Life listed chronologically

Categories

Archives

Recent Posts

  • Interesting Little Puzzle

    I found this a few days ago and I can’t for the life of me remember where I got the link to it. But at least I’m finally getting around to posting it. So here’s a link to Petals Around the Roses.

  • LiveJournal RSS Celebration

    The other day over on #joiito i was whining about how I wished I could get friends-locked posts in the RSS feeds on LiveJournal. Luckily LJ user crschmidt was there to let me know that it was possible. In general, the link to someone’s feed on LJ is http://www.livejournal.com/users/[username]/data/rss. The problem is, it only shows you public entries. So, in order to get friends locked entries, you need to send along your LJ username and password and tell LJ what kind of authorization method to use. The end result looks something like this:

    http://[YourLJName]:[YourLJPassword]@www.livejournal.com/users/[username]/data/rss?auth=digest

    Note that this will only work in RSS readers that do the right thing with urls that have login information in them. But it works in NetNewsWire so I’m happy. While I still have my friends page, this means I now have access to all my LJ friends in the same place I read other blogs.

  • Another Example of Why I Like OS X

    With OS X, I don’t have to deal with computer problems like Adam Felber is having.

    I’d just written an amusing explanation of the incredible discovery of Bush’s lost military records. And then my browser crashed. I haven’t worked on a Windows PC for a while, and I’d forgotten that they only work for so long before something horrible happens, at which point the Windows manual suggests that I scream, sob, rend my garments, and upgrade to a newer version of the software that will really definitely totally not crash quite so much this time albeit depending on various conditions involving things that would be far more difficult to learn about than simply following directions and getting a head start on my next bout of screaming, sobbing, and etc. [Fanatical Apathy]

    I’d also recommend valium, and some whiskey, and maybe some Lexapro.

  • I Think This Is The Solution for My N.A.D.D. Too

    Rands in Repose gives a history of his N.A.D.D. and some good reasoning for getting a 30 inch flat panel.

    Thinking is messy.

    You don’t want to admit this because you’ve been carefully orchestrating yourself out of the chaos by constructing your personal version of N.A.D.D. These interactions with your desktop, your content, your thoughts exist because information is messy, too. It’s all a big mess and our job as consumers of an infinite amount of information is to find a system of organization which best suits our interests and our attention spans.

    The comment I’ve heard most about this new 30 inch flat panel is, “Who in the world needs it?” You do. Right now. So do I. 60 inches would better, but 30 inches is all we got.

    Yes, I can’t afford it. Neither can you because we’re not working at Pixar or PDI where they’ve got a present day politically correct justification for all those pixels, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. It just means we haven’t successfully convinced the bill payers that more pixels means more productivity. [Rands in Repose]

  • Yet Another Reason The DMCA Sucks

    Ugs, this just pisses me off.

    DMCA hammer comes down on tech service vendor

    This just in: A district court in Boston has used the DMCA to grant a preliminary injunction against a third party service vendor who tried to fix StorageTek tape library backup systems for legitimate purchasers of the system.

    How is this a DMCA violation? Well, it turns out that StorageTek allegedly uses some kind of algorithmic “key” to control access to its “Maintenance Code”, the module that allows the service tech to debug the storage system. The court found that third party service techs who used the key without StorageTek’s permission “circumvented” to gain access to the copyrighted code in violation of the DMCA, even though they had the explicit permission of the purchasers to fix their machines. [LawGeek] [via boingboing]

    What scares me the most about this is thinking about what the next step from here could be. Could a car manufacturer do a similar thing with the computer in your car? I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know for sure, but it seems like it could be done.

  • SPIM?

    From an article on CNET about Yahoo blocking Trillian:

    IM spam, commonly referred to as “spim,” has been flagged by experts as a growing problem. However, experts have also written off spim as a far cry from e-mail spam, which has caused enormous headaches for consumers and businesses alike. [CNET.com]

    SPIM? I have to say this is one of the lamer terms I’ve heard. If you look at the origin of the term spam, it doesn’t even seem to come from email at all. So I guess that means for email we should be calling it ‘spem’.

  • My Amazon Wish List

    Via The Universal Church of Cosmic Uncertainty, a link to a cool project for making an Amazon Wish-of-the-Month club. Each month it randomly picks something for you to buy from your wish list and buys it and sends it to you. You set things like a price maximum so that you don’t end up buying something too expensive. Quite the cool idea.

  • Airport Express and iTunes 4.6 and What I Think Is Missing

    globalnavexpresshi06072004Apple’s new Airport Express sounds great. It’s one of the things I’ve really been looking for. A nice way to have a wireless repeater that (hopefully) doesn’t kill the network speed. Everything else is just really good icing. Mini base station, great. Printer server, great. Streaming audio receiver: great. AirTunes, which is part of iTunes 4.6, here’s where I think they missed slightly. You can only stream to an Airport Express box. I would have loved to have seen the ability to stream to any other box running iTunes. Yes, there is music sharing, which is great, but I can think of times when I might want to be just streaming to a laptop. Or both a laptop and an airport express. I live in a fairly good sized house and maybe people in multiple places want to be able to tune in.

    I think Apple also needs to come out with some kind of stereo/AV component for listening to music and viewing photos (and maybe even movies) on your home theatre system. Something that works like TiVo’s Home Media Option (which is now included in the TiVo subscription instead of as an add-on), but more tuned to how Apple does things. It would let you listen to AAC encoded files, and AAC files you bought from iTMS. But it would act more like the iTunes music sharing does. To me, this could be the killer box for Apple. Roku comes close with their products, but it still isn’t exactly what I’m looking for. The one thing I know I don’t really want is a full computer attached to my home theatre system. It just seems like overkill to me when I have a server already that has all that stuff stored on it.

  • How to Spend the Day

    How do I spend the day when the power is out for most of it? By playing my Fire Emblem and the original Legend of Zelda on my GBA. I’m kind of amazed at how much I remember of a game that came out 15 or so years ago. And by how much it still holds my attention.

  • More Manga in the News

    The New York Times Magazine had an article on manga last sunday that’s a pretty cool read.