09.10.05

Catching up with August 2005

Posted in Apple, Career, General, Life, Media, Tech, Transport, Web at 9 am

For the first post of September, we’ll be covering August and the last few weeks with QuickNotes™…

1) I’ve got a new laptop: 15″ PowerBook. Woo Hoo! It’s teh hot! Seriously, switching from the plastic-cased iBook to the aluminium wraped 15″ PB has given me a new appreciation for thermodynamics. (But still the PB is FAST! So much faster than the iBook.)

2) Tiger is okay, but little to write home about. The UI inconsistencies in OS X from the system and iApps perspective is becoming more obvious. But I could be just railing against the fact that part of iChat crashes on a regular basis, just after I switched back to using it instead of Adium because iChat can now do multiple accounts including Jabber accounts.

3) General instability is the call of the day. Some things are craping out way too easily. I’m letting Steve use my iBook while he’s out in Astoria for school, and I’ll be putting Panther on it.

4) Went and saw part of the Woodburn NEDRA electric drag races. Took some video and put together some movies for John Wwayland over at plasmaboy racing.

5) The new iTunes interface is an unecessary change unless it’s carried out to the rest of the iApps. The name for it seems to be “Polished Metal” as opposed to the older (and reviled) “Brushed Metal”. The iPod Nano looks cool but it took me days to find out it was solid-state flash and not hard drive-based. The ROKR iPhone is for SUKRs. Totally crippled and nothing new hardware-wise. Apple can’t build the whole widget, so the widget is a total compromise.

6) Our living rooom television died. Would like to replace it with a flat LCD, but they’re still more money than I want to invest in Home Entertainment. If anyone’s got a recommendation for a $200 to $300 television with *LOTS* of input and output jacks, let me know.

7) I’ve got a freelance project launching in the next could of days. I’ll point to it once it’s got a bit of burn-in time.

8) I’ve been seeing a new testing probe-bot that’s crawling around Contact forms. It’s already hit LazerQuick where we’ve patched it and just last nite it hit my feedback form on OrderSomewhereChaos. Nasty little bugger made me dive back into Perl code that I’ve not touched in 6 or 7 years. The mail is being sent to the (probably compromised) AOL account of “jrubin3456@aol.com”. They’re looking to find tons of spamming reflectors. I’m sure they’ll find *LOTS* of them.

9) Amy and I are off to see the final regular-season game for the Timbers! Mighty Mighty Timbers!

08.04.05

Techie Cheat Sheets

Posted in General at 11 am

Cool one page write ups on some techie web stuff. Laguage references, etc. Cheat Sheets from ILoveJackDaniels.com

08.01.05

Reblogged via Geneva

Posted in General at 11 pm

So I was reading Boing Boing and they had yet another reference to Technorati (again) and decided to see if anyone had linked to this poorly updated journal. Lo and behold, the illustrious Joe Clark had an entry titled B-links, July 18 where in there was a little link to my OLD OLD entry on Geneva, the font by which all screen fonts are judged by.

When I say little—I really mean little. One word in an entry of 1700 words doesn’t exactly stick out like a sore thumb, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. Also the rest of the links are great to walk thru as well…

Ball and Hammer

Posted in General at 12 am

I was at this year’s Mondo Croquet and I had a great hour I was there. I got knowcked out by a zombie, but boy did I enjoy the fresh air…

07.22.05

Great Timing

Posted in General at 12 pm

There’s never a good time to upgrade your blogging software… So I’ve apparently chosen the worst time possible. However, now I can play with the podcasting options, getting things customized for the iTunes Music Store RSS feed, and try out some of the pages that I previously hacked together myself. Oh and turn on comments. Not that this thing gets enough traffic to have comments very often.

Oh yeah, the ‘post in the future’ thing works well for when I queue up a whole bunch o’ posts.

But now I’ve got to go back and redo my layout as a WordPress ‘theme’, recreate the Wiki Discussion links and get my Recnet Music list back up to date.

On the flip side I now know that there are 935 posts in this thing. So yay for that.

(Yes Jock, that post is coming too!)

07.19.05

Prevent .DS_Store file creation on network volumes

Posted in General at 4 pm

macosxhints – Prevent .DS_Store file creation on network volumes

To prevent .DS_Store aka (dot ds store files) creation on network volumes execute following command in a terminal:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

This will not get rid of all of the ._files, but it will get rid of one of them… The one side effect is that you’ll lose any ‘Comments’ that have been added to the Mac file.

07.18.05

Been flirting again

Posted in General at 4 pm

In a desperate attempt to get a second keyboard for the second desk that I’m setting up in the apartment, I’ve been searching for a new keyboard that won’t hurt my wrists.

My wrists, these days, are quite sensitive to things like the lateral angle that the twist from my forearm and the amount of vertical rise or drop they have from my forearm. The pressure required to push down a key on the keyboard has to be below a certain amount or else I feel it; even the speed of deceleration that the tips of my fingers experience as the key stops is a consideration. (It seems I need airbags for my finger crashing.)

In the pursuit of finding an appropriate keyboard, I went over to the dark side: a Microsoft Natural Pro keyboard (split key layout, rising angle in the middle, etc.) It almost worked perfect for me, except that the keys were just too damn tough to press. too much force means pain in my wrist. This is always bad. (The key mechanism seems to involve little plastic/rubber volcano-shapped nubs that getting pressed in. the nubs seem to get more stiff over time.) I took it back.

So I ended up getting another Apple Extended keyboard II just like the one I already had. This one is a bit stiff still, but it should break in pretty well, once I’ve used it for a few… years. 🙂 At that point the metal scissor-style mechanisms should loosen up a bit more. Already though, I can tell it’s better than the MS keyboard.

The only other successful keyboard I’ve had has been the Logitech Comfort Pro that I tricked Brad into getting for me at work. It’s much like the MS keyboard in split/tented layout, but the key presses are real easy on the fingers. $100 a pop, but it’s been the only thing that’s let me actually get my work done at work.

Will my RSI go away? Not as long as there are computers in my life. Will I be able to keep it at bay? I think so.

Lazyweb Request: Contoured, split-layout keyboard with Bluetooth

Posted in General at 4 pm

Another lazyweb request, though this will be more of a request for search, or rattle the cage of a couple of manufacturers… (I’m looking at you Logitech)…

I just want a contoured, split-layout keyboard with Bluetooth.

Contoured – The keys rise a bit in the middle, kinda like the keys are sitting on a miniature pitcher’s mound.

Split layout – there’s some spacing and a bit of an angle between the right and left hand side of the keys to accommodate those of us with adult-sized shoulders and arms.

Bluetooth – My next machine *will* have bluetooth come hell or high water.

Nick Finck has been looking for this too. The closest I can find is the Logitech Cordless Comfort Pro… but it doesn’t have Bluetooth… so you’ve got to lug around this USB receiver… which is huge. Bah!

Lazyweb Request: Dragable colorblind filter for OS X

Posted in General at 4 pm

Okay here’s one of my latest lazyweb needs:

I’m imagining a floating window in OS X, (made with Quartz Composer?) that will be a live ‘filter’ for colorblindness on my screen. Imagine being able to drag a piece of rubberized mylar / cling wrap that changes the colors underneath it to approximate the look of what a person with one form or another of color blindness would see.

This thought brought to you via Sara Horton’s WebVisions 2005 presentation materials.

07.13.05

ONLamp.com

Posted in General at 8 am

Okay, so, O’Reilly publishes an article on XSSI’s (ONLamp.com: Apache’s eXtended Server Side Includes) and has a nice link to my XSSI Library with some kind words, but did it have to come this week?