Penny Arcade: I Like Clothed Parties, Myself.
We’re having a party tonight. It will have clothes.
Also PA related, Les Orchard alerted me to the existance of an official PA RSS feed. It was cleverly hidden on their Cool Stuff page with a bunch of other things that haven’t been updated in years.
I’m off now to go see Lord of the Rings: Return of the Acronym! Much excitement.
Lazy blogging through quotation:
Apple on Wednesday released Battery Update v1.1, software which enhances PowerBook and iBook battery performance by making sure that full capacity is available.
As said by MacCentral
LiveJournal has updated the RSS feeds that free accounts produce to include the full entry text. Previously only paid accounts had the full text in RSS. I like this very much.
You also no longer need a code to get a free account. If you care about that sorta thing.
Well, I reinstated last year’s holiday style… and then I decided that I didn’t like it. So I set about tweaking the things I didn’t like. Which was, well, pretty much everything. Welcome to the new design. :)
If in doubt. Reload.
I drew some trees, got rid of many many boxes, tweaked some colors, and added cute little snow flakes everywhere. The only thing I’m not happy with is the logo/’mintchaos’ text in the sky. I’ll be changing that.
Let me know if anything looks exceptionally borked in your browser of choice.
Saddam Hussein has been captured. A few references:
Update: Slate has a great collection of about 50 editorial cartoons from all over. [via: Ned]
Congratulations men of the 4th Infantry Division!
Wow. You really need to watch this (17.5mb Window Media Video). It’s a video of someone with far more free time than me playing and beating Super Mario Brothers 3 in under 11 minutes. Did I mention wow yet?
My favorite part is two minutes and eleven seconds in when he takes on the first level in world eight. In case you aren’t familiar, level 8-1 is mean. Lots and lots of bombs and flying wrenches everywhere and you can’t control the scrolling. Level 8-1 is why use racoon-suit/coin tricks to get 99 lives before I get to 8-1. He not only plays 8-1 without dying, he finishes it with 75 more lives than he starts it with and he only touches the ground 6 times!
Wow.
Tim blogged this a few days ago, but I just got around to watching it.
Design Within Reach is holding an interesting compition. They are giving out $1000 gift cerfitcates to the two “best designed miniature chairs”: built solely from champagne cork hardware. Sounds like fun. I think I’ll try.
$1000 doesn’t buy much from DWR, but it would get me one of these.
We momentarily interrupt this blog to talk about things I want. Gimme gimme!
First off. If I were to get only one thing I want it to be a license for xScope. If no one buys this for me I’m buying it myself when my trial version runs out. I downloaded it a while back, but didn’t get a chance to use it until just recently. Wow. If you design anything for on-screen display you need this app. You can’t gain full appreciation for this app until you use it while actually working.
Then there is of course the ubiquitous Amazon Wish List. Notable items include Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, and a 27” Sony Wega television. :-)
There are of course a couple of t-shirts from Think Geek.
And on the super cheap end, these stickers crack me up.
We now return you to your previously scheduled drivel.
Under Jaguar I loved and used PTHClock and PTHPasteboard all the time. Since I’ve upgraded to Panther both utilities have been unavailable. I haven’t found a replacement for PTHPasteboard yet, but I did find wClock.
wClock is exactly what I want in a menu bar clock. It shows the current time and date in the menu bar. The format is completely customizable. And a single click shows or hides a calendar. Well done!
Now if anyone knows of a nice simple multi-pasteboard for OS X I‘d really like to know about it. All I want is something that holds 20 or so copied items, has a non-intrusive interface, and can be controlled entirely from the keyboard. Essentially I want a PTHPasteboard that works in Panther. Oh well, I may just have to wait until the new commercial version of it comes out and buy it.
The current wallpaper on my new (and quite large if I do say so myself) display is the most excellent Middle Earth Map from Pixelhaus.
The setup:
I’m approaching computational bliss.
Here are my first day thoughts. With mild amounts of ontology for good measure.
The computer:
Display:
Misc:
Ergonomics:
Merry Christmas to me!
To anyone who might assume otherwise (me). iChat does not save logs of your conversations unless you explicitly tell it to in the preferences.
For a while now i’ve been planning a post. A post where I was going to tell you about how I sold my iBook to my brother and got one of these PowerBooks. I was going to tell you about how I bought this bag to carry it around in, and about how it didn’t have a cd burner so I picked up a great 52x cd burner. Yes. Those were all good things I was going to tell you. But I wont. I wont because that PowerBook died.
To anyone concerned, due to the various wonderful circumstance the loss of this computer doesn’t put me out any money just time.
It died on the trip from my house to Ann’s parent’s house for Thanksgiving. This complicated life. I can’t accomplish much without a computer. Because we had to buy a new one we thought that we weren’t going to be able to go to Florida with my family over Christmas for two and a half weeks. Too much time being gone, and not enough time working making money to pay for a new computer. But my parents are buying one of our plane tickets so we’ll be able to go down for a week. First crisis averted. Thanks mom and dad!
But I still needed to work. Michael has graciously lent me his iBook for a couple of weeks until my new one gets here. So I swapped the hard drive out of my dead computer and into his iBook. The PowerBook was amazingly easy to operate on. The iBook. Not so. Forty-plus screws of 8 different sizes, 5 covers/panels, 4 impossibly small ribbon cables and 8 hours later I had an iBook booting from my PowerBook’s HD with 100% of my files intact. Thanks Michael!
Of course I have to do it again when I put his HD back. But I have skillz™ now. Thanks skillz!
And new toys are headed my way! A 12 inch PowerBook with 768mb of RAM (which if you want my opinion has been sitting at the FedEx sort facility in Sacramento for too long) and a nice 17 inch Apple Studio Display (which has left the Sacramento sort facility but hasn’t gotten anywhere else yet). Thanks Apple! And when they finally get here I’ll thank FedEx too. ;-)
Oh, Thanksgiving was quite wonderful. There was much good food. I helped move Ann’s Sister and Brother-in-law into their new house, read a couple of novels, played some Advance Wars and beat Metroid Fusion again. I have a delightful life. Thanks God!
