Category Archives: General

Stuff that doesn’t fit into existing categories

Snippets of interest

Jon Galloway on how to avoid RSI by ditching the mouse, with particular attention to web browsing, which is one of the hardest things to do with just a keyboard.

(My particular pet hate is that even Alt-D to get to the address bar can get disabled when a web page has Flash on it.)

Telstra Sensis and NineMSN have clubbed together with mylocal.com.au to try and fight off the onslaught from Google (who have data from truelocal.com.au).

Long Zheng has a great piece on the next steps for GUI environments, pointing out that, really, they haven’t changed all that much over the years.

Stuff and nonsense

Very interesting guide to DVD media, highlighting which brands you should entrust to your most treasured archives (but check yearly and re-burn regularly!) and which should be saved for stuff that doesn’t really matter.

Commodore launches game machines with high-end components and custom-painted cases, using that same old C= logo, preloaded with Windows Vista and a Commodore 64 emulator! Launching in April.

Haven’t tried these yet, but Killfile for Google Groups (Firefox/Greasemonkey) and Killfile for Google Groups (IE). Shame Google doesn’t implement this themselves, of course, so users don’t have to install it on each browser they read from.

Friday brief stuff

Google for the Enterprise: Google Apps Premier edition is here. $50 / user account / year, providing Gmail, GTalk, GCalendar, GDocs & Spreadsheets, GPage with guaranteed uptimes, phone support and more storage and options.

Favicons: Good article on making a good favicon.

One commenter left a useful link to the PNG2ICO command-line tool. This online tool also looks handy.

RIP: Robert Adler, the man who invented the TV remote control (despite not watching much TV himself, apparently).

Earth-Destruction Status

I think we can all agree there are many issues with life on earth. A solution that may not have occurred to many of us is total destruction of the earth.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

Current Earth-Destruction Status

Some brief stuff

Good news for our friends across the Tasman: iTunes NZ just opened.

Speculation that the death of CNet editor James Kim can be attributed to bad advice from an online mapping service, which didn’t know the road the family took was dangerous in winter. I’ve previously noted faults in trip planners though the worst I encountered was trips that would take too long, gain you a traffic ticket or were physically impossible.

By the way, for those in Melbourne, Metlink now have their Journey Planner plotting more trips, and showing you maps, including walking to the stop.

Microsoft’s RSS blog featured a pr0n image for a short time due to a Flickr image owner protesting over use of his picture without attribution.

No Need To Standalone

Web developers have been using the very handy IE standalone for a while now. It gives access to IE versions dating back to IE3. While a handy tool to check backwards compatibility there are some limits and drawbacks.

Now Microsoft, yes, Microsoft, have come to the party and released a virtual hard drive that comes with a licensed copy of Windows XP SP2 and IE 6.0 installed. While targeted for the cross over time as people update from IE 6 to IE 7 it’s an incredibly handy (yet large) download. All you need is the, also free, Microsoft Virtual PC and you can have fully functioning IE 6 and 7 on the same PC. Hopefully further down the track they may release the 5.0 versions as an alarming number of people are still using these dinosaurs.

I like traffic lights

In case you’ve ever wondered…

Vertical slats are used to prevent people in the wrong spot seeing the light, eg for diagonal intersections like Camberwell Junction.

Horizontal slats are used to prevent people at a distance seeing the light, when they should be concentrating on a closer one.

Mesh can be used when both are a problem. Which is probably not very often.

Amazon’s data loss

Amazon has lost historic data. Sales data. Data for profiling customers.

I know. They lost mine.

I found out because it wouldn’t let me look inside The Complete Far Side because I don’t have an account that’s bought stuff – according to their records.

Except now I can look at the excerpt, but still they reckon I haven’t bought anything.

Weird.

Brief stuff

It’s a bit quiet here this week, probably because I’m busy and Josh is away offline somewhere in Gippsland.

Google have announced the Anita Borg scholarship programme is now running in Australia, offering A$5000 scholarships to women studying at undergraduate or postgraduate level in computer science in Australia.

One of the oldest games software houses in the world, let alone Australia, Melbourne House is in trouble, and likely to be sold/offloaded by Atari in the near future.

Another example of where being geek luddite is good: Dans Data on why the latest and greatest X mega-pixel cameras aren’t good value for money. I’m sticking with my 3.1MP Canon A70, thanks — for web and domestic use, it’s great.

Nothing lasts forever. This page logs the deaths of free email services: Free email DeathWatch.

Girls, music, and virtual PCs

Hmm, a calendar of Australian IT women, in the name of encouraging more women into the industry. Available online at itgoddess.info.

If you’re more at home with mucking about on Virtual Machines, then you might be interested to know that Virtual PC is now free.

Billy Bragg has applauded MySpace for backing down on their T+Cs imposed on artists who used the site to distribute music. “I am very pleased to see that MySpace have changed their terms of agreement from a declaration of their rights into a declaration of our rights as artists, making it clear that, as creators, we retain ownership of our material.”