Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

Platform customized Google home pages

This morning saw the release of Firefox 1.0, a grand day for browsers everywhere. While I haven’t installed it yet myself (I’m still running PR1), we have been chatting about it online.
Firefox has as its default homepage “http://www.google.com/firefox” which in fact, brings up a modified Google search page that looks like Firefox’s default theme.
Catching the scent of geekitude, we set about finding other interesting pages:
http://www.google.com/firefox – The first one we found, Firefox themed.
http://www.google.com/mac – Macintosh themed
http://www.google.com/windows – Windows theme
http://www.google.com/palm – Simplified view – which carries through to search results. Very handy
http://www.google.com/itunes – Not sure about this one, it automatically brings you through to Google Adwords.
http://www.google.com/linux – Tux goes Google!
http://www.google.com/ie – For that, other, less well known browser.
I wonder where Google is going with this? It seems incomplete and inconsistent. Unusual for Google.
Update 11/09/2004 12:55pm…
A few more fun bits were located by Tim and others…
http://www.google.com/bsd – Chuck has his own Google logo!
http://www.google.com/unclesam – For the patriots
http://www.google.com/universities.html – This one may not count, it’s an HTML page (doesnt’ work without the HTML), but it is a search interface to college sites.
Should be noted that Google has a webpage that mentions some (but not all) of these sites here.

Danger! Danger!

According to Astraware, a new version of the extremely addictive game “Bejeweled” is due for release in December.

Dubbed Bejeweled 2, the feature set is rumored to include:

  • Explosive new pieces: Power Gems, Hyper Cubes and Time Bombs
  • Stunning special effects
  • Awe-inspiring planetary backdrops
  • Four ways to play: Classic, Action, Puzzle and Endless
  • Five secret game play modes to unlock
  • Explore a galaxy of hand-crafted brain-teasers in Puzzle mode
  • Play for eternity and collect jewelry in relaxing Endless mode
  • Enhanced sound effects and epic soundtrack

Going by how addictive the original game is, I should simply chalk off December and assume no work will get done at all.

New MovableType version

This weekend blog goddess Lisa spent a couple hours and upgraded the blogging software that drives Planet Geek and my business site Stonekeep Consulting. It was a bit of a rocky upgrade, but tonight everything is up and running properly.
A HUGE thanks to her and all the work put in. Yay!
One sideline… MovableType can now use TypeKey to verify people posting comments on the site. This is a way to help cut down the amount of blog spam my site gets (hundreds of attempted posts per day). If you don’t use TypeKey, comments postings will remain ‘queued’ until I approve them, so things posted may take a bit of time to appear.

XM Radio

I just got back from running registration at a customers event down in Washington, DC. Jonah generously agreed to be my second, as well as let us use his truck for hauling the equipment to and from the event. One of the nifty toys he has installed in the car is an XM Radio SkyFI receiver.
For the uninitiated, XM Radio is one of 2 satellite radio systems available that provide full time access to hundreds of radio stations from anywhere in the continental US. I had been intrigued by this concept for a while, but the cost of the receivers and the monthly fee (around $10) sort of scared me off.
Since this was a longish (7 hours) road trip each way, I had plenty of time to get a feel for the system.
I’m impressed! On the way south, we chatted a lot, so we left the receiver quietly playing 80s tracks. The unit rebroadcasts the reception via a local FM signal, so it was simply sitting on the dash playing through the cars stereo via the radio. The XM display would show what song by what artist was playing (in that nifty amber LCD display). Unobtrusive, no commercials (other than ones for XM itself), nice!
On the way back I did a lot of driving while Jonah slept, so I noodled around with the receiver, checking out other channels. The unit has a jog-dial on it that shows what station you’re tuning to, and the title and content. Blues, various rock stations, a couple different Jazz stations… then it got interesting.
Various news feeds (MSNBC, CNN, etc), a couple comedy stations and… whoah! NPR!! There is a full NPR feed as part of the lineup. We listened to This American Life as well as some other shows. The signal was strong, clean, and we were able to listen to it from the middle of New Jersey all the way into Massachusetts – something you can’t do with any local radio station, let alone NPR.
Okay, so that’s pretty neat. But it just got better. XM Radio is preparing to release MyFI, a portable XM radio receiver the size and shape of an iPod. It’s somewhat expensive ($349), and not out yet, but it’s mobile, rechargeable, dockable, and pretty durned sexy.
If XM were to ever get Radio Paradise as an active channel, there would be no question, I’d be there in an instant. As it is now, I’m just screamingly tempted. Heck, just for the regular drives we do up to Maine during the summer, having regular, dependable radio reception from door to door would be wonderful. And with something like the MyFI, we could put it in any vehicle we happen to be driving up in.

Your order has been shipped: (#011-412-1515)

From: 	Order Notification (orders@TheMan.com)
To: 	unsuspecting populace (minions@unwashedmasses.com)
Subject: 	Your order has shipped (#011-412-1515) (fwd)
Date: 	Wed, 3 Nov 2004 11:50:38 -0500
Greetings from The Great American Experiment.
We thought you'd like to know that we shipped this portion of your
order separately to give you quicker service.  You won't be charged
any extra shipping fees, and the remainder of your order will follow
as soon as those items become available.
You can track the status of this order, and all your orders, online by
visiting Your Account at http://tinyurl.com/6272p
There you can:
* Track order and shipment status
* Review estimated delivery dates
* Wonder how the rest of the world sees this
* And do many more things except materially affect the election outcome
The following items were included in this shipment:
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Qty      Item                           Price  Shipped  Subtotal
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1        Fear                           $11.20   1      $11.20
1        Nausea and Incredulity         $13.95   1      $13.95
1        5 Stages of Grief              $19.99   1      $19.99
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Item Subtotal:  $47.14
Shipping & Handling:  $5.25
Shipping Savings: -$0.99
Total:  $51.40
Paid by Visa:  $51.40
--------------------------------------------------------------------
You have only been charged for the items sent in this shipment.
(Per our policy, you only pay for items when we ship them to you.)
The following items will ship separately, as soon as they're available:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Qty      Item                           Price  Not Yet Shipped
---------------------------------------------------------------------
1     Presidential Inauguration      $49.99      1
3     Supreme Court Nomination       $24.99      3
This shipment was sent to:
Americans and Concerned Friends Worldwide
via USPS (estimated delivery date: January 20th, 2004).
For your reference, the number you can use to track your package is
07041776.  You can refer to our Web site's Help page or:
http://www.csmonitor.com/
to retrieve current tracking information.  Please note that tracking
information may not be available immediately.
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Please note: This e-mail was sent from a notification-only address
that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this message.
Thank you for shopping with us.
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The Great American Experiment

(Thanks to Adam Hirsch for this)

Depressed? Go see Keef!

I’m totally putting the current election nightmare out of my mind and getting on with my life. We survived the last 4 years, we’ll survive the next 4.
I did however get some very good news in my mail this morning. Keith Knight, the artist behind the K Chronicles, is going to be in Boston! He’s doing a bunch of touring about, here’s the info that went out in his mailing:

*K CHRONICLES/(TH)INK SLIDESHOW TOUR
i’ll be swingin’ on through a few of the cities that run one or both of my strips. if you haven’t seen my slideshow, ya gots ta check it out. favorite strips… censorship stories…shocking, controversial stuff..here’s the info i’ve got so far:
*SALT LAKE CITY, UT 11/9/04 7:30pm @ Westminster College, 1840 South 1300 East- FREE, ALL AGES EVENT
*CAMBRIDGE, MA 11/20/04 2-4pm @ Million Year Picnic, 99 Mt. Auburn St. Harvard Square-FREE, ALL AGES EVENT
*NEW YORK CITY 11/21/04 8pm @ Jigsaw Gallery, 526 E. 11th St.(between A & B)- FREE, ALL AGES EVENT

I hope I’ll be able to make it, he’s a great cartoonist.
*UPDATE: Did you know that Keef has a blog? I didn’t! He writes some good stuff.

Happy Evolution Client Performance Fixes!

A while back I had a hard system shutdown due to a battery failure, which ended up trashing some of the setup in Evolution, my mail client. I got it sort of running again, and restored backups of my calendar and my contact list, but I was having abysmal performance problems. Things were just deathly slow.
I reverted to using Pine for a while, which was fine, but I found myself -seriously- missing my address book and calendar. I guess I’ve been successfully reprogrammed.
Anyway, this morning I sat down to figure out my performance problems. I do everything in Evolution via IMAP (as I believe all mail clients should). No folders or information is stored locally, except instructions to the mail client as to where to go to find the IMAP mailboxes.
One of the settings in Evolution tells it that whenever it does something, it shoudl not only scan the inbox for new messages, but also scan all my subfolders. I had inadvertently set this option ‘on’. So everytime Evolution did something with the IMAP server, it scanned all my folders. And baby, I have a LOT of large mail folders.
Unchecked that option, and Evolution veritably -leaped- back into workable performance realms. I am a happy man.

Mmm. voting

I voted today.
Massachusetts uses the optical scanning voting machines for folks casting their ballots. They have the advantage of leaving an undeniable paper trail (everyone has a sheet of paper), as well as instant registration and counting (they are scanned immediately and data is collected right there and then).
Can someone tell me why these are inferior to ‘touch screen voting machines’, which have no paper trail, and audit capability is completely out of the hands of the people running the vote for the state?
Everyone at a site running the optical scan machines can pick up the votes, count them, and say “We have xxx votes recorded, if you give me af ew, I can even tell you who.” I bet one in 10,000 volunteers at sites using touch screen machines could get any form of information from the touch screen voting machines.
I just don’t get it.

Words fail me.

I actually saw this on a bumper sticker this afternoon. Everytime I try and figure out what is trying to be said here, I get a headache and move on to something else.

Let me see if I can summarize these things a bit. First, who the heck is the ACLU, and what do they really do? According to their “about” page:

The ACLU is our nation’s guardian of liberty. We work daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Our job is to conserve America’s original civic values – the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Okay, sounds pretty good. So, these guys are there to defend the rights of the individual vs the centralized authoritarian government by providing a check and balance against unquestioned dictates. So, I suppose in some ways an argument could be made that they are in fact the enemy of the “state”, in that they are there to counterbalance it. Note I say counterbalance, not overthrow, but I digress, which to me is an important distinction… but I digress.

Now, this particular bumper sticker replaces the ‘C’ with the symbol of the former soviet bloc, the ‘sickle and hammer’, representing, we assume here, the tenets of communism. The implication here is that the ACLU is a communist front, bent on overthrowing the US through it’s anti-authoritarian (and, by implication, it’s anti government) policies.

Okay, so lets look at what that means…

According to wikipedia, the definition of ‘communism’ is:

Communism, or communist society, is the name of the social formation that, according to Marx, would be a classless society in which all property is owned by the community as a whole, and where all people enjoy equal social and economic status.

I’m having a hard time connecting these two concepts, at least in the methodology that is implied in that bumper sticker. “Enemy of the state”, okay, someone who wants to bring down the state power. ACLU, a body that opposes centralized authoritarian rule when checks and balances aren’t in place… er, that’s a stretch, but I guess I might see that…

But… this bumper sticker is offered up as emblematic of the views presented by the ‘right wing’ crowd. The ones who detest central authority over local issues and personal details. The very private rights tha the ACLU is sworn to defend.

I’m so confused.

The master speaks..

This isn’t related -directly- to Politics, but it seems to be to be applicable to the current situation, where otherwise sane people still think George Bush is fit to lead this country…

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we’ve been so credulous.

    – Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

Retro Echo!

How many of these make you go “I know what that is! I used to do that all the time!”

IN#4

Control-Alt [SIDEKICK!] - Delete

C> ^P[enter] [pause] “GodDAMMIT! “

Hmm. Cool machine. What’s this? Superzap? That must be a game!

[S]pell “Tiltowait” HAHAHHA! DIE!

“Sure, I got Bilestoad. Whatcha got? Ooo, Karateka! ”

“I’ll take 2 doublesided, doubledensities please. Yeah, I could use 3, but I don’t have the extra $2.”

^R^R^R, hm… ^C… yeah… ^R^R^R… okay, i’m done. ^KX.. [C]… Damn [E].

“Whadya mean no command line!?!? It’s a friggin PDP11! Yeah, I got another interpretation of POS…

“Dude, I found this box. $5! 2 RX11s, an 11/34boardset, an RK11D and.. YES! An RL11! You still have those 2 RL01s? Man, this’ll bring me up to 10meg ! Score! Can I borrow some packs? I’ll sysgen this weekend… should only take about 22 hours.”

Wow. Can you imagine getting a ‘login: ‘ prompt? On a LAPTOP? ‘Hey, mind if I log into your machine? Here on the airplane?! Hahahahah!