cellio | Entries tagged with brain trust

When one cat in a household spends time at the vet it's not unusual for the other cat(s) to react badly when that cat comes home. I assume the cat picks up foreign smells ("you've been with other animals, aiieeee!") or something. Erik, Baldur, and Embla grew out of this (presumably as the frequency of such visits increased), but I vaguely recall that the snarling and hissing would last a few hours.

Giovanni is still distressed this morning over Orlando's trip to the vet yesterday. How long does this last for other people's cats?

Out of curiosity, how long "should" a typical dental cleaning and check-up take these days for an adult with no special considerations? (I mean time in exam chair, not time in waiting room.) My visits got faster when my dentist's office switched (regretably IMO) from hand-scraping tartar to using an ultrasonic gizmo, but even so I was surprised by how quickly I got through a check-up on Monday and I lack other relevant data. Help plug my data gaps, LJ brain trust. :-)

My trusty iBook has died and the Apple Genius declared a hard-drive failure. Apple no longer sells those, though I could go looking for a third-party solution and that's not off the table yet. But maybe it's time to move to a machine that can support an OS newer than 10.4 and a Firefox newer than 3.6, so I'm considering other options too.

This is very much a secondary machine, for traveling, going to a class or meeting where I want computing power and not just paper, using in parts of the house other than my desk, and occasionally for taking to work if I need access to personal computing during the work day. I don't do a lot of that last, but it's happened. The iBook was also useful to me during a multi-day DSL outage; I could at least take the laptop to the library or bookstore for access. So I use the machine sporadically, but when I do use it it's important enough that I don't want to do without.

Apple's current laptop offerings are too pricy for me -- I'm sure they'd be great machines if I used my laptop all the time, but that's not my use case. It looks like used or refurbished Macbooks (just plain Macbook, the laptop Apple sold until 2010) could be an option; if you have experience with those, please tell me what gotchas lurk there.

I'm talking about Macs because that's what I have on my desk at home and some consistency of user experience (and software) is useful. (Among things, having the Soncino talmud/etc collection on my hard disk is useful. I bought that for Mac; I don't want to rebuy for Windows.) I'm willing to consider Windows options but I don't know that space yet.

Alternatively, tablets are appealing -- more portable and "instant-on" and just generally more convenient. I've used Dani's iPad and it's very nice. Just one problem: they don't seem to be designed for composing text documents and that's an important use case for me. For example, I often compose blog posts or other documents offline and then post/email/share them later. This calls for a text editor and access to the file system. If one is internet-connected then solutions might exist (SSH to a Unix shell was suggested to me recently), but we can't assume a network connection. (I actually don't know if there's an SSH application for the iPad.)

(The other problem with tablets is the keyboard, but there exist add-ons for that. And ok, a third problem is that everything these days seems to have a glossy display and I much prefer matte, but I think I'm doomed there.)

Dani commented that what I really want is a Linux tablet. Yeah, now that you mention it... is anybody working on that? Can Android tablets meet my needs? Which ones should I be paying attention to? (~10" screen rather than 7" required.)

So I'll be doing my Google research, but I'm also interested in hearing opinions from y'all. Thanks.

A very helpful (yes, really!) technician at Verizon diagnosed our network problems as a flaky router, so he sent us a new one and we swapped it in today. The old router had two features that I found useful: I could name devices on the network, and the "my network" list showed me everything that had connected since the last router restart, not just the currently-connected devices. These, particularly in combination, were useful for monitoring my network. (Why yes, since I can be punished for anything done from my IP address even if I didn't do or authorize it, and since no security that is still usable is perfect, I do care.)

The new router lacks both of these features; it shows currently-connected devices by MAC address (and IP address), but short of my maintaining the name-MAC mappings externally, that's of limited utility. And it doesn't tell me if a neighbor found his way onto my network while I wasn't watching. Now my neighbors seem like decent folks, and in a different legal environment I'd rather be the sort of person who shares my spare bandwidth with anybody who needs it, but that's not the point.

Oh well. I guess I am now relying more strongly on decent neighbors and passwords, as I haven't found anything like router logs that tell me this stuff.

I know that some of my readers are pretty security-conscious. How do you handle this?

Edit: I think I've got something adequate now. The indentation of comments in threads isn't quite as clear as I'd like, but it'll do. It's the price I have to pay for a legible font. Thanks everyone! Suggestions for ways to improve this are still welcome, but it's not as urgent as it was. (This wasn't how I wanted to spend my evening. Thanks LJ...) End edit.

Thanks for all the comments on the previous entry. I've read them and tried the suggested changes and for some reason I can't view my journal in other styles using the standard URL settings. Bizarre. Also, I tried posting what follows by email and it didn't show up; if it does later, please ignore it.

I chose the style for my journal and reading page because it has two important properties. First, it maximizes the space spent on actual content, omitting stuff like sidebar links, calendars, indented text with outdented userpics, and so on. I don't care about that and I don't want to give up the real-estate. Second, it isolates individual entries, so one humongous picture or ultra-long link doesn't hose the entire page, only that entry on it. (I think the relevant implementation detail here is the use of tables. Not sure.) Anyway, it actually took some digging to accomplish those two simple goals, many years ago; most of the styles available at the time I did this were "artistic" and IMO unusable.

That style's handling of individual-entry pages is poor. It doesn't show nesting for comments (essential!), and if I recall correctly it doesn't show userpics (also pretty important). So while I use a custom style for my journal, I've checked the "use the site default" option for individual entries to get around those problems. That doesn't give me the colors I want, but it'll do.

Now that style is broken. :-(

So far as I'm aware, I cannot set one style for journal/reading pages and another one for individual entries. So if the site default no longer works I need a single style that works everywhere. There may well now be such a style; it'll take many hours crawling through the gazillions of LJ styles to try to find out.

Does anybody happen to know a style that meets all of the following requirements?

For journal and reading pages:

Uses most of the browser width for entry content (no sidebars/multi-column layouts).
Prevents one wide entry from messing up the whole page.
Shows poster userpics.
Has, or can be configured with, a reasonable font size and face. My current style is fine.
Lets me change colors (I think they all do?).

For individual-entry pages:

Has, or can be configured with, a reasonable font size and face. The old site default is fine.
Threads comments.
Shows poster and commenter userpics.
Makes all the functionality you'd expect (like editing comments) available.

I don't care about S1 versus S2; I just want something that works, ideally without spending a bazillion hours learning the LJ style system and hacking something to fit. Any ideas?

Many thanks!

Dear LJ brain trust,

Upgrading a browser is a dangerous thing because you never know what'll happen to your add-ons (or UI experience in general, really) until you get there, and rolling back isn't always smooth. In the past I've used my iBook to test-drive new versions of Firefox before committing on the machine where it really matters, but apparently OS 10.4 is no longer good enough for Firefox (and the iBook isn't good enough for newer operating systems, which I knew when I bought it).

I was hoping that I could just visit the pages at the Mozilla add-ons page for the add-ons I care about to find out the latest versions of Firefox on which they're supported. No dice. I can apply Google one at a time to look for evidence one way or the other -- for example, I found a Stylish user script to change something in the Firefox 8 UI, which suggests it works with Firefox 8 -- but is there a better way?

I know some of you are already using Firefox 7 or 8, so just in case there's overlap in our add-ons, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if you have direct knowledge (and for which versions of Firefox) for any of the following: AddBlock Plus, Flashblock, Ghostery, Greasemonkey (I assume, but...), HTTPS-Everywhere, Image Zoom, NoScript, Stylish. I use others, but these are the important ones.

Thanks.

PS: I'd also appreciate hints about major UI changes.

Dear LJ brain trust, help me figure out what to feed my camp-mates at Pennsic. :-)

We take turns cooking dinner for everybody, where "everybody" is around 25 people, give or take. Cooking facilities are propane-fueled stoves and grills; it's camping, so no electricity, and our camp doesn't build a firepit (especially this year when we'll probably be packed like sardines). We do also have a small propane oven, big enough to bake a dozen muffins, but I'm not sure what role it could play in dinner for twice that many people.

My night is late this year and I don't like to leave site once I'm there, so my usual of grilled fish (and/or grilled meat) doesn't work (I wouldn't trust either in a cooler for the better part of a week). We tend to be a meat-heavy camp, more than I'm used to eating, so I personally lean toward vegetarian (or fish, if that worked). We have a couple people in camp who are lactose-intolerant.

Dry goods (or canned) can obviously be stored for the week with no problem and there is a vegetable stand on site.

I prefer to make food that is period or plausible as opposed to modern.

Any suggestions? I'm currently thinking that something with chickpeas could provide protein, and I could have rice and grilled veggies, but can I improve on this?

So Netflix just raised my subscription fee 60% (effective September 1). They did this by splitting streaming and DVDs into two separate plans, each costing $8/month, instead of bundling streaming with DVD plans as they do now. They argue that the price increase is due to the high cost of (and demand for) streaming (see recent news about them and Sony, for instance), but if so their pricing doesn't make sense. They didn't raise the price of the current streaming-only plan, and they are now asserting that DVDs cost $8/month to support (for one out at a time) instead of the $2/month suggested by the current pricing model. My current plan is $10/month for streaming + one DVD at a time. If streaming is $8 of that, then they have just raised DVD-rental fees 400%. (Ok, less half the overhead of having a customer account -- but I'm betting that's pennies a month.)

I, unlike others, am not looking for an alternate streaming service. Netflix has the largest streaming catalogue out there (though it has many deficiencies) and it already works for me. I want easy DVD rental because of those gaps in the streaming catalogue. What alternatives do I have for that?

My TiVo is reporting that it's not seeing any input. This happens from time to time with the Series 1 TiVo, but this time rebooting it didn't fix the problem. I checked all the connections and power-cycled the DTV box (just in case), but no luck. (Also changed channels "blind" using the remote; no effect.) Next up was to test whether TiVo is the problem; connecting the input to first a VCR and then the TV did not make the bits flow. Swapping cables did not make a difference either.

The only things I can't isolate for testing are the antenna and the DTV box; I only have one of each. Apparently one of these is failing, but how do I tell which? My guess is that it's the DTV box; Google has served up some complaints about reliability there. But it's just a guess. Have any of you seen that happen?

Before I go buy a new DTV box, let me tap into the collective wisdom of the LJ brain trust. My goal is to watch, via time-shifting and on my TV (not computer), occasional TV shows, inexpensively. "Occasional" means one or two current-run shows at any given time. I am not interested in cable or satellite services.

I currently have the following ingredients: (1) an amplified antenna that had been serving my reception needs (and may still be for all I know). (2) That DTV box. (3) A Series 1 TiVo, which does not have a digital tuner card in it (hence the DTV box). (4) A VCR (ditto). (5) A 10-year-old TV (does not speak DTV, HD, or the newest connectors). (6) Wireless internet, but running ethernet cable to the TV room would be hard. (7) A Roku box.

Options:

I could replace the DTV box or, if that's not it, the antenna. Short-term this is the cheapest (if it's the DTV box, anyway); is it the wisest longer-term?
I could get a new DVR with digital tuner card (eliminating the need for the DTV box). TiVo + lifetime subscription is too expensive (new, anyway); word on the net is that I can't use the TiVo for recording without the service plan. I don't mind recording manually; I don't need the smarts that the TiVo software comes with. "Record channel 3 at 8PM on Thursdays" is fine. There are, of course, other DVRs; most seem to come bundled with cable service. Pointers to DVRs that I can just plug an antenna into and use would be most welcome.
I could buy individual episodes from somebody using the Roku box and forget about getting live TV, relying on the internet for breaking news that I might actually want to follow. Feels sub-optimal, and my test run (Big Bang Theory) didn't turn up anybody selling the current season (including Hulu Plus).
I could do something with a laptop, some new connector, and wireless internet. I think my iBook is probably not up to that.

Opinions? Other options?

( Read more... )

My congregation has a writing group and we'd like to be able to share some of our work with each other and anyone else who cares. Our own web site doesn't yet support blogging; I'm told it's coming but not soon. So I want to set up a shared blog or journal somewhere, with posting access restricted to the members and commenting open to everyone. I'm looking for suggestions about where to do this.

Some factors to consider:

Most group members are minimally proficient with internet tools and concepts; I'm the outlier. So the interface needs to be pretty simple and resilient.
There will be 10-15 individuals posting to this and I'd like it to be clear who's posting. (I don't want to share one account.)
There's no money for this. I'm willing to chip in up to about $50 a year, but I can't fund individual accounts for each poster.
If the site is ad-supported it should be tasteful; I've seen LJ ads recently (when accidentally logged out) and that's just plain obnoxious.
For this application I don't think threaded comments are a requirement. (I consider them essential for my own journal, but not for this.)
Syndication (RSS or Atom) is a must, but I assume they all do that. (More specifically, I want to be able to read this blog via LJ.)
I have a personal aversion to Blogspot because it's very hard for me to post comments there. (OpenID seems to be broken and their captchas are extremely difficult for me.)

I find myself leaning toward Dreamwidth because of the ad-free familiar interface, but I don't know if asking people to create individual accounts would be too much of a burden. Can I have accounts set up there with just names and email addresses and an empty shell of a profile? (Can I do that and just hand out login ID/password pairs to the group members?) And there may well be something much better for this project; I didn't so much shop for a blogging platform as stumble into LJ because of friends. I haven't used the others to publish, only to comment.

Thoughts?

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

We recently received a Keurig coffee maker as a gift. This is one of those gizmos that takes individual packets for making coffee (or tea or cocoa). Pour in water, put in individual packet, push the button, and out comes a cup of hot drink a couple minutes later. As the pitch goes, if you and your spouse like very different things, this gadget's for you.

To my surprise, I have found a coffee-based drink that was actually pleasant. This is a first, so I turn to you, o brain trust, to guide my further explorations. Because while this was fine, it isn't exactly healthy. Also, I'd kind of like to know about non-dairy options (for meat meals), assuming any exist that I'd like. For this experiment I started with Dani's mantra that coffee is a good source of calcium.

What worked: a French vanilla packet turned into 8oz of coffee (the gadget supports 6-10), about 4oz (!) of half-and-half (didn't have cream in the house), and about two heaping ~~table~~teaspoons of sugar (ack). These were added incrementally, alternating half-and-half and sugar in small quantities until it tasted good. So possibly a better answer is more milk product/no sugar, and I don't know how cream versus half-and-half will play out. There is also the question of other coffee bases to try, particularly if I can find them in variety packs or something so I'm not committing to a whole box of something we turn out not to like. I am categorically uninterested in decaffeinated coffees (defeats the purpose of coffee for me).

For calibration, I also like most black teas. For a "regular" tea I default to English breakfast. I do not care for Early Grey but Lady Grey is ok. I like most strongly-flavored or spiced teas, so my instinct is to look for coffees with some flavor additive. (This is why I gravitated to the French vanilla, and I have my eye on the hazelnut packet.) I think what this all means is that I don't like bitter flavors. What does that imply about coffee roast types? I see a variety of descriptors in that space but I don't know what they tend to mean for flavor. And how should I be thinking about the trade-off between stronger coffee flavors and brew strength?

If any of you have relevant knowledge or opinions, please chime in.

This week's portion is Sh'lach L'cha, which starts with the twelve men scouting out the land. In the end ten of them say this is a bad idea and the people believe them, which leads to that generation spending 40 years in the wilderness. The other two, Caleb and Yehoshua, say it's a good land and we should go, so they get to live to enter the land, but the rest of their generation won't make it.

At the beginning of the portion the twelve men are named with their tribes. In general these names follow the pattern "from the tribe of [tribe], [somebody] ben [somebody]", with (generally) the same trope (cantillation). There is one exception to the text pattern, and since tradition takes the precise wording of torah pretty seriously (and holds that there are no unnecessary words in torah), I wonder what it means.

The twelve tribes include the two "half-tribes" descended from Yosef. (Yaakov had 12 sons, but one is Levi who doesn't count in the 12, but another is Yosef whose portion split between his two sons, Efrayim and Manasheh, so 12 but not the original 12.) The text for the first is "from the tribe of Efrayim, Hoshea bin Nun" (he doesn't get renamed for a few more verses). The text for the second is "from the tribe of Yosef from the tribe of Manasheh, Gadi ben Susi". So why does Yosef get mentioned explicitly for one of them but not for the other? Is it just that Hoshea (Yehoshua) is a big name and everyone knows who he is? But this is about the tribe, not the individual...

By the way, these are the two who get non-standard trope, too. In the latter case there are extra words to be covered so the pattern used for the rest wouldn't work, but that's not true for Yehoshua. He gets different trope anyway. One might think it's foreshadowing of the outcome, except that Caleb doesn't get any special trope. (Poor Caleb; he's just as meritorious as Yehoshua, but Yehoshua gets most of the glory.)

MP3s ripped from CDs or bought digitally (usually) come pre-tagged, including "genre". "Genre" has an eclectic set of options including folk, rock, soundtrack, children's, Christmas, gospel, international, electronic, and electronica/dance, to name just a few. Some CDs of Jewish music came tagged as Christian (!) or gospel, and I changed those to Jewish (a new category) at the time. An MP3 can have at most one genre (hence options like folk-rock, I guess).

Some of these genres are orthogonal to each other. Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds", "Pirates of Penzance", and "West Side Story" are all soundtracks, but they are not similar musically. Children's isn't a genre; it's an audience or application. "Nowell Sing We" and "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" are both Christmas songs, but they're not the same at all (I would sort the former with "early", another category I had to invent because "classical" just doesn't fit the middle ages and renaissance). (Ok, I wouldn't have the latter in my collection, but work with me here...) I have no idea what the difference between "electronic" and "electronica/dance" might be, and how the latter differs from "dance".

I think the makers of the tagging system conflated style and purpose. We're running into this a lot with international dance music (often dances are set to folk songs), or with everything from folk to blues to rock ending up together because they're "Jewish", or SCA dance music being scattered across "SCA" (this must have been a custom category for someone), "dance", "classical", "folk" (?), and probably others. And I'd like to be able to tag the subset of folk music that is children's music (for selective exclusion), without losing its folk-ness.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the correct way to do this is to use "genre" for what it is musically and some other tag for usage (if it has a primary usage). Looking at the tags available to me in iTunes, it looks like I should use "grouping" for this. (I've never seen this field filled in, so I don't know what conventions surround it.) So early music is early music and some of it might be grouped as "dance", folk is folk and rock is rock and some of each might be grouped as "Jewish" (or perhaps "Jewish liturgical", since that's what I'm really after), and the Hebrew folk songs that are used for Israeli dances would "folk" (genre) and grouped as "dance", and so on. (Maybe we want to distinguish SCA dance and international folk dance; that's an implementation detail.) But before I try to do anything along these lines I'd like input: how do you capture multiple dimensions of your music? (Another option, just to throw it out there, is to use playlists as buckets. We're doing some of that but it doesn't feel sustainable to me.) I want to be able to find music by genre or by purpose, which says to me I want two searchable fields.

We are currently using the comments field to support tags iTunes doesn't give us. For example, there's no off-the-shelf way to tag the language of a song! So for the languages we care about we have entries in the comments field like LANG_HEBREW. We're also doing something similar to tag the Child ballads (TAG_CHILD_#_) so we can easily find the dozen variations on "Maddy Groves" scattered through the library. (Child ballads are a special interest of Dani's.) We're also using this field for meta-data about our own recordings (e.g. TAG_WEAK); "comments" probably isn't a good place for that but those were the first tags we added so we grabbed the obvious field and now we're kind of stuck unless we want to do a lot of work.

A problem with using "comments" is that you can't systematically add to a comment field, only replace it. So if we wanted to use it for other tags (like usage) and wanted to apply those in bulk, we couldn't without stomping some of our existing tags. Well, we could write a perl script, I guess, but I looking for something a little closer to the GUI.

So how do the rest of you track extra information? Or are we the most finicky among our circle of friends? :-)

Last year I bought an amplified antenna and a digital converter box in anticipation of the national switch to digital TV in February. Then Congress delayed it to June, which means my antenna warranty will expire a week before the switch. WQED switched on April 1 and I've been getting zilch on channel 13 since then, but maybe I've been looking in the wrong place. According to this list they might be on 38 now, but I'm not getting signal there either. (WQED's web site does not actually appear to have channel information.) I live 2 miles from WQED, but Pittsburgh is a hilly place.

I'm not sure if any other local station has made the switch. (Google is inconclusive.) I just checked signals tonight, and currently I am only getting 2 (CBS), 4 (ABC), 11 (NBC), 47 (Christian), and (weakly) a couple other UHF channels. (There were more signals the last time I did a survey.) So it's not clear whether the equipment I bought specifically for the DTV transition even works. (The antenna claims to be digital-capable.)

If you're in Pittsburgh and are receiving any stations digitally, which ones (station and channel number)?

If anyone has any debugging advice beyond waiting to see if everything goes dark in mid-June, I'm interested in hearing that.

(No, I'm not interested in subscribing to cable.)

Edit: Scanning is not dynamic; you need to explicitly have the converter box re-scan when channels are added/moved. Thanks, all.

15 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?

Dear LazyWeb,

LJ seems to have made a change today that makes single-entry pages in the default style too wide for my preferred browser-window size. Specifically, the links at the bottom are in 5 columns (that's fine) (About, Help, Legal, Store, LJ Labs), and then over on the right is a drop-down list to change languages, with "current version: v46" under it. That last column of content is what's making the page too wide. I do not care very much about it.

Do I have any readers who have both the know-how and the inclination to write me something that will move, or remove, that drop-down? I'm using Firefox v2 (not 3 yet) and have GreaseMonkey installed already. I'm using Vertigo (not Horizon), if that makes a difference. Sticking it at the bottom of one of the five other columns, or just eliminating it, would fix my problem.

Thanks! (Yes, I will learn GreaseMonkey someday, perhaps even soon, but this is painful now.)

Query to the brain trust: I have USB headphones that include a microphone. What free software can I use to record voice from that microphone (preferably on Windows XP but I also have an iBook with OS 10.4 available) and produce something like WAV files? (I know I'm not going to get stellar audio quality from this setup; that's ok. The immediate goal is to record torah chanting -- think "teaching tapes", except no one uses tape any more.)

Followup on UJF: I spoke with the campaign manager on Friday and she was very apologetic. She promised to take appropriate action. (I've updated the original entry to reflect this.)

This week my employer's landlord started giving preferred parking spots to people driving green vehicles (definition not provided). Not that I'm going to turn down the convenience (my Honda Fit qualifies), but as one of my coworkers pointed out, are those the cars for which they want to minimize driving? (Should we try to get the gas guzzlers to stop on the first floor instead?) I used to always park on the top indoor floor, mostly so I could park in the same place every day and not have to worry about remembering at the end of the day. Now that I think about it, that decision represented about 2-3% of my commuting distance.

You know that "25 things about me" meme that's been going around? Maybe it's older than you thought. Or maybe not. :-)

The local SCA got some decent TV coverage recently.

Via

jducoeur: Facebook company secrets were revealed by someone who applied paper analogies to digital media. Oops. No, white-out doesn't work on bits. (From the news story it sounds like it might have been the court that screwed up, which presumably means they can't sue anyone for the leak.)

Birkat ha Chamah is a once-every-28-years observance, and it's coming up this April. I wonder if anyone local is doing anything for this. It sounds kind of peculiar, but it'll be a while before I could next satisfy my curiosity. (The timing is inconvenient with respect to Pesach, however.)

Glow-in-the-dark body cream, pointed out by

browngirl.

Thanks to

xiphias for pointing out this comic to me: ( moderately-large image )

Dear LazyWeb,

The soon-to-be-only "supported" IM client is soon to be one that has some accessibility problems for me. I've been told that I can get a security variance to install a different one. I probably get one chance at this.

The folks who told me this recommended Pidgin. (Others they mentioned included Trillian, Adium, Exodus, Pandion, and Jbother. I haven't done anything with those yet.) The main thing I need to be able to do with an IM client (that the current client doesn't already do) is modify the fonts and colors in the UI.

Pidgin claims to have themes. I even see that the (Windows XP, in case it matters) distribution came with some, and I've found sites where I can download more. What I can't find is a way to actually apply those themes. Per this FAQ (or a link from it), I've tried using GTK Theme Selector; it doesn't change anything, even after restarting Pidgin. I also found allusions to a .gtkrc file, but not enough information (so far) to just go and roll my own. (And anyway, if someone else has already done the work...)

This article recommends using GTK+ Theme Control from inside the UI. That worked exactly once; having set one theme from the installed set, I can't change it to another.

Can anyone out there offer me some guidance? I guess I'll move on to Trillian in the meantime, but I was getting a strong "use Pidgin if you can" vibe so I'd like to figure this out.

Edit 12:30AM: Pidgin themes installed into the right directory are eventually noticed. The sequence seems to be: use Theme Selector to pick a theme, then go into Pidgin and enter the name of that theme (both steps are required), and then maybe it works. There appears to be a delay; this failed for me initially and worked an hour later. As for editing, it turns out that each theme is (wholly?) defined by one config file, and while I don't know the whole language for that yet, I've been able to make some progress by cloning a theme and tweaking the colors. I don't yet know how to do font sizes.

Dear LazyWeb,

I have one -- count it, one -- DVD from which I would like to extract the audio. Google leads me to many, many software offerings, some trustworthy; alas, the half-dozen I've tried so far all have built-in limits of 3 to 5 minutes for the free trial. If I were going to be doing this a lot I'd buy the software (as I have for other pieces of the great digitization project), but I really just want to do this once. I'd pay a small one-time-use fee if that were available. Because I only want to do this once, I'm not fussy about user interface and features -- if it does DVD in and WAV out without quality loss, I really don't care about anything else. Any suggestions?

(Clam Chowder, "Kosher", in case you're wondering. I want to be able to listen to it on my non-video-enabled iPod.)

Update: I ended up with a two-pass approach. HandBrake (recommended by some of you) turns DVDs into several other video formats, including AVI and MP4, but no audio-only formats (as documented). However, this free tool converts MP4 to MP3. Both of these have a batch mode, so I can just set 'em loose in turn. A small trial worked just fine, so now I've got the big job running. Thanks, everyone.

I have a bootleg cassette tape of the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat made by, at the latest, 1989 (probably a few years earlier). I am now trying to replace this recording, or at least come close.

I believe it is a London recording. The narrator is male and this is important to me; it's the reason I have always preferred this one to the Broadway version. (Look, I'm not chauvinist; I just think the part works better with the lower pitches.) It is not this one despite the timing; I don't recognize Peter Reeves. It is possible that it could be this one, but I can find no samples to listen to. And, finally, it is not an earlier edition of this one, though if I can't find "mine" this is probably the one I'll buy. (The most important roles are the narrator and Joseph, both of whom I like in the samples here. The rest of the sampled ensemble is weaker than I'd like.)

So I turn to you, oh diverse and helpful friends. Do any of you share my affection for this musical, and if so, do you have any clue what edition I might have or where I could find samples of #2 above?

Thanks!

Dear LJ brain trust,

I'm looking for virtual-desktop software for Windows XP with the following properties:

Supports six or more desktops. Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager fails here, being limited to four.
Can switch desktops with a single click on a grid (or something similar); I'm not interested in apps that run only on hotkeys or require cycling. VirtualWin fails here, requiring me to cycle through them by repeatedly clicking on something in the task bar.
Doesn't get confused by multiple windows from the same app being on different desktops. (I usually keep a few Firefox windows around.) Cool Desk appears to fail here; it's making my second Firefox window sticky when I don't want it to. This will probably get some more testing, as the app is otherwise decent (once you swap out the default skin).
Doesn't interact badly with some unknown OS update that landed in the last two months (sigh). JSPager, which I've been using happily for years, is now implicated in unplanned Windows restarts. ("Implicated" is the wrong word in that it's probably not really JSPager's fault, but my attempts to debug it have all failed, including the ones involving hardware.)
Commonly-found features that I care about: can make windows sticky on demand; can send windows from one desktop to another easily; task bar for a desktop shows only that desktop's windows.
Nothing that would obviously bar it from being approved by a corporate IT department (unverifiable executables from Russia or Iran, for instance).

Features I do not care about: per-desktop wallpaper, per-desktop desktop shortcuts, live preview, changing resolution for different desktops, support for multiple monitors.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

I enjoy reading a variety of commentaries on the weekly torah portion, and a lot of them are published by email. However, some of the ones I've been reading recycle previous years' content (that I've already seen) and others are moving to formats I'm not interested in -- most recently, Aish HaTorah has switched all of its weekly commentaries from emailed copies to emailed teaser paragraphs with URLs. Not interested -- I might visit your web site at times, but the whole point (to me) is to serve up that content in one place for easy reading at my convenience. (Yes, I sent polite feedback to that effect, a few weeks ago. Nothing beyond an ack so far.)

So I'm interested in suggestions -- which commentaries have my readers found interesting? I require email delivery of the full content and strongly prefer plain text -- if it comes as HTML the markup has to not get in my way. I'm currently reading Ohr Somayach, the Reform movement's Ten Minutes of Torah (even with its poor formatting), and Ziegler (AJU, Conservative). What else is good?

Dear LazyWeb,

Dani and I have a lot of albums and cassettes that we don't play any more, so we have begun the process of figuring out how to upgrade to digital media (while culling the stuff we don't care about any more). Some albums exist as CDs or downloads; others we'll have to burn ourselves (we have hardware for that). Mostly we're replacing albums, we think, and not just grabbing the "good tracks". But not all albums were reissued as CDs, so there are some individual tracks in our future assuming we can find them. (We're only through "folk, A to C" so far so expectations could change, but this is what it's looking like now.)

Even though most of this is going to end up as MP3s anyway, I prefer to buy physical CDs where we can. Yes, it's extra work to then burn them and we have to store the CDs, but I want both the liner notes and the security of knowing that some digital nanny isn't going to prevent me from moving that album to a new computer or iPod. It's also easier to browse; cover art and location on the shelves are meaningful guideposts for me, and iTunes' "genre" is not nearly rich enough for sorting; I need multi-level catagorization.

First questions: where besides Amazon should we be looking online for reasonably-priced CDs, some obscure? Is anybody beating Amazon on price consistently enough to look into? (I realize that the Amazonians among my readers might not want to answer that. :-) )

Now, about downloads. We haven't bought much music in this form before. We want it to be as easy as possible to play whatever we buy on multiple computes and iPods, including future ones and future tech. Sometimes this is prevented (DRM, I presume) -- I bought a song from iTunes and we were unable to play it on Dani's computer. Other times things appear to work fine -- Dani bought a song from Amazon and I could play it just fine. Next questions: are these typical experiences for those two vendors? Are there other vendors we should look at?

Thanks.

This morning at my ophthamologist's office, through the collection of lens parts that she used to mock up a new glasses prescription for me, I read a letter from the 20/30 line. I have never done that before. Woot! Yeah, office conditions are probably optimized compared to real life, but even if the raw numbers don't matter the deltas should. And yeah, it's only one letter, but it still passed a threshold. (If I understand correctly, this would mean a rating of 20/38 on that single test.)

Now if I can just find an optician to correctly make them for me. I had rotten luck with that last time around. (The guy I used before those guys was excellent -- but he retired, which is why I went to someone else.) Locals, any recommendations? I have a complicated, finicky prescription and complicated, finicky needs on things like the precise placement of the bifocals. I need someone skilled and detail-oriented who (1) is that scrupulous about what comes back from his lab and (2) can work with me on this. I recognize that this is a non-standard level of service for which one should expect to pay extra. (I would also like someone to advise me on frame shape to optimize my vision; most places want to optimize their bottom line or some sense of "fashion".)

Bonus points for proximity to either Squirrel Hill or South Side Works, because even if he is excellent I'll probably have to make a couple extra trips as part of this. My glasses just don't happen as one-shots. So running up to, say, Cranberry at lunch time (because places aren't open at 8:30AM) would be a challenge, though doable if absolutely necessary.

( geekiness for the curious )

Monica

remind me: how long does "vet smell" last?

modern dentistry

time for a new {laptop, netbook, tablet...}

but those were useful features!

seeking an LJ style

brain trust: Firefox 7, 8, neither?

camp cooking

Netflix price change

debugging the TV room

parsing a glasses prescription

query to the brain trust

coffee

a question on this week's portion

how do you tag your MP3s?

DTV in Pittsburgh?

random bits

request for minor LJ support

random bits (and browser-tab-cleanup day)

IM clients

extracting audio from DVDs?

question for the music brain-trust

virtual desktops?

looking for emailed torah commentaries

replacing albums

a first

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