Faced with foot-high grass in our back yard and a no-show lawn service, we bought a lawn-mower this weekend. Yesterday, I spent about three hours (including a couple of water breaks and a fuel refill) beating the grass into submission. When all was said and done, our lawn was looking pretty nice. I’m really glad that we spent the extra money for a self-propelled mower. We’ve got about an acre of land, and that gentle … Continue reading
Have you ever wished that you could have your own wireless network available, wherever you go? How about a mobile wireless access point, GPS tracking, and a webcam in your car? Would that do the trick? The EVDO StompBox Project is just such a beast. So, if you’ve got about $700 and some time to blow, you’re all set! [via: BoingBoing]
I’m sure some of you have noticed that I’m experiencing occassional server problems. The host I’m on has been overtaxed, mostly due to spammer activity (both web and email varieties). There are times when the server load spikes up into the 20s, which is ridiculously high. To combat the problem, I set up a cron job which monitors the load level, and restarts apache and mysql when it goes above a certain threshold. However, for … Continue reading
If you’re like me, you’ve been hearing “Ruby this” and “Rails that” everywhere you go. But I don’t have time right now to be playing with a new development framework, however nifty it may be. Busy, busy, busy, that’s me. I’ve got my perl programming to do at the day job, and in those tiny little niches of time that I can nab for other things, it’s generally PHP for me. But maybe now we … Continue reading
Ping-O-Matic is one year old today. To think that my lowly little service pinger, originally created to help me gain an edge on BlogShares, is all grown up and sending out approximately 1 million pings per day! We’ve sent out pings on behalf of over a half-million individual blogs, and over 85 thousand in just the last week. I haven’t been able to give PoM as much attention lately as I’d like. I still have … Continue reading
The 9rules Network is a website affiliate network. They have chosen WordPress to power their blog, and hint at more things to come. Wordpress’ powerful theme architecture and plugin API gives us the ability to not only build a powerful blog, but to empower an entire Network – as you’ll soon see. WordPress is not just for blogs anymore. We’re utilizing some of the very latest features available in WordPress Strayhorn (1.5) to build the … Continue reading
Recently, while Susan was driving the kids around, our daughter saw a convertible and commented that she’d like a car “with the lid down”. Susan told her, “save your money!” That’s our stock response to the kids whenever they request anything expensive. Anyhow, Susan has always thought that Mary would be really cute in a MINI (when she’s old enough to drive, of course). So we were joking around about that, and began to wonder … Continue reading
Has anyone else noticed brick-and-mortar stores that offer auction services through eBay? There are two in my area that I’m aware of so far. One is TheTradingBay, in Marietta, which I pass each day on my way to work. The second is iSoldIt, which has a store in Woodstock. Basically, they operate sort of like a consignment shop which fronts your items through eBay. “Clicks-to-Bricks” isn’t exactly a new idea. But for some reason, I … Continue reading
There’s a new plugin for MovableType called SpamLookup. Let’s compare this add-on to the anti-spam features already in the WordPress core: Feature Comparison for MT SpamLookup Plugin vs. WordPress Core Feature SpamLookup Plugin WordPress Core IP-based lookup Yes No Domain-based lookup Yes No TrackBack IP check * Yes No Passphrase checks Yes No Checking HTTP Headers Yes No Hyperlink Count limits Yes Yes Dynamic proxy checking Yes Yes Wordlists (blacklist/graylist) Yes Yes Whitelist URL checks … Continue reading
Oh yeah, and Wil Wheaton is also pondering a possible switch to WordPress. Some plans: […] Rebuild the entire site, either in Movable Type, or in WordPress. Right now, I’m playing with a development version of WordPress, and I’m very excited about what it can do. It may not be for me, but I’m enjoying the test drive. […] I’m still kicking myself for not buying an autographed copy of Dancing Barefoot when I had … Continue reading