I’m not sure if anyone but a close bunch of friends noticed, but I took the blog down while I was moving some things around in the background here. Nothing big, but moved a few subdomains over to the excellent slicehost and off my old hoster TextDrive (now Joyent).
They’re still excellent, but they’re not about to upgrade their old BSD boxes and it was getting to be a bit difficult with working with new stuff like git and rails 2.0.
It’s well known amongst my friends that I loath cleaning (though I love a clean house.). I’m not sure why. I have friends who find it therapeutic. It may be that it’s because cleaning, and especially dishwashing and vacuuming, were used as punishment for transgressions when I was a child – in fact, I used to “design” small saucer robots with treads (obviously powered by imagination alone) which would take care of the vacuuming for me.
I’ve been using the Firefox beta for a week now and I have to admit, it’s a wholesale improvement over the 2.x branch. More stable, uses lower memory and the OS integration is much nicer, particularly on OSX with the default Proto theme. Works just as nice as Aranox’s GrApple that I’ve been using.
Haven’t really taken advantage of most of the newer features they’ve developed though do like the way they’ve added tagging to the bookmarking though I imagine it will be a little while before the Delicious bookmarking Add-On moves in line with it.
I just got through cleaning up and prepping my old 12" G4 Powerbook (quite seriously, the best computer I have ever used), to give to a friend whose 1st generation iBook is starting to wheeze with the things she needs it to do (and who is giving it to her Mom whose computing needs are relatively modest in comparison).
Now, as a preamble, I try to live quite greenly. I use low power appliances wherever I can, use public transport, take the train whenever practical instead of flying and in general, think of myself as a (compared to most people I know) as quite an easy-on-the-planet kind of guy. My problem is computers. I know they are horrendously toxic and everything about them from manufacturing to disposal is the anti-thesis of green but I make both my living off manipulating and making them more effective.
Scarily, most of the most popular posts on my blog are not about my fascinating rock-star lifestyle, but actually revolve around:
It’s been ages since I wrote about the software I use on my desktop, and it definitely needs a refresh as the changes are huge compared to when I first posted on what was on the desktop , but I did want to draw some attention to some new apps that are out recently that are definitely worthy of attention.
If you’re like me and use the excellent menu bar extra Meteorologist to keep up with the weather everywhere you’re going (or want) to be, you’ve probably been pretty annoyed that it’s impossible to add cities for a while now due to a broken search function.
I don’t know how I missed it, but someone released an unsupported patch
that has a better solution to fixing the
non-updating problem than I supplied a /etc/hosts hack
for fixing both the update and the searching and adding cities problem.
Amnesty International (disclaimer: who I work for), has just released their 2007 Annual Report which outlines the state of the world’s human rights.
Available in five languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic).
Lotta stuff going on in the world that people don’t know enough about, or even worse, are doing nothing about when they do know about it.
I have a love/hate relationship with Apple’s Mail.app. It’s pretty and powerful and has good rule based filters, ok junk mail detection and good support for imap, pop and even Exchange accounts.
However, at times I have to say I’m looking longingly at other mail clients, in particular Thunderbird (so don’t even get me started on the fact I should already be back on Ubuntu… I’m looking for a good laptop before moving back.).
If, like me, you use the excellent Meteorologist toolbar application on OSX to keep track of weather in loads of different places (especially handy for travel, though I just noticed I track London, Paris, Vancouver, Kelowna, Whistler, San Francisco, Mexico City, Toronto and Amsterdam… ahem…) you were probably put out this week when it suddenly stopped working.
Normally, when this has happened in the past, it has been a problem with parsing the XML data that weather.com sends.
Just big props and a huge, hearty congratulations to my very dear friend ZA, the hottest greenpeace toxics campaigner and evil genius behind the Green My Apple campaign.
Steve Jobs’ announcement yesterday in the change in Apple policy (GPI’s take on it ) basically addresses many of the major points in the campaign and is a victory all round for the Greenpeace campaign, and most importantly, people and the planet.
Well done Ze! You kick ass!