because not enough websites start with the letter “Z”
Posted in nerdliness on Jul 27th, 2008
My note taking involves three kinds of paper. Plain, or blank paper, lined paper like we all used in school, and graph paper. Plain At home and at work I tend to reuse paper for random notes or temporary lists. Anything the I print out single-sided gets torn into quarters and used a scrap paper. [...]
Posted in life, nerdliness on Jul 24th, 2008
Sibylle and I are preparing for our next overseas trip, which starts in just six weeks. Travel brochures, train schedules, dreaming of places to go, et cetera. Last year, after some deliberation, we opted to not take a laptop with us. Instead I took a 40 GB drive in a USB/Firewire enclosure, and the card [...]
Posted in elsewhere, nerdliness on Jul 23rd, 2008
Amateur Neurotica has a new posting about those incredibly annoying telemarketing phone calls that greet you with a computerized voice when you answer the phone. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment expressed in her posting. I would add, however, that until you endure the computerized greeting, and the hold time, and tell the human [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Jul 22nd, 2008
(These steps assume you already have a version of Eclipse installed under /opt.) Step 1. Download Eclipse Ganymede: $ wget http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/eclipse/technology/epp/downloads/release/ganymede/R/eclipse-jee-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz (NB: I’m using the J2EE version, adjust the download if you want a different install.)[1] Step 2. Untar the downloaded file. $ tar xzvf eclipse-jee-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz Step 3. Change to the /opt directory. $ cd [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Jul 18th, 2008
coconutBattery isn’t just a tool which shows you only the current charge of your battery – it also shows you the current maximum capacity of it in relation to the original capacity your battery hadas it left the factory. You also get information about the battery-loadcycles (how often did you fully load your battery), the current charger (coconutBattery even warns [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Jul 17th, 2008
Increasingly the places where I work required frequent password changes. And the new password policies also tend to stipulate lengthy, complicated passwords. ”Must contain upper and lower case letters, numbers, symbols, et cetera.” The kicker is not being allowed to repeat a password for so many iterations. Developing a good 8 – 12 character password [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Jul 17th, 2008
With the release of WordPress 2.6 this week I was preparing to update both my test sites and our public sites using the rsync method I wrote about in April. Quite by happenstance I read an article on Download Squad about the WordPress Automatic Updater plugin, and decided to give that a try instead. In [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Jul 13th, 2008
Ever since getting my first Palm Pilot many years ago, I have been a big fan of electronic books. First with Peanut Press, and now with eReader, I have collected nearly 400 electronic books. The diminutive screen size has never bothered me, and I have enjoyed the portability and availability of having one, or two, [...]
When I was a child going to the grocery store and watching the bag boy work was always fascinating to me. Standing at the end of the conveyer belt, he sorted items into different bag. Some items were shunted aside for later bags, occasionally an item was repositioned in a new bag. They were fast [...]
Posted in nerdliness on Jul 11th, 2008
When I was a child I was given a large set of wooden blocks. The set included a huge variety of sizes and shapes, and I spent many happy hours building any number of things with them. My favorite activity was to build large towers; some required that I stand on a chair to add [...]