Category: nerd

I still get tingly during MacWorld events. This one is supposed to be as big as others in the past, and I’m kind of hoping for the headless iMac/PVR thing. I don’t need office software.

Also, timed with the event was a protest over Apple’s e-waste policies. I agree whole-heartedly that companies should be heavily involved in cleaning up after themselves, especially those who profit so greatly on disposable products (fast food?). But I’d also like to point out that my macs haven’t needed trashing yet. My 1997 Power Computing clone was shelter bound, and my G3 (circa 1999) is still humming along and hosting this site. If absorbing the cost of waste helps Apple make their computers last even longer, I’d be all for it. But I wouldn’t mind getting something a little faster.

I just deleted comment spam from Mt. Angel Oktoberfest. It was in a relevant post about the festival, but jeez, it was like a full page ad.

When you mash down the control-R & E keys simultaneously in Eudora, you are in effect hitting reply and send immediately to whatever message is highlighted. This doesn’t work well when you’re still groggy from lack of coffee and coming in early. Did not the folks at Qualcomm consider the danger in this? The statistics in the program show that most of my email activity occurs in the morning. They should put the Send Immediately shortcut on a separate part of the keyboard in the same way that large weapons have separate switches to prevent accidental launching. Well, it was just a blank reply, neutron bomb.

The misunderstood geniuses at The Daily Grind have released an updated version of Faith Converter. Software to change your belief system? No, it converts key words in a text that identify it as belonging to one religion into key words of another religion. Not only is it a useful tool, its also brilliant parody.

Happy 1.0 Firefox!

Seriously, if you’re still using IE, you deserve the problems that come with it.

In an effort to determine how best to spend our tech fee, I was asked to try an alternative to the somewhat pricey Starboard. The alternative was a clumsy little device with the somewhat suggestive name iPen. The product was like a prototype to the wacom tablet where the designers realized that it was stupid to put the cord on the pen. I had some fun with it, but it requires that you use it on a little pad with a grid for optical registration. Kind of lame.

There are plenty of reasons to use Firefox when surfing the web. For a list of reasons and testimonials, see Spread Firefox.

..now back to solving IE related problems.

I’ve passed up several opportunities to get a gmail account because I already have a web-based e-mail account that I like that also allows IMAP access to it. But then I thought about it. What if someone else was to get my name as their e-mail address? That just can’t happen!

So I now have a gmail account, but don’t send stuff to it. I need to decide how I’m going to use it.

I really needed to use my now headless workstation. I forgot to start up VNC, and I forgot to enable access through the firewall to it. Fortunately, I’m not the only one with this dilemma.

Thanks to Simon Carr for these command line tips for starting OSXvnc.app and allowing a firewall rule.

This could also be filed under “Mac OSX rules.”