Les Orchard has switched his 0xDECAFBAD blog over to WordPress.
In between bouts of actually being busy, I’ve been yak shaving around the idea of executing this overhaul–making lists, researching sites I like, installing WordPress on my laptop. Finally, after a bit of a weekend sprint during which I mangled the default theme a bit to my liking and installed a few plugins, I figured that I’d just throw the switch tonight and deal with the fallout as it arrives.
Welcome to the family, Les!
If you’re visiting this site directly (not just reading a feed), and have javascript enabled, then you should be seeing the nifty Red Cross donation banner in the upper-right corner of the page. Brian Alvey explains how to add it to your own site. All I had to do was to upload the image to my own server, paste a bit of javascript into my template’s footer.php, and adjust the image tag to use the my local copy of the image.
Read the comments on Brian’s site to find versions of the image in other languages, or to find a Salvation Army version.
(via: lifehacker)
…updates from blo.gs are still hosed.
Tivo Series2 40GB DVR — $50 after rebate!
A couple of days ago, I read about a $150 rebate from Tivo. This brings the price of a unit down to the “impulse buy” level. I’m thinking about getting us a 40GB unit. I figure that if we decide that we need more space later, we can just hack a larger hard drive into it.
And actually, that may not even be necessary, as I’ve just read that you can now stream video from a PC to the Tivo over a network. Which effectively means that any PC in your home can be used for auxilliary Tivo storage.
I expect that we’ll get pretty good usage out of Tivo. We often miss shows that we like because we’re busy trying to get our kids to bed. And of course, digging out a blank VHS tape and programming the VCR is a pain in the neck (plus you only get 2-6 hours of recording, depending on what kind of video quality you’re willing to put up with). It would be nice to let Tivo keep track of which shows we want to see, automagically record them for us, and timeshift them to when we can actually sit down for an hour.
Current Tivo users: tell me about your favorite Series2 Hacks sites!
After almost 8 years, Slashdot’s HTML is finally getting an overhaul. For now the changes are almost entirely under the hood, as we migrate the current skin to CSS…
I can’t bring up the Slashcode site right now (they slashdotted themselves!), but I’m betting that they’ll see a pretty substantial bandwidth savings when all is said and done.
I talked to my mom this morning, and she said that all of our Mississippi relatives are accounted for. One family lost their house and is staying with other relatives, and one of my great aunts fell and broke her hip, and is in the hospital. Other than that, everyone is fine.
I have a lot of family in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Fortunately, my closest relatives — my mother, father, step-father, grandmother, plus some aunts, uncles, and first cousins — were not in the most heavily affected areas. Granny was visiting one of my aunts in New York. Her flight home was canceled twice, so she returned on Wednesday instead of Monday, but at least she has a home to return to. My mom rode things out at her house in Fairhope, with not much worse than power outages and downed tree limbs. My father stayed with friends on Sunday night, but stubbornly returned to his home on Dog River in Mobile on Monday morning, despite warnings of a possible 10′ storm surge.
But I also have some second cousins and such who live(d?) in Mississippi, mainly around Biloxi and Gulfport. The last we heard, one of my great aunts was heading up towards Jackson. We haven’t heard from her or any of our other relations in that area since last weekend. We’re hoping that they just don’t have a way to get in touch yet, and that they’re all safe.
A gentleman at our office is collecting supplies for victims of Katrina. He, in turn, will be passing them to another person, who has a box trailer which she is going to fill up with supplies and drive down to the Gulf Coast area. Susan and I packed up two boxes and a baby bag full of baby clothes, diapers, formula, bottled water, bottles, nipples, and other baby necessities. We can only hope that these things can help in some small way. We’re also going to make a cash donation to relief efforts, probably through a local television station that’s doing a joint Red Cross/Salvation Army collection. And as soon as I can, I’m going to donate blood.
Here in Metro Atlanta, the worst we’ve seen are short-term gasoline shortages, skyrocketing gasoline prices, and reports of people trying to steal gasoline from cars in parking lots. My mom says that there’s no gasoline to be found in the Gulf Shores area right now, and that grocery stores are starting to run low on a lot of staple items. In New Orleans, the Mississippi coast, and the surrounding areas, things are much, much, worse.
The last time that this country suffered a major disaster, people pulled together, unified. But in this emergency, we’re horrified to hear reports of looting, car-jackings, shots fired at rescue helicopters (!?!), and worse. How is it that some people in the midst of such a situation become nothing more than animals? No, worse than animals. I don’t know what to say. I try not to think about that aspect of things, and concentrate instead on the efforts of those who are trying to make things better. If you haven’t already done something to help, do so. Even a small donation to relief efforts will do some good.
I noticed earlier this morning that the blo.gs updates appear to be functioning (more or less) normally again. I haven’t heard anything from my contact at Yahoo!, so I don’t know if they found a better way to filter the information from feed updates, or if they simply dropped feed updates from their ping sources. It still seems to be seeing some spurious false-positives, but it’s much better than before.
We have some software that requires a hardware dongle, which connects to a standard printer port (25-pin DIN, female). Dongles are annoying enough, normally. But now we would like to occassionaly run this software on our new laptop. No, problem, just move the dongle over, right?
Nope. The new laptop doesn’t have a printer port. Just USB and Firewire. We found a USB/Printer adaptor, but it converts to a Centronics connector, not a 25-pin DIN, so no joy there.
Has anybody seen a way to add a standard, old-school printer port to a laptop via USB (or Firewire)? There’s probably a docking station available, but I’m sure that would be more expensive than we’re willing to deal with right now.
Here’s an awesome list of titles for Klingon Fairy Tales. Some of my favorites:
Additions I’d make:
What would your favorite be?