If you do web development work, check out this firefox plugin which stitches tidy right into the browser. Nothing particularly revelatory about this but it can speed up website development workflow depending on your existing process. Free, works on platforms that firefox runs on, which means pretty much everything.
System-wide text macros on the mac
Speed up your typing on the mac with the free Textpander. Chances are pretty high that there are blocks of text you type repeatedly and frequently, say for example your name or street address. Long time Mac users may already have discovered Typeit4Me, which has been around since at least the System 8 days. If you haven’t tried it, it’s well worth a look. If you haven’t already licensed Typeit4me, Textpander is donation ware, distinguishes itself from Typeit4me with a much nicer interface for adding macros, has the ability to mix in binary data with macros (so, for example, insert your email sig and then a gif or jpg of your actual signature), and can import your existing library of typeit4me macros if you’ve decided to switch for some reason. Both programs are worth a look for those looking to speed up their text entry.
Fix that busted computer
This is for geeks only, but if you’re one of those people who gets calls from friends/family/acquaintances/the guy who puts your groceries in the bag asking for help with their computer, you’ll find the Ultimate Boot CD pretty handy. It’s a bootable CD that contains a host of useful diagnostic and maintenance tools for computers. Next time you go out on a service call, bring along this cd. Free, mostly useful to windows/x86 hardware folk.
Another variation on the tiddlywiki theme
I’ve mentioned tiddlywiki, the single page javascript-based wiki engine, a number of times. If you want to experiment with a simple little wiki it’s hard to find a simpler way to do it – download, tinker with it, use the file menu to save to your local machine. It can’t get much easier. Meanwhile though folks are doing all kinds of interesting things with the basic code, including turning it into a server-based service. If you’ve played around with the basic premise but want a more robust solution with more features, check it out. It’s free, at least for now.
Of course as I’ve mentioned in the past, there are also ways to do this on your own server if you’re geeky enough to know how to do it – check the main tiddlywiki site for links to a variety of solutions.
Sick of the windows start menu?
Quicksilver has solved this problem on MacOS, but if you’re on Windows and like me have 1.6 gajillion different applications, utilities and games installed across a collection of hard drives, you probably struggle to find applications you’d like to launch and have such a proliferation of icons on your desktop that you can no longer distinguish between them. Enter Quickrun, another file launcher for Windows. It’s free, very small at ~300k, and super easy to use. Just install it then right click on the quicklaunch area to the right of your start menu and begin customizing. It’s nowhere near as elegant as Quicksilver but it gets the job done, especially if you’re partial to hierarchical file management, and you can’t beat the price.
Yet another reason why you shouldn’t run Internet Explorer
This one hits especially close to home for me. Check out this forum thread over on worldofwar.net. The gist of it if you don’t want to click through and read is, folks visiting a popular World of Warcraft fansite were exposed to a banner ad which contained a jpeg image that took advantage of an Internet Explorer security vulnerability to install a keylogger, which in turn captured your World of Warcraft login and password information. People are logging into WoW only to discover their accounts gone, or their characters stripped of all possessions and currency. Although WoW’s exchange rate is currently something like 11 (US) cents per gold piece, I’m sure in aggregate this quickly added up for whoever managed this. For anyone wondering about the warning messages about account security you’re seeing when you login to WoW these days, this is why. Thankfully aside from Windows Update I never run IE on my gaming rig so I wasn’t impacted by this. I’ll also note that given my current main character’s 35 GP cash reserve, and taking into account his equipment and materials supply, I’d guess my main would have been worth around $4-$5 to someone had they hacked my account. It hardly seems worth the effort, but again in aggregate I guess it was. I’ll be curious to see if they manage to track down the perpetrators – if they do I’ll post a followup.
A worthwhile solid state videocam
Check out the steve’s digicams review of the Sanyo Xacti C5, a tiny solid state video camera. You can get these for just under $400 if you import them. This would be perfect for my hikes with Soolin, especially if I could find a way to head mount the thing and do a ‘First Person Hiker’ cam thing. It records for about an hour per battery charge, saves out to mpeg4, connects via USB so you can dump the video onto your computer for editing, and is tiny, it will fit in your shirt pocket. I’ve been watching this class of camera for a couple of years now. This is the first worthwhile device to come out. I’d need to get at least one spare battery and a couple of 1GB SD cards to store the video on, adding about $200 to the final cost, but for $600 I could be fully equipped to shoot a couple of hours of video while I’m out in the field. This goes onto my list of stuff I want once I can pull together the money for it.
Another cool human powered vehicle
Check out the pumpabike (though beware of their retarded flash-only website design, I’d love to get the designer of this one out behind the woodshed). Another hydrafoil design, this one a trike concept where you hop up and down to propel the vehicle. It’s a lot more expensive (~$1,000 USD) than the last one I linked to but it also looks like a better, sturdier design. It’s worth dealing with their idiotic website design to check it out.
More on commenting
Ok, so for now the site is wide open for commenting. I’m discovering a number of issues with running wordpress under PHP 5.0 and one of them seems to impact wordpress’s ability to send email, for things including registration, hence why registration wasn’t working when I had that turned on. I’ve got a clue on how to fix this and will post an update if I manage to get it resolved. I have managed to resolve a host of other issues related to these bugs – kudos to the wordpress trac instance as far as that goes.
Hopefully the spammers won’t go nuts on me while I work this out. If they do I’ll have to bump up anti-spam extensions in the queue of things to get installed and running.
Next theme: k2
Ok trying the next theme here, this time around it’s k2. It doesn’t look like much, I know, but check out the search function, the comments and the archives sections and note how they work, these are the main reasons I like this one. Some of this stuff I can easily get working without using this theme of course, but this made it easier. As with the previous theme (wuhan, for those keeping score), I’ll keep it around for a while then switch to another. Eventually I’ll settle on one and call it done.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 