I want to see what the Monkey Webcam looks like personally. Perfect for spying on people.

Lovers of cute things (and the Japanese) will snatch up this USB MyPet Webcam that comes in both monkey and puppy models. Supporting up to 640x480 at 15 frames per second, this webcam is perfect for the girlfriend that hates tech.

Readers could also use it to spy on a victim who doesn't know this is a webcam. A very dumb victim.

USB MyPet Webcam cranks the cuteness factor [uber gizmo]

[via Gizmodo]

An answer to social networks: isolatr

Today brings us the latest offering from Google: Google Mars. Explore the red planet in three different ways: an elevation map shows color-coded peaks and valleys, a visible-imagery map shows what your eyes would actually see, and an infrared-imagery map shows the detail your eyes would miss. It is pretty nifty. Check it out!

While looking around the iTMS for some new podcasts to listen to today I came across one by Sasha (the DJ). Pretty cool, so far he's just got two mixes up, both live mixes (which I love the best), but it's a cool start. Definitely worth a check out if you're a fan (and even if not).

Now I'm searching for any other DJs who have podcasts. This is also helping to inspire me more to do one of these myself.

I tried playing around with Pandora a bit more tonight. In the past I'd gotten frustrated with it by trying to get it to play techno. The problem is it has next to no techno and when it runs low on selections it seems to start pushing me towards listening to other things I don't care for.

Tonight I started out with The Housemartins. Things started okay, but started to travel away from that style. I thought of other things that might fit my mood tonight and ended up adding The Style Council and The Blow Monkeys in for flavor. I think I fucked the station up because now it is playing Dead or Alive for me. Not what I was really going for.

One thing I'd love to see from Pandora is a more broad selection of ratings for songs you listen to. Like, I want to say "don't only play this song, but don't play anything by the band performing this song because I never want to hear them again. I hate it that much." Just thumbs up or thumbs down doesn't do it for me.

Overall I'm finding Pandora to be frustrating. It's not playing stuff I don't like, but it's not playing stuff I'm not in the mood to hear (though it did just play some Mike Viola).

A few people have started doing this, so just to be trendy I've decided to do it also. Frappr is a site that lets you map where people are. For instance, if you click on the button below, it will take you to the page for this blog (with one whole person on it as of this posting). And then you can add yourself to the map. I've always kind of been curious about the readership of this blog. I know it isn't huge, but there do seem to be a fair number of people who read it. So please, leave a marker for yourself (It only requires a name and a zip code, so no other personal information is required).

How much is my blog worth?

Damn, not bad, but I could do better I bet. Find out how much your blog is worth.

[via Don Park (who is worth much more than I)]

After listening to TWiT the other day I felt compelled to check out Tiki Bar TV, Forbidden cocktails in a swank pad. I can't decide if it is genius or incredibly stupid, but I do know I can't stop watching it. You should definitely give the Tiki Bar a visit.

A month ago I posted about 101 things in 1001 days. I started my list (and am nowhere close to 101), but then I ran into this site called 43 Things. It is the same kind of idea, but the site will keep track of the things you want to do, tag them, see what things other people want to do (which is a big help in coming up with ideas). Check it out.

I started an experiment today on note taking. I always have a tons of things I want to do/try, tons of things I have to do, and just lots of random information I'd like to keep track of. In the past I've tried all kinds of things text files (which I still use somewhat). But was thinking of new ways to organize. In the end I thought of using a Wiki and stumbled onto MoinX.

For those not in the know, a Wiki is a web environment that allows fairly easy creation of web pages without having to know HTML. It also makes it easy to put in placeholders for where you want new pages to be. If you haven't seen Wikipedia you should check it out for a good example of a Wiki.

MoinX is a standalone version of a Wiki called Moin Moin set up to run on OS X. You run it and you get a blank Wiki all set to start editing. Pretty slick. So far I've just got pages for general ToDos and to start my list of 1001 Things. We'll see how it progresses.

A new beta of the OpenID plugin for Movable Type came out recently, so I thought I'd see if it would work better than the version I had been trying. After one try it was working just dandy. Even had someone else try commenting with it to make sure it worked (thanks again!).

For those of you who haven't heard of OpenID, it is something that was come up by the LJ folks at Six Apart. It lets people who have accounts on systems with OpenID post to remote blogs. I'd actually like to see the plugin I use have a list of trusted remote systems, since it really isn't an authentication system. I hope to post a bit more on this in the near future.

So just follow the instructions if you want to post here and not sign up for TypeKey. As usual, if it is abused, I'll just turn it off.

AdRants has an post about people being upset about ads on Flickr. People seem to be blaming Yahoo! for this practice.

With Yahoo's purchase of Flickr, it didn't take too long for Yahoo text ads to begin appearing next to Flickr member's pictures. Unlike Google AdWords, Yahoo text ads, at least on Flickr, appear on personal Flickr pages whether or not the member wants them. Granted, Flickr provides the service for free which negates a non-paying Flickr member's ability to completely control what appears on their photo pages but one Flickr user, tanais, doesn't like the practice, commenting on an ad placement next to an image of, we assume, his dog, "I do not like my pictures being used to advertise a specific breeder (they may be excellent they may be terrible - that's not the point)... so I shall sit down and think about how best to AdBust this." [AdRants]

IMHO the people complaining are idiots. I've been a user for ages, and Flickr has always had ads for free accounts. It's been one of the big selling points for their Pro accounts. I'm not a fan of advertising, but you can't expect to get something for nothing.

Flickr is one of the few web sites that I think does get it right. And my Pro account has been a very good deal. If it's that much of a big deal pay for the service.

From #!/usr/bin/girl, more flash game fun. Remember Grow? Remember Grow RPG? Well now it is an all new Grow, this time it's a cube!

Flash Fun: GrowCube
Here's a little fun for your Monday: GrowCube. I like to have something to distract me from the beginning of the week. [via #!/usr/bin/girl]

I've almost got it figured out!

Last night, in a fit of boredom, I deleted my wiki. Of course as soon as I had done it I wanted to find some new wiki software to run. I've played with tikiwiki and Moin Moin. Both were decent (and I'm leaning towards Moin Moin) but I figured I'd do the lazyweb thing and see if anyone out there had any recommendations. I think I'm looking for small and lightweight with access control, that has a fairly simple interface.

On another note, I was trying to edit something over on Wikipedia the other day and discovered that some control key commands were intercepted by the site. Kinda cool, but when editing a text field in Safari you can use emacs controls for moving around and editing. Works great till you do ^e and suddenly find yourself moved to another page because it's some wiki command. So the question is this. Anyone know how to turn it off? I tried searching around the Wikipedia site, but nothing jumped out at me.

I use NetNewsWire for reading RSS feeds. One of the great features up till recently has been the ability to have it search places like Feedster and have the results show up as a feed. In the recent past my regular search for anything to do with Pulmonary Fibrosis has achieved nothing more than hugely long posts of spam (click and see). Since the 15th there have been around 27 hits on that search, only ONE of them being an actual post by someone. And all the offending posts have been at blogger.

I think Blogger needs to do something about this. Have a better way of detecting automated blog signups or something. Currently it has drastically reduced the usefulness of things like Feedster for me. At least Feedster does have the ability to filter out responses from some urls. I just need to see if I can get NNW to support doing that.

Phil Ringnalda does some tests to see if spammers are smart enough to grab email addresses that have been escaped as numeric character references. I was surprised to find that spammers weren't going this little extra mile.

Spammers are lazy<

Last July, wanting to prove that simplistic protection of email links by just escaping them as numeric character references (a@b.com to produce a@b.com) was a lousy idea — and how could it not be? even without any economic incentive, it wouldn't take me long to write the code needed to harvest them just fine — I put an encoded SpamMotel address in my sidebar, along with a fresh address in the unprotected part of my accessibly spamproofed address. I figured it wouldn't take long before the encoded address was getting just as spammed as the other.

This morning, when I got my third actual email through the encoded one (I guess the "Harvester Test" headline wasn't quite clear enough), I finally remembered to turn it off and take it out. The final tally, for the encoded address: 46 spams, 3 actual emails; for the unencoded address: 2632 spams. Apparently, if you don't have time to really harden an address, it's worth taking the time to at least convert it to NCRs. Lazy spammers. [via phil ringnalda dot com]

I've argued for ages that just escaping email addresses like this was an example of security through obscurity. Of course I'm sure spammers everywhere will now be looking to change this.

The other day #!/usr/bin/girl posted about Bejeweled 2 over at Popcap.com. Having liked the original I hopped on over and tried to play. I click on the 'Click to Play' link and the familiar Popcap game window pops up with the instructions and no game. I hit reload a few times with the same result. I closed out the window and clicked on Bookworm, then original Bejeweled to see if they worked. Both played just fine (and wasted a good bit of my time).

So I fired off an email to their customer support asking for help. This morning I got back the following response.

Which Internet Browser are you using? Zuma, Insanaquarium, Bejeweled 2, and Astropop will only work in Internet Explorer on a Windows machine because they use Active X. ActiveX is a code that defines MicrosoftÂ’s interaction between web servers, clients, add-ins and Microsoft Office applications. ActiveX is MicrosoftÂ’s answer to Java technology from Sun Microsystems.

So, if you're a Popcap fan, forget running any new games from them for the moment. They seem to have ditched any support for other browsers/oses. The thing I find more annoying is that Insanaquarium used to run just fine on OS X, so I'm not quite sure when they made the switch. Bastards.

And yes, I know IE is still the most popular browser out there (Though it sounds like those numbers are being slowly chipped away at by things like Firefox). But the other thing that irks me is that I think these games are written in Java, at least that is what their web site indicates. Anyone know for sure? Oh yes, and Popcap support? ActiveX is not M$'s answer to Java. C# maybe, but not ActiveX.

Here's another cool Flickr thing, a calendar showing when you've posted pictures in the last five weeks.:

Each day is a link that brings you a page with pictures for that day. Nothing real fancy, but it does look pretty cool I think. You can also view calendars by month.

When the whole podcasting thing started to take off I found I was quite into it, but then RL got in the way a bit and it kind of fell off my radar. Interestingly enough, this happened when I stopped being good about using the treadmill three times a week. Today as I was getting ready to walk I realized I needed something to listen to and decided I needed to upgrade iPodderX and start listening again.

iPodderX looks like it is really progressing nicely, even if I'm going to end up having to shell out some $$ for it soon. It's got some really slick features, and I've already found one feature that I want in it. It lets you set the genre of what you download, which is cool, but I want to be able to access other tags also. iTunes has one called 'grouping' which I use for any extra data/keywords to describe the track. For instance, anime soundtracks are in genre soundtracks with anime in the grouping tag. So I'd love to be able to put 'podcast' into the grouping (as well as any other info).

Now I need to get off my ass and figure out where to set up my turntables so I can start doing a mix of the week podcast.

Seen via Compendium, SBC's new RSS reader: Project D.U.. I guess D.U. stands for Digital Universe.

proj·ect · d. u.
(noun) 1. a reader populated with headlines pulled from across the web.
2. relater of news and rumors
3. hiding place for next month's topic of conversation.
4. the center of your Digital Universe. Synonyms: middleman, informant, eavesdropper.

First off, the site. It feels like it is trying way too hard to be 'Hip'. Almost all the buttons you can click are animated in some way. Luckily none of them burst into flames. Next, the Project D.U. Reader. I personally found it to be pretty lame in a bunch of ways.

• The interface leaves much to be desired. It just feels clunky.
• When you look at the lists of posts for a blog it only shows you excerpts, even if the blog provides full posts. Clicking on their 'read more' link opens up the actual post .

• No way to export your subscriptions.
• No support for enclosures.
• Kinda slow and clunky.
• When it couldn't resolve a hostname right away it told me that the feed was bad.

• Project D.U. is a stupid name.

And as I was about to close my browser window on the site, I noticed this on their about page:

One of the best features of this site, not unlike the advent of color television, is the Project D.U. Reader. It’s filled with headlines from some of the best blogs you’ve never heard of. In fact, we’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours scouring the web, trying to find the most intriguing sites the world has to offer. To be fair, we pay the favored blogs a bit each month for the right to use their stuff. But we don’t edit what they say, that would be a very un-fun read.

Wait, they are paying the blogs they list money?? How can I get in on that racket.

About 2 weeks ago I received a Nikon D70 Digital SLR camera in trade for some computer work I've been doing for a neighbor. I've long wanted an SLR of any type and this has helped energize the creative side of me a bit. It also means I've been putting pictures online more and making much more use of Flickr. Which has also led to many of my friends asking "so what's so great about this Flickr thing anyways?"

Flickr is a photo hosting/sharing service from ludicorp that's been in beta for a while now. I think I first started using it around 8 months ago, but didn't really get into it until the new camera. I'd fiddled around with running my own photo gallery software a few times, tried a few other services, but nothing really jumped out at me until Flickr. Flickr is all about finding ways to organize and ways to share your photos. Like most other photo hosting services you can upload pictures, create photosets (albums), etc. It also has a bit of social networking type stuff built in so that you can choose to only share photos with your friends or family.

But where Flickr has really hooked me is with some of the other features. The biggest of which are tags. Tags are keywords you can add to a photo to provide more data about it. For instance, in this photo that I uploaded there are a bunch of tags. I can then choose to look at only pictures of mine with the tag 'squirrel', or I could see all the public photos on Flickr that have the tag 'squirrel'. You can also put notes onto a picture that show up when you mouse over a certain area. Oh yes, and they also have it set up so that you can post your pictures to your blog or LiveJournal from within Flickr and they accept photocam posts too.

One thing the tagging system has done is that some tags have a following. People will take pictures that can be tagged with a certain keyword. One of my favorites is squaredcircle, where people post pictures of circular things in a squared image. This one has enough of a following that someone has created a group for pictures like this (groups are things you can join which have their own photo collections).

The other thing that made Flickr my choice for a photo hosting service was that someone wrote a plugin for iPhoto so that you can export your pictures straight from iPhoto (instead of saving them and uploading with the web site or one of their uploading tools). When it's this easy I can't help but want to post stuff all the time.

Flickr is currently free, also also has a Pro option. With a free account you can upload 10MB of pictures a month, have 3 photosets, and people can view the 100 most recent images you have uploaded. The Pro account offers quite a bit more, you can upload 1GB per month, there's unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth use, unlimited photosets, and permanent archiving of high-res images. In the future Ad-free browsing will be added to that. You can check out their FAQ for more info.

The last thing I have to say about Flickr is that it has really inspired me to really learn more about taking pictures and to actually get out there and take them. The other day someone invited me to a group called 'sky'. For the next few days I was on the road and everywhere I went I kept looking for good shots of the sky (and I finally got one I really liked). It really ends up being quite addicting after a bit.

Oh, and no, Flickr isn't paying me to rave on and on about how I like them. I just think it's one of the cooler sites out there and want more of my friends to use it.

The folks over at Everything Sysadmin have started a wiki to go with the book (along with their blog). They're also talking about integrating wiki and blog, something that I think could be a really cool thing. I've thought about trying to find easy ways to do that myself (especially when I'm posting about some nifty OS X tip).

So that last post was from Flickr, and I'm not sure if I like how it posts. I may have to fiddle around with their template for posting. Overall though it was pretty painless. The only issue is that there aren't any categories for that post.

One of the things I've been watching lately is the growth of Podcasting. The idea is that various audio broadcasts online would be available for download, with RSS feeds being used to announce when new broadcasts are available. Adam Curry is the one who really gave this a kick-start with his Daily Source Code.

The other part of this is the iPod. There are a number of programs out there for watching the RSS feeds for these broadcasts. When a new show is posted, they automaticly download it and put it into a playlist in iTunes so that you can sync it to your iPod. It's all pretty slick.

My idea is kind of an expansion of an idea I've been playing with for a bit: Audiobooks. I could record an chapter at a time, and as I finish post it so that people can download. In the end I'd love to expand this to having a resource for various kinds of storytelling. Maybe do a book reading with a few people, each taking various parts. Or provide a directory for other people doing the same thing. As usual, the big issue is resources. I'll think about this a bit more after I get a bit more sleep.

I have a few different tools I use for managing MySQL on my OS X server. I've always been a fan of phpMyAdmin and have also used something called CocoaMySQL. But I was recently in a situation where I didn't have those available and needed something quick. After searching around some I discovered dbSuite Admin Tools X, a very nice piece of donationware for OS X and Windows for working with your MySQL server. The big bonus it has over CocoaMySQL is that it has user management built in (something I'm sure it will have eventually). These folks will be getting a little bit of a donation from me on my next round of payments.

Well, at least I have some pictures I could post for this occasion, even if I don't have cats of my own.

BlogACatMas This Friday!

It may be only a one-year-old tradition, but it's still a tradition! Last year, Boss Ross and I declared that the first Friday in October shall be "Post a Cat on Your Blog Day", or more simply, BlogACatMas. Yeah, posting a picture of a cat is nearly as old as blogging itself, but we figured why not have a designated special day for that most bloggy of blog practices?

Here's some inspiration:

...

So gather your kitty pictures, because Friday's the day! [via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Joey deVilla's Weblog]

From my friend Greg: The Infinite Cat Project. Pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats, looking at pictures of cats (help me! I'm stuck!)...

After not being able to talk about this for ages I can finally say NetNewsWire 2.0 rocks. Tonight Brent released the beta of NetNewsWire 2.0. I've been using betas for the past few months and he's been doing a pretty kickass job. You can check out the What's New page, read the Change Notes, or just go and Download it.

From Joi Ito's Web:

Wikipedia reaches one million articles

Wikipedia has just announced that it has reached one million articles. Congratulations Wikipedians! Wikipedia is in more than 100 languages with 14 currently having over 10,000 articles. It is ranked one of the ten most popular reference sites on the Internet according to Alexa.com (trumping Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times). At the current rate of growth, Wikipedia will double in size again by next spring. [Joi Ito's Web]

Pretty cool. I keep thinking I should work on contributing more, especially in the anime section.

Eric Meyer posted a test file that tends to freeze IE6 and in some cases even cause a reboot of the computer. So if you're running that, don't click the link below.

Freezer Case

Since a few people asked for it, I've created a test file that reproduces the Internet Explorer freeze reported yesterday. You can find it with the title "Internet Explorer Freezes -- BEWARE!". ...(254 words | CSS Browsers | comments and pings allowed) [via Thoughts From Eric]

Behold, the power of CSS.

I've been playing with A9 a little bit lately, it is kind of nifty, but nothing that really made me go WOW. Though, someone did find out something interesting about it.

Discount at Amazon for using A9.com

A9 is the new search engine from Amazon and so far it seems good enough to use. It's supposed to have all kinds of wizbang features, which it seems to. One important thing is that it's hooked into amazon's cookie system so it does know who you are and keep track of your searches. (blah blah big brother yadda evil corporate, DOWN liberal DOWN *smack* back in your cage.)

If you can get over that for 5 minutes and use it, then go to amazon, you'll notice this little "pi/2 discount" thingie. I clicked on it and, being a good little advertising target monkey, I'll pass the resulting blurb on...

since you've been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional π/2% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout (it will happen whether you use the shopping cart or our 1-Click Shopping®). You don't need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.

So there ya have it. [via The Universal Church of Cosmic Uncertainty]

I just checked on Amazon and found that I had the same link there now. Pretty keen.

One of the first things I've posted to my wiki is a short article on how I did my new blogroll (down on the left). It's a bit of PHP/CSS/Javascript code that all works to make the expandable folders. Comments are welcome and appreciated.

After a few false starts I've started up my own personal wiki. In the end I decided that MoinMoin would be the best choice for me, since it is fairly small and simple. TikiWiki was interesting, but just way too much for a small personal wiki. Now I just need to make some themes. to make it fit in with the rest of my site. Anyways, you can get there via the link on the left, or by clicking here.

There really isn't that much in there yet. But I'm planning to use it for random information I want to keep track of. And if you want to contribute at all just let me know (everyone has read permission unless I grant them more).

Movable Type 3.1 lets you now have subcategories, something that I'd kind of been wanting for a while. I'm currently using them and you can see some of the groupings of categories I have to the right. The code is after the 'more' link.

<h3>Categories</h3>
  <div class="right-text">
  <MTSubCategories>
  <MTSubCatIsFirst><ul <MTHasNoParentCategory>class="open parent"</MTHasNoParentCategory>     <MTHasParentCategory>id="ul_item<MTParentCategory>
    <$MTCategoryID$></MTParentCategory>" class="closed"</MTHasParentCategory>>     </MTSubCatIsFirst>

  <li
  <MTHasNoParentCategory> id="item<$MTCategoryID$>"</MTHasNoParentCategory>
  <MTHasParentCategory> id="item<MTParentCategory><$MTCategoryID$></MTParentCategory>
    _<$MTCategoryID$></MTHasParentCategory>">
    <MTHasSubCategories>[<a onclick="toggle('item<$MTCategoryID$>');">+</a>]
    </MTHasSubCategories>
  <MTHasNoSubCategories><MTHasNoParentCategory>[+]</MTHasNoParentCategory>
    </MTHasNoSubCategories>
  <a href="<MTCategoryArchiveLink>"><MTCategoryLabel> (<MTCategoryCount>)</a>
  <MTSubCatsRecurse>
  </li>
  <MTSubCatIsLast></ul></MTSubCatIsLast>
  </MTSubCategories>
</div>


If you view the source for this page you can see what it creates (along with the javascript it runs). There is documentation for this as part of the MT 3.1 documentation (also viewable here). If you are looking for other examples of the subcategories, you could start by checking out David Raynes' SubCategories, since the Movable Type 3.1 subcategories are based on his plugin. (Of course in the midst of typing this I realized I'd been talking to David earlier today on #joiito. Small world!)

The fine folks at Six Apart have officially released Movable Type 3.1. I've been beta testing this for a bit over a week and it's pretty nice. They also released a pack of plugins for it that includes MT-Blacklist.

One of the cool new things in Movable Type 3.1 (which should be out pretty damn soon now) is the dynamic PHP publishing. Why is this a big thing? Because up till now if you'd changed a something like your individual archive page template you'd have to go back and rebuild your whole site. If you've got a large number of posts this tends to take a while. Now, it can just render the page when requested, which means doing a pushlish all will go much faster.

After a few rough starts, I got the whole thing running on this blog. The index page and the feeds are all static, but any archive page is built up on the fly. And you can even turn on a caching if you so desire. When you do this, a copy of the dynamic page is kept around for an hour so that if someone else visits that page again within the hour it doesn't have to rebuild it again from the database.

Setup for this feature was actually much easier than I thought, once you know a few things. One, it doesn't work if you are using Berkeley DB as your database. Which required me to convert to using mySQL. Which worked out okay overall, but I had to do a bit of tweaking since I seemed to have some odd corruption in my database. Once that was done I just had to turn on the dynamic publishing for the templates I wanted and create a templates_c directory in my blog's home directory. One republish later and everything was working just fine. It's pretty much transparent to the person browsing the site (which means your existing permalinks won't change at all.

It also lets you do caching of the dynamicly generated pages via the Smarty template engine. If you turn it on, dynamicly generated pages are cached for an hour by default (though you can tweak that if you need to). Pretty slick. While my site doesn't generate a ton of traffic, this is the kind of thing that could really be useful for a site that gets tons of hits a day.

One or two other gotchas. If you are using PHP you can't use opening tags in the format <?, you need to have them in the format <?php. As long as you do that you shouldn't have any issues. Also, this is supposedly not compatible with any other plugins (not an issue for me as I don't use any other plugins).

Another issue is how dynamic pages are built. I tend to do my template editing locally using cyberduck+subethaedit and I have my templates linked to a local file on my web server. I find it is much easier to edit them that way. The problem with this is that if you make a change to the local file, you need to go back into MT and save it there also for it to take affect. I personally think it should make a check to see if the file version has changed and load that one in if so.

Next thing to try: doing more with categories and sub-categories (You can see a bit of a preview to the right).

Anyone else seen a bug with clear: both; on Safari? It seems like it is being a bit overzealous in what it is clearing. As you can see in the image here, it seems to be clearing the space from the <div> on the left, which I would think is out of the scope of that clear: both. It looks fine in Mozilla (and I believe IE).

Update: If you are looking at this at Safari you'll most probably see the behavior right now.