random bits
Apr. 19th, 2009 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellio15 most strange buildings in the world is bizarre. While it's not the strangest, I am fond of the library that looks like a shelf full of books.
Dani's comfort foods include shepherd's pie, which was not part of my upbringing. I've made the version from Cooking for Engineers a couple times, substituting margarine for the butter because of kashrut and beef for the lamb because of availability, but he says it's not quite right. I asked him to do some searching and he reports that everything that looks right involves milk or cheese, which is of course a problem. Do any of my kosher or lactose-intolerant readers have a favorite recipe?
A friend recently burned DVDs from some treasured old videotapes, but our DVD player won't play them. (The computers will.) Google tells me that this is a common problem, especially with older players. There are the competing standards of DVD+R and DVD-R; the documentation for our player mentions neither by name. (These discs are DVD+R.) This happened once before and I assumed a bad disc; now I suspect the problem is the player. We bought our DVD player, a region-free Sampo, when the first season of The West Wing was released in the UK, which was apparently 2002.
I could get this video adapter for my iBook for $19. There might be other benefits to that too, though streaming Hulu might not be one of them (video seems jumpy). Or it appears that region-free DVDs have come way down in price, so maybe we should replace our player. Maybe with this ($58 and I've heard of the manufacturer) or this ($40, no reviews, and never heard of the maker). These are the results of half an hour of surfing; if anyone reading this has opinions, I'd love to hear 'em.
Recently I've seen a few "bot" LJ accounts go by -- users that seem to subscribe to people at random but don't do anything else (so they're not, say, making harrassing comments), and then the accounts get nuked. The last one I got was Russian, as I gather many are. I don't really care if such accounts show up as subscribers, but I find myself wondering two things: what do they get out of it, and why do some folks get upset enough to get the accounts suspended? What am I missing?
Dani's comfort foods include shepherd's pie, which was not part of my upbringing. I've made the version from Cooking for Engineers a couple times, substituting margarine for the butter because of kashrut and beef for the lamb because of availability, but he says it's not quite right. I asked him to do some searching and he reports that everything that looks right involves milk or cheese, which is of course a problem. Do any of my kosher or lactose-intolerant readers have a favorite recipe?
A friend recently burned DVDs from some treasured old videotapes, but our DVD player won't play them. (The computers will.) Google tells me that this is a common problem, especially with older players. There are the competing standards of DVD+R and DVD-R; the documentation for our player mentions neither by name. (These discs are DVD+R.) This happened once before and I assumed a bad disc; now I suspect the problem is the player. We bought our DVD player, a region-free Sampo, when the first season of The West Wing was released in the UK, which was apparently 2002.
I could get this video adapter for my iBook for $19. There might be other benefits to that too, though streaming Hulu might not be one of them (video seems jumpy). Or it appears that region-free DVDs have come way down in price, so maybe we should replace our player. Maybe with this ($58 and I've heard of the manufacturer) or this ($40, no reviews, and never heard of the maker). These are the results of half an hour of surfing; if anyone reading this has opinions, I'd love to hear 'em.
Recently I've seen a few "bot" LJ accounts go by -- users that seem to subscribe to people at random but don't do anything else (so they're not, say, making harrassing comments), and then the accounts get nuked. The last one I got was Russian, as I gather many are. I don't really care if such accounts show up as subscribers, but I find myself wondering two things: what do they get out of it, and why do some folks get upset enough to get the accounts suspended? What am I missing?
Re: bot accounts
Date: 2009-04-20 06:33 pm (UTC)Occaisionally I've gone to the profile page for one of these accounts and found an ad of some sort, so that's also a possiblity.
Re: bot accounts
Date: 2009-04-20 06:52 pm (UTC)It doesn't! It just avoids the risk of a social blunder.
Re: bot accounts
Date: 2009-04-20 07:06 pm (UTC)Re: bot accounts
Date: 2009-04-21 02:58 am (UTC)