cellio | Entries tagged with tech

We went to

alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (

blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.

2013 was getting off to a great start but then I had to go back to work. Powerball, you have failed me. :-) (Ok, I've never actually bought my own lottery ticket, but when a group is forming at work I always buy in because I'd sure feel stupid if I didn't and half the company won buckets of money and left.)

Resolution? 1280x1024, but maybe I'll get a new monitor this year. (I think it was merle_ who inspired that idea.) Though I'd rather keep the aspect ratio I have now (i.e. I'm not so thrilled with the widescreen monitors that are all the rage these days).

Orlando is currently chasing his tail. I thought that was a dog thing. (He's got one white pixel on the end of it, but I don't think it's that in particular that he's chasing.) More generally, he and Giovanni seem to be settling in, though I still can't pick either up for more than a few seconds and I had only 50% success on last week's vet visit. Giovanni has gained a pound in the last month, so I guess Orlando isn't being as pushy about the food dishes as I thought.

Netflix only gives you about a week's notice when something is going to disappear from their streaming service. Last week I noticed that Farscape, which had been languishing there for a while, was slated to disappear, so I watched the first eight episodes to decide if I want to queue up DVDs. It looked to me like interesting characters and underwhelming plots, but I'm mindful that some good shows (like B5) took a while to settle in. To those who've seen it: does it get better?

Apparently I can't post comments on LJ tonight, so some of you will probably get some belated comments when that changes. Let's see if I can post an entry.

I'm typing this from my new Android tablet -- an ASUS Transformer with keyboard dock. It's quite spiffy! (And a well-timed gift, as I was still cogitating over my dead iBook.)

It works well as a tablet -- nice display, the apps work the way I expect, and it didn't take too long to figure out some of the interface quirks (which may be real or may be signs that I've used an iPad). The on-screen keyboard is "fat"; I don't know how else to describe it, but it works (and, not surprisingly, with better accuracy than my phone). The hardware keyboard is of course smaller than a conventional one, so currently I'm making lots of typos but I'm touch-typing. The keys are closer together than I'm used to and it feels like I'm hitting them harder than I'm used to, particularly the keys toward the edges (that are less likely to be struck "straight on"). I'm still faster with the hardware keyboard than the on-screen one, though, and it doesn't take up half the screen. So, bottom line, when I want to do extensive typing I can slip it into the dock, and otherwise its a nice 10" tablet.

Please feel free to tell me about all your favorite Android apps. I have an Android phone so I know a few, but tablets and phones are different.

Good news: somebody has ported emacs to Android and it's in the store (free). Bad news: it seg-faults for me on start. It's a known problem but the suggested work-around didn't for me. I've contacted the author.

The dock provides a USB port and there's a file-browser app. This is very promising.

How in the world do I get the Google+ web site to let me use the regular, not mobile, site? I know there's an app but I don't like it; the web site is just fine with the real-estate available on a tablet. But when I try to use it it forces me into the mobile version, which isn't as good. (Not as bad as the app, but not as good as it could be.)

The previous paragraph might describe a specific symptom of a more-general problem. General solutions also welcome. :-) (Stack Exchange, by way of contrast, uses the mobile site on my phone but the regular one on the tablet, so it's not as simple as checking for mobile devices.)

There are two browsers pre-installed, "browser" and Chrome. I wonder why. I wonder what "browser" is.

LJ oddity: I'm typing this using the (regular) web site, not an app, and when typing this text is a smaller variable-width font. When focus is elsewhere (like when I typed the tags), it changes to a larger fixed-width font (Courier, I assume). I want that all the time! (This is the HTML editor, not the rich-text one.)

I'm not very good at finger-based cursor placement yet. I wonder what typos Ive introduced while editing. :-)

More to come as I use it more, I'm sure.

The trip home from Pennsic involved detours at both ends, so I decided to turn on the GPS app on my phone (Android, Navigator, came pre-loaded) for a running commentary. (Good thing, too; the obvious path out of Cooper's Lake wasn't.) This experience reminded me of some things I really want a GPS to do for me. It's possible that it already does some of these; I'm an infrequent GPS user and was fiddling with it at the side of a rural road.

I want to constrain a route without spelling it out: "Go home from here, taking Route 422 rather than staying on 19 and, in Pittsburgh, detouring through downtown instead of via Liberty Bridge". I can, of course, just do that and let it recalculate, as I did, but I would like it to take that information into account in case there's a better way to execute that plan.

I want it to learn from its recalculations. In an ideal world I would be able to turn it on in "observer" mode while I drive, and then later tell it to navigate as close to my usual habits as possible. My GPS should be able to learn that I don't like the eastbound 376 entrance in Squirrel Hill, or the West End Bridge, or Carson Street during rush hours.

I want to be able to tell it take current conditions into account. My phone knows that it's currently pouring rain or dark; I should be able to tell it "prefer local roads over highways during heavy rain" or "try not to take Business 22 at night" or even "check conditions up ahead and advise me on when to take a rest stop" (for longer trips).

That's just until the self-driving cars are ready, of course.

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

( Read more... )

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?

Dear brain trust,

I have some vision-related problems with my computer setup at work and our IT and HR departments are ill-equipped to help. I've got a configuration -- a combination of OS settings (Windows), monitor settings, application settings, and lighting -- that kind-of sort-of works, but it's all stuff I figured out on my own. There may be better ways to solve my problems, and some of my problems are currently unsolved and getting in my way. Meanwhile, IT really wants to push me to newer versions that seem to be worse for me.

I would like to find a consultant who is knowledgable in both vision stuff and tech stuff, someone who can sit with me for a few hours and give me informed advice about changes to make. My ophthalmologist of course knows the vision stuff but is not a techie; the techies I know don't grok the vision stuff. I need to find someone who can hear "photo-sensitive" and "restricted focal distance" and "astigmatism" and the rest, understand what that means, and suggest approaches that have not occurred to me from walking the application menus and Windows control panel and Firefox extensions. Technical areas will include the gamut of Windows display settings including custom color themes, CSS overrides in Firefox, configuration of Office and (if possible) Adobe reader, and monitor settings, among things. (Bonus points if this person can make Eclipse suck less.) Once I find this person, I intend to push my employer to hire that person for a consultation. I don't expect to have to push very hard, but I also don't expect to get multiple chances on the corporate dime.

The problem is I haven't been able to find that person. My Google searches have turned up many many consultants who will help employers comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act -- they're compliance people, not usability people. (Also, most of them are about mobility issues.) And I've found folks who will build you accessible web sites (they say). This does not help. Clearly I'm going about this wrong.

So, dear brain trust, can you help me figure out how to search for help with this? And in the "hey, I might get lucky" department, do you, dear reader, know someone who could provide this service in Pittsburgh?

How companies learn your secrets is a long but interesting article on commercial data-mining. The case studied here is Target, leading with a bit of a fumble where they showed they knew a high-school student was pregnant before her family did, but practically everybody analyzes their customers like this. This article explains some of what they're doing and why it works.

"We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, 'Here's everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,' " one Target executive told me. "We do that for grocery products all the time." But for pregnant women, Target's goal was selling them baby items they didn't even know they needed yet.
"With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly," the executive said. "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."

I know someone who used to get together with friends every now and then to randomly redistribute store affinity cards to mess up the data mining. I don't know how long hat will keep working (if indeed it still does) -- unless you also pay with cash. Personally, I just assume that any transaction I make that involves a credit card, affinity card, or disclosure of an address or phone number is not really private.

Last night my four-month-old phone (my first smartphone) died -- wouldn't power on and didn't light up when plugged into a charger. This said "dead battery" to me; I briefly considered popping and replacing the battery on the theory that that's probably the control-alt-delete of the phone world, but I was stymied by the case.

A word about the case: I didn't get the phone with a case and wasn't looking for one. I'm pretty careful with my portable electronics and don't expect to be using a phone in situations where I'm likely to drop or crush it. A month after I got the phone the screen-protector peeled off and they replaced it since those are supposed to last a year or more. (So maybe the initial application was faulty, I figured.) A month after that the second one peeled off, despite my being very careful in how I handled the phone. I carry my phone in an otherwise-empty pocket, same as bunches of other people; this should not happen. So that time the guy suggested that a case would help hold it down; the price of the case was comparable to the price of a two-pack of protectors, so I grudgingly bought a case and he put it on for me.

I've not had cause to try to remove the case since then, until last night when I found I wasn't sure how to do it without damaging something. And this "pop the battery" idea was just a theory anyway. So today I visited the T-Mobile store and spoke with Matt.

Matt's first guess was "confused phone", not "dead battery", and he took the case off, popped the battery, put it back in, and plugged the phone into a charger. This time it responded. I asked him to show me how he'd taken the case off and he said that it's very fussy. He then went to put it back on so he could show me, and discovered that it wouldn't go -- something had cracked or bent or something. He apologized for breaking the case and replaced it with a new one. I decided at that point that if somebody who probably does this dozens of times a week couldn't succeed, there's no hope of me doing it -- next time I need to access the battery I'll take it back to the store.

From Matt's point of view this is probably "stupid-customer 101" stuff, but he never said anything that implied that I was anything less than a smart person in an unfamiliar situation. He was very friendly and helpful and not at all condescending. While we were waiting to confirm that my battery could hold a charge, I overheard as he helped someone with questions even more basic than mine -- a customer trying to learn how to use a new "plain old phone". He was just as courteous and patient with that customer.

The salesperson told us when we bought the phones that we could come in any time for help; this wasn't just a sell-and-forget operation. Today they delivered on that, and I'll be asking specifically for Matt if I need to go back there again.

A normal "save and exit" with no signs of things gone awry should not result in my saved tabs being gone on restart. Bah. I guess the lesson is to always bookmark all tabs first and clean it up later. What a stupid requirement.

I had several LJ entries open with intent to comment, but I don't know how I would reconstruct that state now. So I'm not ignoring you; I just don't know how to get that state back without doing a lot of digging, which I probably won't do.

Bill Walsh writes about an episode of the Amazing Race in which teams were required to use a manual typewriter to type a supplied passage. The passage contained the number "1". Sadly, Bill notes, the token old people had already been eliminated. Apparently hilarity ensued. (I presume there were no remaining middle-aged people either. I assume that most people of my generation would have known what to do.)

And the title of Bill's post? "LOL 101". :-)

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.

To get my TiVo to shift out of DST I reboot it? Is that what I did last time and I managed to forget? There's no way to manually set the time, and apparently no less-invasive way to ask whomever it asks about the time to go do that. Weird.

Lately I've been having to reboot the TiVo once or twice a week to get it to stop losing part of the signal (sometimes it freezes video; other times it drops sound). So I guess I would have noticed this before too much longer. I don't know what the reduction in reliable uptime means -- aging hardware, dropped support for older models, gremlins, or what. But now I can stop adding an hour to recordings because of clock error, which is handy.

We have joined the ranks of the smartphone-enabled. We had been Verizon customers and the Droid Bionic looked tempting on specs, but we ended up going across the street to T-Mobile (it seems safe now that AT&T is unlikely to buy them), where they're selling an all-you-can-eat plan for less than Verizon's metered plans and the staff were very helpful besides. (By comparison, I was only able to use a dummy Bionic at Verizon and the sales guy didn't seem to understand my need to use the phone before deciding.)

We were both having trouble with the touch keyboard; I assume that's something you just have to learn to do. So we both chose the MyTouch Slide (4G), which also has a physical keyboard that we were both able to use easily. I'll try to transition more to the touch keyboard, but meanwhile I can still complete a Google search or type a text message or the like on the first try when I need to.

(In case you're wondering, Dani decided that if he really really wants the iPhone 5 when it eventually comes out, he can buy an unlocked one and switch over to it.)

So what apps are must-haves? (Android 2.3.)

Edit: How do y'all post to LJ from your phones? I downloaded both "Livejournal" and "LJ Beetle"; in both cases I could figure out how to compose a post just fine, but could not find anything like a "post" or "send" button. Once I've got a buffer to send, what then?

I'm posting this to both LJ and G+.

When I joined LJ there were three levels of publicity for posts: public, friends-only, and private. Years later they introduced filters, so you could group your friends into buckets for both reading and access. Either you could not at the time put a post in multiple filters or I did not know that you could, so I ended up creating some hierarchical security filters. For example, some posts would be restricted to the "best buddies" filter, others to the "know pretty well" filter, and others to the "know" filter. A "best buddy" was therefore in all three groups. This is a royal pain to administer on LJ (you can't put a group in a group), and I've been moving to another model now that I can. I may never get around to correcting the older entries, though.

I would like to not have such a mess with G+. I note that G+ (unlike LJ) tells you right there on a person's page what group (er, circle) you've put that person in. I haven't put anybody in multiples, but I assume that if I did they would all show up.

So I'm thinking that what I want to do is to put everybody in exactly one security filter, and then make posts visible to all applicable filters. Instead of having a person in multiple filters, I would have a post in multiple filters. Does this seem right to y'all? Are there other factors I should be thinking about?

On LJ I post almost everything publicly, but it looks like G+, with its ability to make posts to specific individuals, is likely to involve more non-public posting. I can't tell yet. By the time I know, it will be too late to go back and fix my circles if I get this wrong. So I'd like to hear people's thoughts now, while everybody is in one big "acqaintances" bucket awaiting sorting.

Note that I am not talking about reading filters here, and I don't intend to mingle them. I might trust somebody deeply but not want to give his 20 posts per day high priority, y'know? Reading filters can help manage that.

Edit: To clarify, my current thinking is to put each person in exactly one security filter and in one or more reading filters.

Someone sent me an invitation to Google+ last Friday, which didn't work after repeated tries. Yesterday two other people sent me invitations, which arrived tonight (so a one-day delay). This time it worked.

First I had to get a newer version of Firefox. I'd been meaning to move from 3.0 to 3.6 but an extension I like wasn't going to be supported, it said. Turns out they built it into the baseline, so all is fine there. (Rendering in 3.6 looks...different. Can't pinpoint it.) Google and Mozilla are both strongly pushing me to move to Firefox 4, but I remember hearing rumblings of problems there, including problems using LJ. If you're using FF4, please comment about any diminished usability you've encountered. For critical functionality -- operating systems, cars, browsers, etc -- I am not an early adopter.

So ok, I have a G+ account. If you're there and care to let me know you exist, please do. If you've figured out useful patterns, please share that. One I figured out right away (so tell me if there's a reason this is wrong): since you can share a post with any number of circles, stay away from any notions of nested circles or hierarchical circles: given the existence of acquaintances, friends, and best-buddies, put somebody in exactly one of those. Of course, there may be orthogonal circles too; that's different. (E.g. I don't currently see the need to have an SCA circle, but if I did it would include some friends, some best-buddies, and some people who aren't in any other circle.)

Yes, I acknowledge the irony of posting on LJ to discuss G+ best practices. :-)

Edited to add: FF 3.6 annoyingly changed how new tabs are placed. New tabs should go to the far right, not immediately after the current tab, thank you very much. This page has some rather colorful language, but it did tell me how to fix it. (I assume I will have to do that with FF4 and 5, too.)

Google Maps almost failed me this morning. That's never happened before. Those "M" guys used to get things wrong so much that I couldn't rely on them at all; they even managed to leave out a major state road once, telling me that I could exit the interstate and get onto such-and-such road that was miles and miles away. And those "Y" guys led me on some merry romps a couple times. But Google Maps had always given me what I needed with a smile and useful photos besides.

This morning I had to run an errand in Wilkinsburg before work. I don't particularly know the wilds of Wilkinsburg, but it's not the land of unnamed dirt roads or anything like that. I was a little surprised that Google's directions didn't actually have me turn onto the street named in the address, but a street number of "xxx02" is likely to be at a corner, so that seemed ok. So, armed with directions and Street View of the key intersections I didn't already know (Street View has made my life so much easier in this land of sometimes-inadequate road signs), I headed off... and at the end of the directions found myself at the end of a road facing an iron gate. Oops.

So I called my destination, told them where I was, and asked how to recover. How far was I from such-and-such road? Sorry, not from around here -- never heard of such-and-such road. Ok, I should go back to other-such-and-such road and... wait, never encountered that one on my way here. We went back and forth a couple times and I said I guessed I was going to have to reschedule and get better directions. I repeated what I had said at the beginning of the conversation: I was at the end of such-and-such road facing an iron gate with an "authorized personnel only" sign and no other markings.

Wait, the guy said, is it a blue sign? Yup. Could I see a white building beyond the gate? Yup. He told me to wait. A couple minutes later somebody came to open the back gate so I could drive in. Weird!

So it worked out in the end (costing me 10 minutes or so), but it was very puzzling.

We've been holding off on replacing our phones (contract is up) because of the iPhone rumors. We are committed to Verizon.

I'm largely agnostic between iPhone and Droid. I suspect that either would meet my needs nicely; I have a slightly better gut feeling about the Droid but it's probably not significant. My needs are largely about having the internet in my pocket -- easy, legible web browsing and email primarily, only passing interest in video, and I don't wear earbuds so music capabilities don't matter all that much. (I have an iPod Nano for driving.) One thing I do want, though, is a digital recorder, which I think both can do. I've never had a smartphone before, though I've used others' from time to time, so this is largely new territory for me.

It sure sounds like -- specifically on Verizon -- the Droid beats the iPhone on speed and future-proofing. The iPhone is locked into the 3G (CDMA) network and the Droid uses LTE, which I understand to mean 4G or at least faster 3G. Do I have that right? Any plan/phones we buy now will have to hold us for two years. (I know that "4G" is something of a misnomer currently.)

As I said, I don't have strong opinions favoring one over the other. I invite those of you who do to evangelize. :-) (Also, if you're evangelizing about the Droid, I'd like to hear comments on specific phones, since there are choices there.)

Stack Overflow has a candidate site for Q&A on Jewish topics. Stack Overflow takes what looks like a sound approach to launching new sites like this, waiting until enough people commit before launching. After all, if they can't attract good questions and good answers, no one will care. I committed.

What Level 3 v. Comcast says about the FCC's obsolescence is a good explanation of what is going on with throttling internet traffic (link, as with many on this topic, from osewalrus). goldsquare writes about why you should care.

Law and the Multiverse (now syndicated at law_multiverse) does fun legal analysis of superhero law. From their "about" page: "If there's one thing comic book nerds like doing it's over-thinking the smallest details. Here we turn our attention to the hypothetical legal ramifications of comic book tropes, characters, and powers. Just a few examples: Are mutants a protected class? Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain? What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?" Thanks to anastasiav for pointing it out.

The first truly honest privacy policy sounds about right to me. Link from cahwyguy.

The semicolon wars discusses differences in programming languages and some of the religious wars that have been fought over them. Thanks to nancylebov for the link.

Thanks to brokengoose for pointing me to Kindle Feeder, which supports RSS feeds to the Kindle. Now, do any of you know how to get an RSS feed to cough up the entire article instead of just the first paragraph? If the publisher didn't set it up that way is there anything I can do about it?

I received a Kindle as a birthday present (with recognition all around that this was an experiment in many ways). I have no prior experience with e-books; thus far everything I have read has been either on paper or in a web browser, and I've established that I don't have the patience and/or ergonomic satisfaction to read lengthy works via the computer. (Dani reads novels that way sometimes, but I really want to read novels while sitting in a comfy chair with optional feline accessories.)

Yes yes, I'm concerned about both DRM and Amazon's pricing policies. That's not what this entry is about.

So, first look: reading is comfortable. ( Read more... )

It's clean-out-the-browser-tabs day:

From gardenfey comes this fun video about what motivates us. The presentation is engaging; I didn't mind at all that it's ten minutes long.

shewhomust posted this item about spoilers and meta-spoilers. Heh.

Big numbers can be hard to understand without some localization. With that in mind, try this visualization of the gulf oil spill, linked by siderea.

And speaking of interesting visualizations, dagonell posted this depiction of Earth, from tallest mountain to deepest ocean trench.

Also from dagonell: every country is the best at something, though, as he points out, some fare better than others.

This visualization isn't about the planet; it's about the changes in Facebook privacy over time.

Not a visualization: How to keep someone with you forever through the power of sick systems. Linked by lots of people; I first saw it from metahacker. I have not lived that kind of abuse, for which I am very thankful, but this tracks with what I've heard.

And on the lighter (err) side: a light saber strong enough to burn flesh -- for sale for $200. Wow. And yikes. Link from astroprisoner.

Pesach has been going well. Tonight/tomorrow is the last day, which is a holiday like the first day was. Yesterday Rabbi Symons led a beit midrash on the "pour out your wrath" part of the haggadah; more about that later, but it led me to a new-to-me haggadah that so far I'm liking a lot. (I borrowed a copy after the beit midrash.) When I lead my own seder (two years from mow, I'm guessing?) the odds are good that it will be with this one.

Tangentially-related: a short discussion of overly-pediatric seders.

Same season, different religion: researchers have found that portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have been rising for a millennium, though I note the absence of an art historian on the research team.

Same season, no religion: I won't repeat most of the links that were circulating on April 1, but I haven't seen these new Java annotations around much. Probably only amusing to programmers, but very amusing to this one.

Not an April-fool's prank: xiphias is planning a response to the Tea Party rally on Boston Common on April 14: he's holding a tea party. You know, with fine china and actual tea and people wearing their Sunday (well, Wednesday) best. It sounds like fun.

Edit (almost forgot!): things I learned from British folk songs.

From nancylebov: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looks like it'll be a good read. Or, as siderea put it, Richard Feynman goes to Hogwarts.

Real Live Preacher's account of a Quaker meeting.

Thanks to jducoeur for a pointer to this meta community over on Dreamwidth.

I remember reading a blog post somewhere about someone who rigged up a camera to find out what his cat did all day. Now someone is selling that. Tempting!

In case you're being too productive, let me help with this cute flash game (link from Dani).

We went to my parents' house this evening. (Their holiday, not mine, but the gift thing is a strong family tradition.) During dinner someone mentioned a gift gone wrong from yesterday: my sister, not understanding the technologies involved, had bought my mother (a dedicated Elvis fan) an SD card with photos and some MP3s. She had thought that she was buying a means to play them, but no -- and since she doesn't know this space, the pricing didn't tip her off. They were talking at dinner about hooking this up to my father's new iMac somehow so she could view/listen, which is more work than anyone intended. (I assume the iMac doesn't have a direct interface and they were going to go through a camera via USB to copy files to disk, or something.)

The digital photo frame we gave my father an hour later made that much easier. :-)

I am now in possession of a Roku box for streaming Netflix to the TV -- yay! There's a bit of delayed gratification, however; due to a bug [*] and connection-type limitations in our TV, I need to go buy some component-video cables. So tomorrow I will be able to set it up (and finish rewiring the TV cluster because, hey, if you have to wade in anyway...). I promised Dani a wiring diagram in exchange for setup help. (This is help of the "hold this" and "plug that in there" variety; actually figuring it out is my job.)

[*] If an s-video cable is plugged in to the TV, all devices using composite video lose their video. Neither the documentation nor Google has been able to help me figure out why. I sure hope component video has no such complications. (Currently the Tivo (series 1) and DVD player are both connected via composite; I'd like to upgrade the DVD player to component and move that composite connection to the Roku box.) The TV does not support three composite connections, only two -- so the third has to be component or s-video.

I am home from Pennsic. It was fun -- good music, good camp, visited with some but not all friends, weather was mostly fine. More later. It began inauspiciously: a couple hours after I arrived it rained, followed by rain, followed by a storm (just for some variety, you know), followed by rain, and then a sprinkle (you tease!) followed by rain, followed by... you get the idea. That went on for about a day and a half (with two camp cars stuck in the mud trying to park) and then it cleared up. And as I said, it was fun otherwise. Rain is good for the land; we just need to work on distribution over time. :-)

While driving to pick up Erik from Mary's Assisted-Living Resort and Spa, Feline Edition (everything was fine, no problems), my other cat-sitter called. I don't use the phone while driving, so I returned the call a few minutes later and it went to voicemail. A few minutes after that he returned the call and my phone never rang (went straight to voicemail), just like Mary's call to let me know she was ready for Erik hand-off. But between those two calls the phone rang normally. This happens every now and then, seemingly randomly, and has happened with multiple phones. I assume the problem is Verizon, not my phone. How bizarre.

What'd I miss here? (And in the world, I suppose, but I have a pile of newspapers to help with that. Yes, I'd rather get the obsolete-by-the-time-I-see-them papers (and have a trusted party bring them in) than tell a stranger that the house he comes to every day will be vacant for a week...)

Notes to self (and any interested onlookers):
( technology, processes, playback options )

Dani and I saw a performance by Second City last night. It was a mixed bag -- some very funny bits, some that fell flat for me, and more scripted than improv (which surprised me). I hadn't realized that Second City is sort of a franchise; there are several troupes out there using the name. I assume they share base material. (This show was, in part, customized for Pittsburgh, some in ways that could be easily reused and some not.) The Second City we saw in Toronto years ago was doing something akin to modern commedia dell'arte; the local show was (mostly) more-conventional comedy sketches. Still fun, as I said -- just different. (I think my favorite was the sketch where the teenager's mom starts answering the instant messages on his computer. Serves the kid right for not using a password, I say. :-) )

Someone local took a few thousand dollars and ran in the NH presidential primary, and he actually came in ahead of some of the "real" candidates. The local newspaper reports his reaction to receiving this news thus: "Son of a (gun), no (kidding)? That's (really) amazing." Or something like that, anyway. :-)

Commenting on the FBI getting its wiretaps shut off for non-payment of bills, xiphias posted this story that made me laugh. I'm not saying I believe it -- just that it made me laugh.

If you've read a little talmud, or haven't but still laughed at the halacha of Xmas, you will probably enjoy Tractate Laundry, linked by velveteenrabbi.

Pleo, a robotic dinosaur reminiscent of Aibo, looks like it would be a fun geek-toy. I wonder what the cats would do. (No, I am not going to spend that kind of money to find out. :-) )

I realized tonight that we have more phones (plugged in, on the landline, I mean) than we get (legitimate) calls in a month. Um... I'm not sure what that says about us. (Why do we have a landline? Aside from the general-precautions factor, because there is one use case not covered well by cell phones: the caller just needs to reach, or leave a message for, the household, and not a specific member.)

Monica

random bits

tablet

it would be easier if it could just read my mind

"7 things" #2

but those were useful features!

where do I find this kind of consultant?

data mining

good customer service: Matt at Sq. Hill T-Mobile

curse you, Firefox

laugh of the day

brain trust: Firefox 7, 8, neither?

wait, what?

we now join the 21st century, already in progress

getting security groups right

G+

the end of a perfect record

Verizon iPhone?

some reading material

Kindle: first impressions

link round-up (including some nifty visualizations)

short takes (link round-up, mostly)

family visit and technology

home from Pennsic

notes on the digitizing-music project

random bits

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