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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.