I mentioned this before in one of my Link Dumps but I had to bring it up again.
I mean, how cool is this:
A guy went and spent a good portion of his $2500 meal plan on bottles of Pepsi just for the free songs that Apple was giving away in their Pepsi iTunes Music Giveaway.
It’s too bad that he didn’t drink any of the Pepsi either. I’d at least go for the Diet—it’s definitely drinkable.
I can’t figure out why iChat is so slow nowadays. The window is unresponsive and takes a couple of seconds to do anything like scrolling or focusing the window. This is unacceptable to me. I’ve tried rebooting with no avail. It might be because I have a large number of contacts, but even so this is unacceptable given that I own a top of the line PowerMac.
Does anybody have any idea, or will I be forced to switch to Adium which is looking quite stable and feature rich at the moment.
I signed up for Audioscrobbler, a free service that records the songs you play and then keeps track of statistics and suggests other good songs.
Songs I’ve Recently Listened To:
[[Removed because it didn’t work]]
One has to wonder how my site shows up as the number two result when searching for UConn Riots 2004.
Interesting searches people have used to find my site:
Kinja is a weblog portal, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers.
??Via: Kinja??
Of course, I signed and included all of the blogs I read of people I don’t know. So therefore don’t expect your listings to show up if I know you. My Kinja page does, however, give you a glimpse into other people’s blogs/news sites I find interesting.
I ran into a link to The Rasterbator a month or two ago and was curious as to how it’d turn out. Essentially it takes an image file you submit and creates a rasterized version of it, essentially a picture with only a white background and black circles of various diameter on a set grid. The “darker” the the part of the image, the larger diameter the black circle is.
I, of course, choose to do a portrait of myself [link dead], namely one that I took while in El Paso for the Sun Bowl.
The software on the site allowed me to crop the part of the image I wanted and then let me choose how many sheet of paper to print it on. I choose 2×2 since my printer was running out of toner.
It then processes your image and returns a pdf file of the output. In case you are curious, here’s the pdf output [link dead].
So I printed it and hung it on the wall. The final result:
I decided it looked pretty good, so I made one of Dave too:
UThink: Blogs at the University Libraries is a new project by the University of Minnesota to offer unlimited free blogs to all staff/students/faculty. The system is easy to configure and get started—just login with your x500 and give them a title/tagline for your blog. For example, I got one setup in under 5 minutes or so.
It’s easy to add new posts (just the standard MovableType interface), but perhaps not so obvious if you have never used it before. They do an okay job trying to offer some links to tutorials/help sites, but there’s no direct hand-holding along the way.
I find it relieving (and quite interesting) that they left all the power-user features of MT (like being able to customize all of your pages with templates) in place. However, the beginning user is likely to get confused and will have a tough time fixing any mistakes if they go messing around.
I found the lack of installed plugins depressing, especially since the individual user will have no power to install “personal” plugins for themselves. At a bare minimum, I’d recommend installing MT Textile which significantly speeds up the time it takes to write, and allows beginning users to easily add links and such.
I think it will be interesting to see how adoption goes, especially since it looks like they will be providing each user ample space (they assumed 180mb per user or something like that per 3 years). It also has the benefit of no ads and quick loading times. The only detractor is their obligatory legal statement on the bottom of every page:
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.
However, that is easily circumvented with a little bit of css, namely by adding the following to the styles-site.css template.
h5{ display:none; }
Another feature that many people (namely those coming from blogging “communities” like Xanga and LiveJournal) will miss is the ability to “subscribe” to other people’s posts and quickly view new entries. Albeit, this problem is easily survived with RSS readers (like the excellent Net News Wire), I don’t think enough of the users will understand such a concept.
I’d like to also take this time to introduce all of you to a thing called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Essentially you can get a free RSS Reader which every so often (ie: hourly) checks a bunch of news feeds (ie: each one of the blogs you read) and alerts you when there are updates.
It’s kinda (well totally) geeky, but it’s slick and can save bunches of time.
Oh, and for those curious enough to actually try, the RSS URL for Xanga sites is for example http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=froehle, obviously replacing “froehle” with the username of whoever you want.
News: Google spawns social networking service
Related Site: Orkut — Note it is invitation only to join, just send me an email and I’ll send you an invitation.
Well I finally got this thing setup over at ITLabs. The confusion was mostly over perl, as /usr/bin/perl was version 5.0.something that didn’t have a lot of modules (namely DB_File) available. However, with a quick switch to Perl 5.6.0 (/soft/perl5.6-bin/perl) fixed everything.
Ahh, such is life… more later.
iTunes: Live From MacWorld San Francisco 2004 by John Mayer
Brad Froehle 