I just realized that the US has just one year left till all the Analog broadcast signals are turned off. As someone who still doesn’t own a digital—or even HD—TV, I’ve created this Userbar countdown to remind me of that fact: Good thing I have satellite. 😉 You can check out my ot
You would think that using an standard would mean that your RSS feed would work just about everywhere. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to always be the case. All those RSS 2.0 fixes I did on my site seemed to have broke the feed to MyBlogLog. Not sure what it doesn’t like as other RSS 2.
Woo, woo! Was finally able to get 20K GS last night. Seems like it took forever.
I’ve been having a lot of stuttering and slowness of late on my Internet connection. I’m thinking it may be my router, but I decided to validate my Internet Speed (1.5MB DSL) and ran into a pretty good speed test site. My Internet looks pretty good (hit 1.2MB to Chicago), so I’m still not sure what is going on. Thought I’d share the one I tried.
I gave Ubuntu Linux a quick run. I grabbed the 7.10 iso, burned it to a CD and rebooted my laptop. Sweet and easy. I’d heard Ubuntu was pretty good with laptops, which is why I wanted to check out this Linux distribution.
This is pretty cool. Hawty McBloggy blogged about a site that generates some spawn time stats (Halo 3 - Time Wasted Respawning). The script is interesting. But more interesting was that it makes use of a Halo API.
Due to issues Ive been having where Xbox Live!’s gamer card, I've converted my gamer card to one from MyGamerCard.net. Recently, it appears that Xbox Live! has been requiring you to sign into their site before showing someone’s gamer card.
I thought this was pretty cool, a number of flash or image badges from Battle Record that uses your Halo 3 service record. Check out one of the images below:
Well, the wife received a Pixie Power Disney mix-stick for Christmas this year. I know, it is marketed for kids, but it an interesting shuffle like MP3 player. Yeah, no screen, but with a 1GB of flash RAM, expandable with an SD card, it appeared to be a great little player. That is, if you can get the music on it to play!
Well, it’s been over a year since I last played around with my Lego ray tracing and even longer since the last time I traced a new model. Well, ’tis the season to build new models! I did some searching around and found a model from 1969: 318 Windmill.
It appears that a new version of Safari is out: 3.0.4. It is still a public beta, but they did fix a few niggles from the last version. For one, tool tips now work. For another, the inline spell checking is now working. Looks like IE7 is still lagging in that area. Surprising since Microsoft Word started whole trend. However, Safari, not to be one upped by Firefox, has also seen fit to include a grammar checker. Although, it tends to error on mundane things, like titles and numbers with periods.
I’m trying to get Brief in Firefox to display my site image. For some reason, it won’t display the image and I can’t seem to figure out why. It displays other sites images fine. Sigh.
I’ve been using the tag cloud concept on a lot of other sites and find it useful at times. The idea is pretty simple, supply keywords or tags to your content. Those tags are then counted and a tag cloud of links is displayed, with more frequent links larger then less frequent ones. Since my site was lacking in that capability, I decided to program it in.
Oh, yeah! 15K—on the nose! Next up 20k!
I’ve been hearing a lot about the Web 2.0, but not sure how much I’ve been participating. I signed up for a Digg account, but didn’t really get into it. I’m still not sure what is considered Web 2.0. If you check out Wiki's definition of Web 2.0, I’ve already been part of the whole Web 2.0 deal by blogging and using and creating RSS feeds. In many ways, my use of 360voice and its API probably qualify as well. After thinking about, maybe I do a lot more with Web 2.0 than I thought.
You know your daughter loves you when she says: “Come play Halo. Oh, wait. I got to kill you one more time.” Priceless.
I grew up for some time in Naples in the early 80’s. Surprisingly enough, this was before any English TV was available to us. That didn’t stop me from watching TV, even if shows like Star Trek were dubbed in Italian. I would often spend time watching the cartoons, also in Italian, and a particular favorite of mine was Daitarn 3.
Although, to date, I own neither of the latest HD disk formats—heck, I don’t even own an HD TV set yet—I find the whole format war rather interesting. Having lived through the Beta vs. VHS, but not really understanding it, I find it fascinating how two companies complete against each other.
I’ve been a fan of the Big Brother (US) series since season 2. This summer, like the last 7 ones, wasn’t an exception. I enjoyed my weekly dose of other people’s reality. Like some previous BB’s, this season included an interesting twist from the outside—a plane banner. It got me thinking, “how hard is it find the Big Brother house?” In particular, I was interested if I could find a satellite image of it.
Okay, it may seem silly, but my daughter had me try one of her favorite game sites called Marapets. Okay, okay. Before you go snickering, I actually found the site pretty interesting. For one, it isn’t just for kids—so don’t put it down yet. It is designed to be kid friendly, while catering to all ages. So, the candy sweet coating aside, it actually has some interesting concepts going on.
I’ve been a big fan of the Blendtec “Will it Blend?” videos on YouTube. The latest installment was unbelievable — he blended an iPhone! What a waste of $600, but it is cool to watch. Take a look below.
Well, I traded Viva Piñata this week for Windows Vista. I decided to bite the bullet and give Vista try on my laptop. So far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
I’ve run into a bit of an issue. XML uses UTF-8 encoding. I wouldn’t think it would be a big issue, but my web pages render in ISO-8859-1. Since my ISP uses perl 5.6.1, I can’t easily encode/decode between the two Unicode formats. So, I thought I’d just render my pages in UTF-8. Ouch, bigger headache. Now older articles don’t look right and some of the WebAPP code converts things wrong. I’m still looking for a solution. For now, you may find some things display wrong here.
Microsoft has released a public beta of their Microsoft Home Server software. I’ve had various “home servers,” usually older computers, running various version of Windows and Linux. My current one is running Media Center, but it is also a desktop for my daughter.
So, I’m still hacking around in Safari. If you read earlier article, you might remember my complaint about the fonts being a bit blurry. Well, in my wandering around the Apple discussion boards, someone was nice enough to post an interesting article on the philosophical differences between Apple and Microsoft.