I’ve noted other studies highlighting similar conclusions about the benefits of drinking red wine and black tea if you’re a type 2 diabetic. A recent article over on sciencedaily.com is more evidence that type 2’s should consider adding both tea and red wine to their diet. Check it out, and tip a glass or two back this weekend.
Friday fun: get yer boomstick on
Here’s a fun little friday diversion. You, a shotgun, abstract shapes flying by in a virtual skeetshoot. Hitting multiple targets increases the score. Not much to it but that’s the beauty of it – simple, arcade blasting fun. Get to it! Flash based, btw, and found over on the superb kongregate.com, which is the flash-based casual gaming portal I’ve mentioned a few time.
A slick backup device
I bought a Thermaltake USB hard drive cartridge system for work last week after almost losing all my data on my laptop. Techreport has a lengthy writeup which I basically agree with, but a bottom line statement would be, for ~$50 this thing is excellent. I got it and a 500GB drive, partitioned half as OSX journaled file system and half as fat32, then backed up my mac and pc at work, using time machine on the mac and Cobian backup on the pc. Cheap, infinitely extensible, and cleverly designed. Well worth a look if you’re in the market for a backup device.
(stupid product name though)
Screw you Leopard
Leopard is the latest version of Apple’s Macintosh operating system. Last Wednesday I decided to install it. Little did I know what I was in for.
Like most folks, I have limited backups of stuff, and my mac laptop is the home of some pretty critical data – project timelines for my staff, project sheets for each of the major projects we have, a huge knowledge base full of all kinds of info related to my day job, and more. So I go to install the upgrade, choose the ‘archive and install’ option, and let it start. An hour later it pops up a very helpful ‘the upgrade has failed for unknown reasons, press to restart’ message. Aigh! I press to restart and the machine won’t boot from its drive. I boot from the OS dvd and it can’t find its drive. Needless to say I freaked out. Many machinations later and I could get it to recognize that it did, in fact, have an internal drive in the laptop, but the volume was hosed and it wanted to reformat. I couldn’t let that happen. With some trepidation I handed it over the our support folks for a look see, more because I lacked the time to continue looking into it than because I had exhausted all my options.
To their credit they did manage to restore my drive. Interestingly, they could never get Leopard to even recognize its existence, but they tried booting from a Tiger OS dvd and it recognized the drive straight away. They didn’t even have to run disk tools – once Tiger had ‘touched’ the drive, it was back to its normal state, and the machine was working fine again.
I have no explanation for how the above happened. I do now have a laptop running Leopard, and I now have several backups of it since the whole experience put the fear of ‘OMFG I lost all my stuff!!!’ into me. Leopard is pretty great once it’s running, but of all the OS X releases this one was by far the worst in terms of the upgrade process. Back everything up is my advice to anyone thinking of upgrading. It came out during this process that I was the 8th machine that was being upgraded to Leopard on our campus, and it was the second one to have a serious issue. The other one actually had data loss too.
What’s going on here?
WordPress, the software I use to run this site, has released a major upgrade to version 2.5. I’m in the midst of installing it. If you visit and things look wonky or links don’t work or whatever, that’s why. I’ll get things straightened out this weekend…hopefully 😉
Drink black tea and metabolize those sugars!
So this is only preliminary, and I’m a bit suspicious of one of the sponsors, but still, this BBC article covers research suggesting that drinking black teas can have beneficial effects for type 2 diabetics. Since I already like black tea this becomes an easy one for me.
Will I become a licker of frogs?
And not for the reasons you think! There’s a lot of research on amphibians and type 2 diabetes these days because of the way they’re able to metabolize sugars. There’s a story over on the BBC covering research into a compound found in the secretion on the skin of a species of frog in south america shows promise for new drug treatments. Worth a quick read if you’re obsessed with diabetes-related news like me.
Friday fun – free elfquest for all
I loved Elfquest when I was young. I first came across it back in the early 80’s, when I was mostly reading ‘men in tights’ comics like the X-men, and Elfquest was this excellent variant from the comic norms of the day. It’s the tale of a displaced tribe of elves and their quest to find a new home, or at least that’s how the first series starts. Anyway, they’ve started giving it away for free, releasing a couple of issues a week online at their website. It still holds up to this day, with great line art and a cool, epic saga. Check it out over on the Elfquest site.
How to play movies with subtitles on consoles – PS3 and XBOX360
The scenario: you downloaded some cool anime/samurai flick/bollywood musical, and you want to play it on your game console, but it has subtitles in separate .sub or .idx files. The solution if you run windows is to go visit the sub2divx homepage. It’s a little app that lets you bake those subtitles into the avi file so it will play on the consoles with the subtitles. There are some dependencies to get this running but the sub2divx page helpfully lists and links to everything you need. Just dump it all into one folder, point the app at the avi file and sub file, and off it goes. It’s fast too, a 2 hour movie broken across 2 avi files took me less than 10 minutes. It’s also flexible – you can tune the color, shadow, and highlight colors of the subtitles, adjust their position on the screen, and choose the font. It’s a great little tool.
[update 8-2010: after two reports that the tripod site this is hosted on is has a version of the software infected with a trojan, I’ve removed the link. Here’s a better link to investigate the software over on videohelp.com. Be cautious and run your virus checker against your download, and don’t grab it from the author’s site. Or even better, read up on this and pick another tool – I’ve been using PS3 media server and no longer need to deal with this]
Great picture of my brother and me
I finally got around to digitizing this years after it was taken. Check out this great shot of my brother and me at my sister’s wedding in summer 05 or 06, I forget which.
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Dave's Place/Metamusing 