Best thing about WordPress is that site layout can be changed easily. Worst thing about WordPress is that site layout can be changed easily. You can lose hours getting sucked into looking at themes, tweaking newly installed themes, and then making new graphics for header images. I just switched to a theme called Suffusion. Lots of options without having to edit the CSS files (which I don’t mind doing, but it’s nice to...
Continue reading...Tech
.NET, Windows XP woes
I’m having to use the Winddow XP virtual machine on the Mac to do character updates for gaming tonight. Stupid fucking Windows keeps asking if I want to reboot. It’s downloading updates in the background even though that was turned off. I get so aggravated with Windows. It’s amazing how having to use an application that relies on Windows’s .NET will drive you up the wall. Even though my netbook has XP installed,...
Continue reading...N900, Skype/VOIP call quality
The Nokia N900 has Skype integrated into the UI. Once a VOIP account is configured, contacts show up in the phone’s address book with Skype call/IM options. Since I’ve had the phone, I’ve never been able to answer a Skype call and hear a person for more than a few seconds. Reading on the Maemo forums helped uncover two facts: Some cellular service providers, like T-Mobile, may filter VOIP traffic to prevent Skype...
Continue reading...Nokia N900 controls full-size helicopter
Once the Nokia N900 was shown to be able to control a miniature helicopter, it was only a matter of time before one success to was extrapolated to a larger scale. The video, originally released by Tweakker and featured on Nokia’s blog today, is a hoax. Wouldn’t you love to have the option to purchase a full size helicopter as an “accessory”? Related Images:
Continue reading...New theme
Seems like any time something major happens, I have to choose a new theme for this site. This theme is called “Vina.” Unfortunately, the theme displays all of the categories in the menu bar. I’m going to turn that off, but not tonight. I have stayed up a little too late fiddling with the site. For many years, I’ve used a picture of Isis running as my header image. This time I decided...
Continue reading...OK Go (Music video)
Remember the game Mousetrap where you put together a trap that was triggered by a ball and wound through counter weights? Here is that same idea on a huge scale — it seem to take up a warehouse. Really cool. Coordinating this must have been a nightmare. Related Images:
Continue reading...New game. Time suck.
I enjoy playing games: pen-and-paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons (yes people still play it), computer RPGs, MMOs, and all that fun stuff. Bioware, a game company, has a good track record producing RPGs (role-playing games). Bioware produced the Baldur’s Gate series a few years back, a well loved RPG. Bioware recently released a game called Dragon Age: Origins for PC, PS3, and X-Box. I don’t have any of those machines, although I...
Continue reading...Severely dead Mac
My poor little Mac died a painful death. What had apparently started weeks ago with random DVD drive openings, ended today with the machine going into an endless boot cycle. Today was not a good day for this to happen. I was already annoyed from idiots on the drive home and from running errands. I was hungry and had had low grade-cramps all day. When I first opened the case I smelled burning...
Continue reading...New theme
Over the weekend I tried a new theme that had a section that looked like torn paper with pictures behind it. Unfortunately, the theme didn’t work in Internet Explorer. The pictures appeared on top of the torn paper images instead of behind. (Maybe it’s a layering issue in the CSS.) Any way, I loaded this theme and we’ll see how it works. I would like to customize a theme with horse pictures. Most...
Continue reading...Engadget’s N900 review
I’ve had my N900 since the end of November. On January 19, Engadget published a thorough review of the N900. The Engadget article points out some of the flaws with the N900: it’s not a polished product. The user interface isn’t as slick as the iPhone or the Palm Pre (but it is very pretty). The selection of applications is also limited, but being worked on. The Ovi Store for Maemo is buggy...
Continue reading...Apple iPad predicted by MadTV in 2005
This is just hysterically funny considering that Apple just announced the iPad this week. (What was Apple expecting by releasing a product that is so closely named to feminine hygiene product?) Here is the Mad TV “commercial” about the Apple iPad with all kinds of innuendo. As far as the iPad itself goes, I was rather underwhelmed. It’s like an iPod Touch on steroids. Why would I pay $499 for a device, however...
Continue reading...Kinda cool…
I got a thank-you on an Open Office forum for my article on using page styles to create unique headers and footers in Open Office Writer. One of my friends asked me why I bother writing documentation that no one will read. I told him I write for that one person who, at midnight while on deadline, encounters a problem and the only resource they have is the product documentation. I’ve been that...
Continue reading...Undead Mac!
After blowing like eight hours trying to get my Mac to work, it finally started working randomly after a reboot. I tried booting from the OS disk to restore from the Time Machine backups. That is what the backups are for, after all. Unless, after booting from the OS disk, the spinning beach ball of doom appears on the “Choose the backup drive” screen. At least I know I have to figure out...
Continue reading...Dead Mac in the middle of the road…
I installed several updates on my desktop Mac last night: Java update, another minor application update, and then two update packages for a firewall. I wasn’t expecting any problems… of course that’s when you get trouble. The Mac will now come up to the point where the gray apple logo appears on the screen. And then it didn’t progress any farther. I dropped in the installation disk to restore from the Time Machine...
Continue reading...Maps of War
A Twitter post today mentioned the Maps of War, a site that has history maps with time lines showing the progression of different events overlaid on a map. Two of the maps caught my eye: Imperial History of the Middle East and the History of Religion. I’ve embedded both of them here. While not much of the site deals with ancient history, the maps do provide an interesting point of view. The Flash...
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