...more recent posts
Yes, I'm in my usual pre travel panic state. This is a low grade panic - you might even mistake it for indifference - but it's panic nonetheless. 28 hours until take off.
The Brown Daily Herald has the first interview with geek babe Ellen Feiss. Unsurprisingly the site is completely slashdotted.
Our friend Alex Hay is in town for a show of his work from the 1960's at the Peter Freeman gallery (B'way and Prince.) Alex is the best guy ever. You should really go check it out. The giant brown paper bag is amazing.
How do I get internet access for one week in Austria?
Dean Kamen introduces a (not completely done) Stirling engine.
T-Mobile has introduced a much more reasonable rate plan for the sidekick:
$59.99/MonthStill not enough voice minutes for the super user, but plenty for me. I'll have to watch my bills, but I think I'm already over enough that this would save me money. I'll look into it when I get back from vacation.
500 Anytime Minutes*
Unlimited Night & Weekend Minutes*
Unlimited Data
1000 T-Mobile 2-Way Text Messages
Included features: voicemail, paging, caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, conference calling, and Instant Messaging.
*Updated Feature. All else is same as original plan.
On the geo-political scene I'm getting very strong here we go vibes. Like the rollercoaster just got to the top of the first hill. (The first hill?!?!)
I'm watching Israel. Things could go quick from here. Or hopefully I'm wrong.
If you have an apple laptop running OS X check out uControl. This will install a new pane in your system preference window (apple menu -> system preferences...) In that pane click on 'scrolling' and then check 'scroll wheel emulation'. Now when you hold down the function key you can use the trackpad like a scroll wheel.
No obvious problems in a few minutes of use. Excellent. This was bugging me. Surfing on the laptop will be much better now.
I haven't experimented, but this will also let you remap lots of different keys. Could be useful for desktop users as well.
I'll be saying more about [upload] over the next few days, but for now you might want to know there is a new verb, "getthumb" that operates exactly like "getpic" but displays a tumbnail instead of the picture itself. Picture x (/getpic/x) now automatically has a thumbnail with the same id (/getthumb/x).
For people with pages here (or on any of the other sites) you can now make any page display as a bulletin board. You'll see this new option on [editpage]. You can switch back and forth between the weblog view and the bbs view with no loss of data. Also, in [settings], you can make your account default so that you always see pages as either weblogs, or bulletin boards, no matter how each individual page is set by its' owner.
Again, like the advanced search, formatting hasn't really had any attention paid to it. That will come. Suggestions appreciated.
If you're not familiar, the thing that might be cool about bulletin boards is that it's easy for readers who don't have accounts to keep up with new comments. The bulletin board lists the subject of the the post (you have to click through to actually read the post and comments,) plus the name of the author, and the date of the most recent post or comment in that thread. But the important thing is that the posts are ordered by most recent activity. So if a very old post receives a new comment, that post summary is returned at the top of your page in bulletin board view.
Probably not so helpful for the people on this site, but some of the other sites can use this sort of thing. Nice for organizational stuff when you can't convice people to sign in and use the [new post] [new comment] links from the front page.