posts iPhoto 4.0.3 update

Following a short lived release of iPhoto 4.0.2 (which was posted and then revoked a few short hours later), Apple has released iPhoto 4.0.3. The difference? No one knows but Apple, which is becoming a very strong trend.

Most users are assuming that it has something to do with extended start up and shut down times associated with the previous update, but in typical Apple style, this new update’s notes exactly match those of the old one. Is it so terrible to admit a mistake and delineate what has changed? If they truly are the same, why not use the same version number?

From MacMinute: Linux on the Rise

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 09:47:14 +0000

Linux on the Rise

Macminute has a couple stories on Linux in relation to Macs.

The first is that Linux has surpassed the Mac as the second most prevalent desktop OS. It’s not entirely surprising as Linux combines the low price of x86 hardware, the low cost of the Linux OS, and the hard stability and functionality of a *nix operating system. It’s ideal for many corporate and software development settings. Despite looking like a loss for Apple, this is actually a win. Increased use of Linux will lead to the necessity of all businesses needing a cross-platform solution. It will also decrease the amount of web pages that are Windows IE only as more and more customers will not have that as an option. Additionally, most software being developed for Linux is also being made available for OS X through the terminal and X11. This is a major win for Apple.

Scam of the Week: FreeiPods.com

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 23:16:36 +0000

I hope that no one falls for this classic pyramid scheme, but in case you were thinking about it, please take five minutes, calm yourself down and realize that it is too good to be true. Please do not fall for this scam, nor should you let any of your friends do the same. It’s worse than falling for the $1000 Microsoft tracking email scam because you are willingly giving your address to spammers and you will receive nothing in return.

.Mac Mail Aliases

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 08:46:42 +0000

Most .Mac users may not have noticed, but mail aliases are available for use through .Mac’s webmail interface. You choose another email address (_yourchoice_@mac.com) and all mail to that address goes to your existing account.

The primary purpose for this feature is fairly obvious. It allows you to have “throw away” addresses to use in situations in which you don’t trust the entity you are giving your email to. If you begin to receive a lot of spam through that address, you simply disable it. Other services have had this for a while, but it’s a welcome addition to .Mac’s existing tools. .Mac’s web-mail also color codes incoming email according to the alias address they came in through (very nice). It’s finally being exposed by websites like MacFixit. I actually discovered this gem several weeks back and never thought to tell anyone about it. .Mac’s documentation actually makes no reference to it.

From Maccentral: Apple versus RealNetworks: A lawyer's perspective

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 13:49:17 +0000

Apple versus RealNetworks: A lawyer’s perspective

My interpretation of this whole situation? Apple should let Real do whatever it is planning, but use of those files will be completely unsupported by Apple. Users are on their own if they decide to use them (or Real can do the support work). Additionally, Apple doesn’t make any guarantees about future firmware working, so if the files stop playing, Apple can say “Talk to Real”.

Migration complete!

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 09:22:59 +0000

The good new is that WordPress is a million times easier to install than MovableType. I also like its interface much better. The bad news is that its documentation, or at least the organization of the documentation is lacking.

At any rate, I also moved my weblog to the root of the domain, so I’ve made a pointer from the old directory. I just hope that users that were using an RSS client to read my site will notice that the feed has moved as well (it’s linked on this page).

Goodbye MovableType, Hello WordPress!

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 20:24:38 +0000

Following confirmation from Ranchero software that NetNewsWire does indeed work with WordPress, I’ve decided to move to it. Partly was to keep current and partly because of some of its features are compelling.

I won’t be making any more entries until the migration is complete. I’ll also be making my blog the front page for my domain. Stay tuned!

Netscape: Back from the Dead

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 10:36:10 +0000

Netscape fans will be thrilled to hear that reports of Netscape’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Netscape 7.2 will be making its debut very soon as reported by MacMinute.

From what I had read earlier, this new version will be based on Mozilla 1.7, which is one of Mozilla’s most stable releases. In fact, I believe that was their priority issue for that milestone.

This doesn’t affect me so much as I use Safari on my Macs and Firefox on my work computer. It is a good thing for those that refuse to use anything but the big two (Internet Explorer and Netscape). It also means that modern Mozilla-based executables will begin gracing corporate desktops again as well (again, because support is generally restricted to the big two).

Get Well Steve!

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 10:24:36 +0000

As reported on every single Mac news site under the sun, Steve Jobs has undergone surgery for a rare form of pancreatic cancer. I wish him a complete and speedy recovery.

You can read more about it at Maccentral.

Blogging Software

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 10:19:29 +0000

I’ve been using MovableType to run my blog here and it’s been working great.

However, MovableType 3.0 and up are no longer free. For now, the current version of MovableType I’m using is sufficient, but I’m concerned about long term viability.

The guys over at Unsanity have moved to WordPress, which seems pretty nice as well.

Does anyone have any recommendations for Blogging choices? Keep in mind, I’d like to continue to have the option to publish using NetNewsWire, which does limit the options a bit (WordPress may be out of the running because of this). My host does supply Blogger software as part of their package as well.

Entitlement and the Lack of Responsibility

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 11:29:19 +0000

It is my firm belief that our society’s high quality of life level has resulted in two things: an entitlement complex and a lack of responsibility complex. This is particularly easy to observe in teenage kids. You don’t even have to leave your home. Log onto the net and see their poorly spelled, grammatically incorrect, incoherent ramblings about everything!

This is evident in every aspect of life. “I bought a harmburger, so I’m entitled to fries. It’s my right.” It’s spread to software as well. Users are content to commit software piracy, downloading and using software with a clear conscience. To them, Microsoft Office and its thousands of features is a right. They need that software and as a human being, they deserve it. Some outright steal it, while others simply buy the academic version of Office (when neither a student or a teacher) and attempt to justify it with the fact that Microsoft Office is expensive. That is not justification, only a rationalization. Further, they have the audacity to claim that Microsoft actually wants users to abuse the fact retailers do not verify academic status when selling this software. Office is a product, a ubiquitous product yes, but a product nonetheless. Its common usage does not make it a right.

eBay Fraud in All Its Hilarity

Tue, 27 Jul 2004 00:06:25 +0000

I can’t say too much about the two following links as they are fairly self-explanatory.

I will say that they are worth the extremely long read.

By reading these stories you can also figure out common scammer tactics on eBay. Any experienced eBayer will already know all the do’s and don’ts, but it’s still worth the read.

Without further ado, they are:

The Sal Wise Fraud

P-P-P-Powerbook

Free Email is Back, in a Big Way

Sun, 25 Jul 2004 17:52:04 +0000

Once upon a time, someone thought to serve email through a web-based interface for easy access anywhere (that saved users the process of setting up an email client). HoTMaiL was one of the first of course, but is now owned by Microsoft. The number of services like these exploded and just as quickly collapsed (or got bought up like Rocketmail).

When web search giant Google announced GMail, its 1 GB email service, the major (and minor) webmail provider’s realized that in order to retain any of its members, they would have to amp it up.

New: Motorola V710

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 23:17:42 +0000

Verizon Wireless is now selling the Motorola V710 cell phone, for August availability, featuring Bluetooth and a megapixel camera. [MacInTouch]

That’s right boys and girls! Verizon is finally going to offer a Bluetooth phone. It looks like it will cost $250 (subtract $70 with a two year agreement).

I can’t wait until it’s released so that I can pump all that money into a new phone. My only problem is that due to its picture phone capability, I may not be able to bring it into work when I make the move to Woburn.

An Email Client without IMAP?

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 15:50:53 +0000

It’s hard to believe that in this day and age that any email client doesn’t support IMAP. For those of you who already know what IMAP is, you can skip down to the next paragraph. IMAP is a mail protocol, like POP, only more powerful. The POP protocol, while ubiquitous. is very simple. It stores messages on the server in a simple queue that one downloads and deletes from the server one at a time. That mail is then stored locally on your computer, accessible no where but that server. While this may work fine for many people, it’s limitations are impossible to ignore for power users. With IMAP, the messages are stored permanently on the server, including a complete directory structure to file messages. This allows one to access their mail at any time, load only messages you want to see instead of having to download them all, and allows mail providers to place a web interface on your mail.

New iPods, No New Menu for You!

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 08:31:58 +0000

Apple released new iPods officially yesterday. New features include multiple on-the-go playlists, the ability to delete songs from those playlists, a revised menu including a “Music” entry as will as shuffle within easy access.

Apple also released a firmware update for all iPods, or so it would seem at first. They actually did not release an update for any iPod other than the new ones.

This has actually left existing users out in the cold. I can understand if certain features simply weren’t possible with existing iPod hardware (the ability to slow or speed up Audible content), but shifting access to the shuffle function into the main menu should be brain dead easy. It’s already implemented and in place on existing iPods, all that remains for Apple is to implant a menu item to access that call.

Pictures Added

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 08:37:23 +0000

I’ve added pictures to my review of Radtech’s ScreenSavRz as well as my entry about my new futon. I took the pictures a little bit high-res so I’ll have to scale them down. Unfortunately, adding the pictures as part of the extended entry seems to be only a half-way solution as looking at June archived will bring up every entry in its entirity, including those pictures.

I wanted to avoid uploading the pictures using MovableType’s built-in web upload because it’s slow in pretty much every browser, but there seems to be no way to get MovableType to recognize pictures you’ve uploaded manually.

New iPods Monday

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 01:23:40 +0000

From MacMinute, Newsweek has the new iPod on its cover. Other new sites are saying that Monday will bring the formal announcement on the net.

New features include a clickable scroll-wheel (a la iPod Mini) and smaller size (physically, not storage). It looks to be a rather incremental upgrade.

This is the second time Apple has made public new announcements in a major magazine before announcing them otherwise. The first time was of course when the iMac G4 graced the cover of Time magazine. It was in fact possible to find out about the new iMac in Time before reading it on the net (other than through sites that basically referenced the article in Time).

What Content Do You Look For?

Fri, 16 Jul 2004 19:45:46 +0000

Now that I have my own domain, it’s time I did something with it. While hosting the OS X Forum FAQ for Macworld and my blog are nice, I feel like I need more.

I could have a forum, but I’m not sure how much I really need one, especially since I wouldn’t host Mac topics.

I could have polls, but I’m not sure if that’s real content on its own.

G5 iMacs in September

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 09:11:30 +0000

Apple announced during a coneference call, that G5 iMacs are on the way. Here’s my spin:

Apple must make the G5 iMac an entirely new form factor. I’m not talking about simply changing how it looks. It has stop being an all-in-one with little upgrade possibilities. The best form factor I think they could adopt would be that of the late G4 Cube. Putting the G4 Cube’s failings aside, I believe we can all agree that it had a large target audience. Those that want moderate expandability, flexibility as far as the display goes, and an inexpensive price. We all know that the G4 Cube’s failing was its price. Nothing else was wrong with the machine. Most of its customers were happy with the level of performance and expandability (the lack of PCI ports, etc. was not troublesome). In fact, many people were crying for a headless iMac. This I can go along with.

Who doesn't love a futon?

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 20:34:46 +0000

Last night, I picked up my futon. This isn’t a cheap dorm room adornment. This is high quality baby (like $440 high quality).

I bought it Saturday, so I had to wait a couple days for it. I was so anxious that even though we weren’t back and done with dinner until 10 PM, I still wanted to assemble it. My father and I had it assembled in less than an hour.

Now all that’s left is to christen my self-proclaimed flip & fuck. Unfortunately, work absorbs nearly all of my time during the week. It’s pretty unbelievable until you actually start doing it for real.

I’ll take some pictures and post them up, along with the other things I promised to photograph.

Movie Review: King Arthur

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 08:55:41 +0000

I went to see King Arthur late last night (10:15 PM, which is way too late when you get up at 6 AM). Was it worth the $9 and lost hours of sleep?

Yes and no. Keira Knightley is a complete babe, that is for sure. She is hot, with a capital *SIZZLE*. I think seeing her was alone with the price of admission.

The movie itself isn’t the typical King Arthur mythology. The movie claims the story is based upon recently unearthed evidence. I didn’t bother to check whether this claim is substantiated, but honestly, I think they simply wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the original myth because this movie had nothing to do with Arthur other than using the names we already know and love. That doesn’t detract from the movie I think, but instead was a cheap marketing technique. Maybe next they’ll do a real life Jesus Christ movie, about this black guy who had some whacked out ideas from smoking too much weed with his 12 buddies.

Missing a Day

Sun, 11 Jul 2004 12:22:20 +0000

All right, I don’t have a good excuse. I didn’t write yesterday. To make up for it, I’ll post twice today.

Last night, I finished Call of Duty. Ok, ok, I practically played through the entire game. My summary, which has already been mirrored by others like Peter Cohen of Macworld and Maccentral fame. Excellent game, great play, good levels, but too short. I want more! Essentially all the levels were interesting and fun. I’m glad there was no sniper level, a la Medal of Honor. Was it worth the $50? Yes, I believe so. I now have a lot of replay value through playing at greater difficulties and multi-player play.

End of the Week Spectacular

Fri, 09 Jul 2004 09:49:40 +0000

The weekend is a few scant hours away, as is yet another Red Sox game. I must be setting some kind of record here. I’ve gone for over two decades without going to a Red Sox game while living in Massachusetts, and now I’m going to at least three this year. The season isn’t even half over yet.

My Macally BTMouseJr is on its way finally. I’ve been waiting with baited breath for it, obsessively checking my order status over at Page Computers *ding*. It has since gone to backorder status there, so it appears that this mouse is in high demand. Now I can shift my attention to UPS and their web based package tracking system.

Busy Weekend

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 08:39:03 +0000

I’ve successfully given myself too much to do this weekend.

I have to in no certain order: rotate my tires, change my oil, change the windshield wipers, go to Chestnut Hill to pick up some pants, and find a gym I like (as well as work out).

That may not sound like much, but getting father to do anything car related quickly is like wishing for the ability to fly, so I know I’m going to have to surrender the better part of 4 or 5 hours to the tire rotation alone. Add in the other couple tasks and there goes a whole day.

Keeping the Faith

Wed, 07 Jul 2004 08:44:34 +0000

The Red Sox finally seem to be on the road to recovery following a rough transition back to its first string starters, many of whom were injured. While Ortiz and Manny struggled with the Oakland Athletics, the rest of the team seemed to find a groove.

This includes defending batting champ, Bill Mueller (pronounced “Miller” which should be enough for any German to cringe). He knocked a ball out of the park early in the game to put the Red Sox ahead by 3. As any Sox fan knows though, that’s simply not enough.

Kerry, Edwards in '04?

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 10:19:37 +0000

I’ve been saying it for months now, ever since John Kerry pulled ahead of John Edwards, that if Kerry is serious about winning, he will pick Edwards as his running mate. It appears now that Kerry is serious.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Democrat, nor am I a Kerry supporter. Quite the opposite actually. I’m going to support our current president, George W. Bush. Let me nip this in the bud now, I don’t feel the need to debate that, at least not for the purposes of this entry. So please keep all comments relevant to Kerry’s choice of running mate.

4th of July Fireworks

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 14:45:13 +0000

Last night I went into Boston to see the fireworks on the Charles River. I’d never gone before, so the best fireworks I’d seen up until that point were sparklers (and on the TV). Originally, I was thinking about going to see the Pops, sit in the esplanade, and watch the fireworks overhead. When I found out that I’d have to be there at 10 AM at the latest, I decided it wasn’t worth that much to me, at least for now.

My Kingdom for a Bluetooth Phone

Sun, 04 Jul 2004 14:39:14 +0000

I use Verizon as my wireless provider. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great. The service is consistent. My phone never cuts out on me (while half the people I know have such intermittent service that I end up calling their landline once they get home). It’s fairly cheap for me because I’m on a family plan (though that may change soon, but then I’ll have all those minutes to myself *muahahahahaha*).

Odd and Ends

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 22:55:47 +0000

I’m a little late with this entry because, well, it is the weekend. I have a couple things to talk about tonight though.

First off, Friday I saw Spider-man 2. Overall, I enjoyed it. I have three problems with it.

First, as Dana said to me, there was entirely too much story. Every other scene was the dopey Tobey Maguire crying about something. Honestly, the more of him covered up, the happier I am. He just isn’t Peter Parker. He’s a decent actor, but wrong for the role. This does relate to both movies, but there was far less of him I felt.

Pith Helmet 2.0 Beta

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 08:53:50 +0000

Due to using a Windows XP based computer at work, I have become very familiar with Firefox. By far, one of its vest features is an extension for it called “Ad Block.” This sweet little add-on lets you quickly and easily block ads or other content. It’s completely intuitive. Right click on something and it will give you an option to “Block Image” or “Block iFrame” dependent upon what the ad is contained within. It will then allow you to edit the URL to replace sections that are variable with an asterisk (*). Quick, easy, effective, and has a hugely significant effect upon load time.

A Trip to the Dentist (or, a Mouse of a Different Color)

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 11:00:33 +0000

Bluetooth is still considered a hot technology and was meant as a cure all for wireless peripherals (such as Palm Pilots, mice, keyboards). Once Bluetooth hit the streets, we were supposed to see all kinds of new products, virtually eliminating products based on other wireless standards.

That didn’t quite happen. Apple released their Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, but again, the one button mouse hinders its utility for many users (including myself). Logitech released the MX900, Microsoft released a Bluetooth version of their venerable Intellimouse Explorer, and Belkin released one as well. However, Logitech’s lacks drivers for Mac OS X, making all but the main three buttons useless (at least until the next version of USB Overdrive is released, which promises Bluetooth support), the same goes for Microsoft’s (but add the fact it uses the old form factor without the tilt-wheel, it doesn’t compare with the RF version), and Belkin’s, well, it doesn’t need drivers, but it chews through batteries from what I’ve read in reviews.

Four Times the Speed, At Zero Cost

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 08:50:42 +0000

Broadband Internet service has become commonplace across the United States. Whether it is a cable modem, dsl, satellite of some sort, or another kind of wireless high speed Internet access, increasing numbers of users are getting on the information superhighway with a Porsche instead of a moped.

A couple years back (but following my departure for school), I finally convinced my father to get a cable modem. My argument for it wasn’t just speed or the services that become accessible when one migrates (such as streaming media). It was in a large part based upon a monetary argument. It was cheaper to get a cable modem.

Once a Day

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 09:39:23 +0000

Once of my favorite websites is RailHead Design. It’s become a daily stop because, well, it’s updated every day (at least during the week). I’m resolving myself to having the same discipline (though my entries tend to be a bit longer than Maury’s). Starting today and happening every day unless I go on vacation, I will be adding at least one new entry.

I’ll probably borrow (ok, steal) from sources such as Obscure Store, Fark, and Maccentral to fill the void on days when I have nothing good or interesting to say.

Mac OS X Tiger and Other Mac News

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 18:05:28 +0000

The first and most major news of this fine Monday is Apple’s preview of the next revision of Mac OS X, code-named Tiger. Apple’s introduced some very provocative new features, all of which are documented (albeit informally) at their Tiger preview site.

The first feature to catch my eye was Spotlight. Based upon Apple’s new Metadata-based search technology, Spotlight brings live search to not just the file system or Mail atomically, it allows for system wide searching of many services including Mail’s messages, contacts, calendar entries, the filesystem, etc. all at the same time. Very cool. However, following a disturbing trend that Apple is perpetuating, Spotlight also very closely resembles one of my favorite pieces of software, LaunchBar. Live searching across multiple data types is what LaunchBar excels at (especially the upcoming 4.0 version which has many, many file types and databases integrated into its own search engine).

Sliders DVD

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 10:04:27 +0000

I’ve always been a big fan of the TV show Sliders. It was immediate, starting with the debut on Friday night on Fox a long time ago. I tuned in as often as I could to watch their adventures (this was at a time in my life when I was still working until 9 every Friday and starting to develop a social life). Sure, it was geeky, but then again, if you look up at your location bar, there isn’t much denying.

Review: RadTech Notebook ScreensavRz

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:35:28 +0000

After making a semi snap decision about screen protection for the 12″ Powerbook, I ordered a Notebook ScreensavRz from RadTech. Wanting to maintain the color scheme of the Powerbook, I ordered the Titanium color with the Powerbook logo on it. The other colors and designs are cool, but not my taste. I ordered last Friday (at 8:26 PM).

My first compliment (of my series of many that will follow in this review) is that they processed and shipped my order that day. Most businesses close up shop at 5, but not RadTech apparently. They diligently processed and shipped my order only a couple hours later. Not only that, but my order arrived on yesterday (Monday). I can’t entirely give them credit for it coming here so quick through the mail system, but I can give them credit for actually shipping my order when they said they did.

The ScreensavRz itself came in a neat little tube. I’ll attach pictures later on if I can figure out how and I still have the motivation. Inside was the ScreensavRz itself, and a one time use alcohol wipe. My laptop is new, so I said that pad for later (even though I already have an iKlear Power Klean Kit). The tube is nice enough to reuse either to store the ScreensavRz later (though it’ll be with the Powerbook about 99% of the time) or other little things.

I pulled out the very soft ScreensavRz from the tube and, to be frank, it looked a bit smaller than I expected. Just to emphasize this point for potential buyers, it does not completely cover the surface of the Powerbook. It leaves a bit of a border (which again, I’ll take pictures of given time and motivation). However, this border is about the width of the border around the display or a little less, so your screen is, in fact, completely protected. I imagine this was done to avoid bending of the computer that would result from the cloth being pressed between the two sufaces (if it were larger). It is large enough to perform its task and stay put, so there are no worries there.

Thanks to the material RadTech decided to use (Optex), it doubles as a cleaning cloth. I can attest to this. I sneezed, getting some of my wonderful saliva on the screen, leaving some spots when it dried. I took the ScreensavRz and wiped the spots right off, even without wetting it. That won’t work for everything, and you can actually dampen it in order to get off more stubborn marks. The material is also washable, so using it to clean won’t permanently besmirch its appearance.

All in all, I’m wholly satisfied. For $13.95-$17.95 (dependent on size), you get quite a few things: an LCD cleaning cloth, LCD protection, a one-time use cleaning pad, a nice little carrying tube, and peace of mind. I’ve read testimonials about how it’s not possible for the keys to touch the screen and honestly, it’s not that I don’t believe them. Examining my own Powerbook has convinced me of that. However, with the extra functionality provided by the ScreensavRz, its low cost, and the reassurance that marks will never happen, I feel this is a worthy complement for any Powerbook and worth a look.

Continue reading for pictures

No Glove, No Love, Part 2 (or I Need a Seatbelt)

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 09:51:15 +0000

You’re all very tired of hearing about my latest purchase. Well, I have a nice L.L. Bean briefcase-like laptop bag that I’ve been using for about 4 years now. It’s a great bag. It served me well all through college. What made it even better was that it’s computer compartment fit my old Powerbook (the Pismo) perfectly. It was tight and snug in its padded compartment. It even had it’s own sleeve type thing that fit it.

No Glove, No Love

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 11:09:23 +0000

Now that I’ve had my Pismo for 4 years, I’ve noticed some marks on the screen that aren’t oils or dirt. They’re scuff marks from my keyboard rubbing up against the screen. This has gotten exponentially worse since I actually started carrying my laptop to class with me (mostly because of the prevalence of wireless Internet available at U-Mass).

It’s such a widespread problem that companies started selling screen protectors. This includes Other World Computing, Radtech, Shaggymac, Acme Made, and Marware. I know there are even more than that, but I didn’t feel like writing out URLs all day.

The Big Move to Woburn

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 23:02:48 +0000

Labor Day weekend, the project that I’m working on at Raytheon will be migrated to Raytheon’s new facility in Woburn from the old one at Bedford. Now, it’s not that I dislike Bedford or anything about it, but the new building (which was originally Genuity’s) is simply amazing.

Nearly every surface is either glass or mirrors, which is actually a little disorienting. Every time I was waiting at the elevator, I’d think it was open because the reflection off the mirrored doors was so clean and clear, I swore I was seeing the inside of the compartment.

EyeTV and TitanTV

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 09:58:57 +0000

For my last birthday, I got an EyeTV from Elgato Systems. For those of you not familiar with the product, it’s essentially a TiVo type device for one’s computer. You can record TV shows to watch later, watch live TV (with a small time delay for encoding), and pause live TV (the feature I use most by far).

In order to efficiently use the EyeTV, it’s necessary to have access to some type of TV guide in your computer that allows for channel selection and selection of shows to be recorded. Elgato provided this with an account at TitanTV. This had two limitations: it’s a web based interface and you had to use IE with it. Both of which are something I’m not interested in.

Kame Hame Ha!!

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 22:00:34 +0000

I finally broke down and bought Dragonball Z: Budokai 2. It was on sale for $20 and while I was at it, I got Budokai 1 (again for $20). I was looking forward to comparing the two games, but unfortunately, the first Budokai was out of stock (even though it was the one not on sale).

So, I’m sure you’re dying to know how it is. I’ll tell you. It’s pretty good. The game play is decent and the moves are pretty cool. What problems do I have with the game? It’s a little complicated for one. You get these cards describing new items. Sometimes it’s a new character, a new move, or a new arena. However, sometimes they’re items. If it’s an item or move, it shows up in your list of capsules (confused yet?). How you enable these capsules for characters isn’t obvious. Once you go to do this, sometimes you can’t enable them (but there is no explanation of why). Once you figure it out, it’s not so bad.

Exercise Sucks

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 17:17:22 +0000

Bob dragged me to the gym in my junior year (as I had no excuse not to go). In the months that followed, my body finally got into shape and made me worthy of the title “Greek God.” Unfortunately, in the summer that followed, instead of the usual manual labor I did for a job, I got an internship at Raytheon, giving me a taste of office life.

I got lazy. I stopped going to the gym because work took up so much of my time during the day. My girlfriend at the time didn’t care and neither did I. When I got back to school, I thought I could get back into working out. I did for a while, until senior year pressure got to me. Most of my time was focused on schoolwork and the little time I had left over I spent on the ‘puter.

The Power of Prediction

Sun, 13 Jun 2004 00:10:49 +0000

I’m sure no one will believe this, but I predicted David Ortiz’s solo home run shot on Friday. I’m very proud of it. Of course, I also predicted that Manny would immediately follow him with another, but that’s not important.

Red Sox Fever!

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 09:59:18 +0000

Tonight, the Red Sox are playing the L.A. Dodgers at Fenway (the first time the Dodgers have ever been there; thank inter-league play) and I’m going to be there for it. This will be only the second time in my life going to Fenway and that’s saying a lot considering I’ve lived in Massachusetts my entire life. My first game was only a couple weeks ago too (a game against the Mariners).

Countdown to a New Powerbook (8 days)

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 22:50:13 +0000

After four great years with my Pismo, it’s time I moved on. I’ve been putting off replacing it because it’s no longer my primary computer (not since I bought a Powermac MDD a couple years back). Being a college student, beer soaked up most of my free funds and as such, a new Powerbook wasn’t a reality until now (with my fabulous software engineering job, take that outsourcing!).

Well, I’ve decided that portability is the way to go. The new Powerbook 12″ looks to be a good move up from a 500 MHz G3 to a 1.33 GHz G4 (which is faster than both of the 1 GHz processors in my Powermac). With the better video card, better optical drive, Airport card, etc., it should keep me entertained (at least for 2 years). I know I’m probably buying the last Powerbook G4, but that’s ok. I made my peace with getting the last Powerbook G3 and next to last Powermac G4.

New G5s = Whining?

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 10:56:54 +0000

I’ve been interested in Macs since early in my teens years while I played with my family’s Quadra 660av. I had to be satisfied with that for many years with the only major upgrade that I could get my father to go along with being a fancy new 56k modem (back when the two standards were duking it out). I was happy with that even though I watched the PowerPCs come out and climb to the hundreds of MHz. This is going to date me, but today’s teens have no respect or perception of reality. They even make me ashamed to be associated with them.

Macally IceKey: Keyboarding Perfection

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 20:11:32 +0000

Most people don’t pay attention to their keyboard. I didn’t either for a long time. I actually loved the feel of my Pismo’s keyboard. The scissor key design made for keys that wore very well and pushing on any part of the key had equal resistance. When I started converting my Pismo into mutated desktop, I decided to get an external keyboard. That started my hunt for the perfect keyboard.

Dumb Letters Hilarity

Sun, 16 May 2004 16:51:00 +0000

Inside Mac Games has posted the third installment of their Dumb Letters to IMG feature. I had previously not read these columns on IMG, but after this one, I had to back to read the first and second parts. They are pure comic gold!

The Second Mac OS X “Trojan”

Wed, 12 May 2004 21:17:09 +0000

According to Maccentral, Intego is warning about another “trojan” virus for OS X. I use that in quotes because although it may match the technical definition, it’s hardly a threat, nor is it the result of some kind of security hole.

As others have said this is a “social engineering exploit”, preying on the stupidity of computer users. This Applescript is simply disguised with a custom icon, causing users to trust that it’s a Microsoft Office 2004 installer.

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