The user interface isn’t as elegant as my current favorite, Ecto, but Bleezer is an otherwise excellent cross platform blogging tool that has the added benefit of being free. It’s java based so there’s an initial bit of sluggishness when it’s first launched but once it’s running it’s speedy. It also supports publishing to more blogging systems than any client I’ve seen to date, and it supports tagging for del.icio.us and Technorati. It’s also capable of downloading your current blog postings and keeping a local archive of them, which not all blogging tools can do. Setup was a breeze and it’s a tiny download. This is definitely worth checking out if you haven’t invested in a blogging tool yet or if you’re managing a lab or campus computer image and need a cross platform tool for consistency of user interface and ease of documentation.
Tired of Firefox leaking memory?
Me too. In case you’re not aware, Firefox leaks memory like a sieve. On the Mac this doesn’t cause too much of an issue normally, but on the PC it can be a real bitch, slowing the browser down to a crawl after a while. There’s no 100% solution to this problem but there is now at least a diagnostic tool. Some of the memory leaking is caused by poorly written extensions. If your Firefox memory leaking is chronic, you might try the Leak Monitor extension, which will help you identify which extension/s are causing the problem. Free, cross platform, and a tiny download.
Sketchup is free, including the mac version
This actually happened some time ago but the Mac version finally released today so I’m mentioning it now. Google bought the company some months ago and announced a free version which is somewhat feature limited compared to the commercial (~$495) version but still very capable and useful for things from shelf construction in the garage to landscape planning for the yard. If you’re not familiar with it, Sketchup is a wonderfully intuitive Computer Assisted Design (CAD) program for macs and pcs. The Mac version is not yet a universal binary but it runs and performs competently enough. It’s also integrated with google earth so you can add the fabulous garden of eden you design for your backyard to the global info-stream should you so choose.
I originally notice this over on the unofficial apple weblog, but you can also link directly to the download on google’s site.
Shades of me, I guess I’m not alone…
… so to speak, anyway. My friend Larry passed along a piece that ran in the Boston Globe recently about the trend of folks like me who are choosing to be single rather than pursuing a relationship. The timing is ironic in that I posted to a personals site for the first time in my life, but there are definitely shades of me in the folks they interview in the piece. Worth a look if you’re interested in the subject.
pinthemap.com – simple perfection for mapping
This is one of my favorite uses of google’s mapping api – pinthemap.com. Find the spot on the map you’d like to mark, left click, provide some descriptive text (here’s where my house is, by way of example) and that’s it. No account needed, no complicated process required. Kudos to the developers for a really useful and drop dead easy to use implementation.
If there’s one thing I’m guilty of, it’s….
…pleonism. From today’s dictionary.com word of the day, which gave me a good laugh. It means ‘the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea.’ True, that, though not on this post.
Screw blister packaging
I’ve ranted about this before, but since Wired ran a piece recently, I’ll rant again. How many times have you cut your fingers on the blister-style plastic packaging so many things come in these days? I could care less about retailer’s shrinkage problems (ie theft) – there are better ways to solve this than subjecting all customers to risk and inconvenience because a small percentage of them will steal. This is an occasion where I actually wish for a ridiculous class-action lawsuit against one or more of the retailers to try and force them into changing their practices.
The article’s interesting in that it points out this packaging trend is largely about shrinkage. I had figured it was about protecting the product from breakage in shipping.
How to clean install windows without losing access to your stuff
This has been making the rounds since this weekend, showing up on Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us/popular and elsewhere, but I’ll throw in my two cents since my windows box, just a week or so past a year old now, is suffering from severe signs of windows cruft – slowdowns, windows explorer ‘crashes (where the screen does a quick icon redraw – is it even possible to have a windows install older than a couple months that doesn’t do this?), registry corruption, etc. I have been considering but dreading a clean install from scratch on a new drive for some time now. Along comes this great post about how to use disk imaging tools and virtualization to back up your existing system before moving to the new one, assuring that you will still have access to all your old apps and data available to you on your new install, running under virtualization. The only gotcha to be aware of is the need to re-authorize Windows if you have a non-corporate edition because of the number of hardware changes windows will detect while running under virtualization. This isn’t an issue for me since I get a corporate license through my employer, but it seems to me this actually means you could have a licensing compliance issue on your hands in that Microsoft probably won’t allow you to have two copies of their OS running on your machine, which kind of sucks. Still, this is a worthy technique to check out if your machine is suffering from Windows Cruft and you’re considering a reinstall.
Ladybug lives!
This week’s friday fun link is to a flash implementation of the classic though mostly overlooked arcade game Ladybug. The game is a riff on the gameplay concepts introduced in Pacman – manuever your ladybug through a maze, munching on dots to score points and eating special dots to turn the tables on your bug adversaries and eat them. It adds turnstyles to the maze, making it possible to block the enemy bugs and adding an additional element of strategy, and there are two kinds of letters strewn throughout the maze which enable scoring multipliers and extra lives if you manage to capture them to spell the appropriate words.
I loved this game back in the early 80’s, much more so than Pacman, and played tons of it – there was a machine adjacent to the pizza parlor near my house and a lot of my paper route money ended up in that machine. My neighbor also had the Colecovision version of the game, which was a reasonably accurate port of the arcade game and just as much fun to play.
So – check it out for a bit of nostalgia or a taste of an unheralded game from back in arcade gaming’s heyday.
Old school Gameboy style game in your browser
Check out dot-invasion’s excellent flash-based gameboy style arcade game Meteor Busters for this week’s Friday fun link. There’s nothing complicated here – manuever your ship, blast enemies, score points, repeat. What’s cool about it is how effectively it mimics the old original Gameboy’s aesthetics whilst subtly updating them. If you don’t get 5 minutes of fun and a grin out of this one, you’re not a gamer at heart.
This runs in your browser and is cross platform so long as you’ve got the flash plugin.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 