Daniel Bergey Commotion

OpenDNS Shortcuts

In Internet on 20 July 2008 tagged dns, Internet, opendns, productivity with 1 comment

I use OpenDNS for DNS resolution (the way domain names match up to websites) on my home and office networks. My favorite feature is their URL Shortcuts. I have a bunch of them set up to quickly search various sites I use often:

The idea is that you can type something like ‘esv gal 5 1’ or ‘wiki cumberland valley’ and be taken to the appropriate page, bypassing several pages you’d normally have to navigate through, like search results.

I was having trouble today with the next-to-last one on that list: the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. But it looks like they fixed it while I was writing this post. Unless I clicked the actual “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on their front page, Google was just taking me to a search results page, even if I pasted in the google.com url I was redirected to for a split second.

I save a lot of time using these shortcuts. If you don’t use them already, why don’t you start now?

Quirks

In Humor, Life and Mac on 19 July 2008 tagged ocd, personality, quirks with 5 comments

Rands In Repose posts a list of peoples’ personal quirks that he gathered via Twitter. I share a bunch of them, but I’ve got a whole pile of unique ones, too:

• I always make sure the paper coffee cup’s seam (and sleeve fold if there is one) is directly below the sipping hole so I can drink it without looking. This produces a helpless feeling if the cup is made without a seam.
• I always wet my toothbrush before after applying toothpaste. Sometimes that makes the toothpaste fall off.
• When I was a kid, I kept track of how many clockwise and counter-clockwise rotations accumulated while moving around in a room, and always made sure to unwind them by spinning that number of times in the proper direction when leaving. Or, I tried NOT to accumulate any rotations.
• I can’t step on sidewalk cracks. If I do, I have to step on another one, with the opposite foot.
• When I didn’t have a rotary volume dial on my car radio, I always made sure to press the volume up and down buttons in multiples of five. Now I just make sure the digital marker is perfectly centered between digital ticks on the display.
• It bugs me if my Mac’s application windows aren’t all tiled or lined up, with no overlaps and no spaces (or a 1 pixel space, but it depends).
• I always use my turn signal, even when I’m pulling into a parking space or the driveway off our shared driveway. My reasoning is that if I neglect it even once, it could destroy my habit forever and I won’t be able to rely on it. Only slightly tongue-in-cheek.

I think there may be others that I’ve grown out of, or can’t think of right now. Outside observers may know of more.

Update: Today Jennifer caught me using my turn signal in the Wendy’s drive-thru. Yes, I was just following the the drive-thru around the building.

July 4th Notes

In Blogging, Books, Life and Work on 4 July 2008 tagged Blogging, Books, coffee, crackerbarrel, debt, finance, frasier, julyfourth, patriotism, peace, programming, tv, webdesign with 6 comments

I finished a consulting project yesterday that had been taking up most of my free time for the past couple of weeks. It has been nice to relax so far this weekend without that constant worry: “Isn’t there something else productive that I should be working on?” And for the first time in quite a while, I let myself sleep in late this morning — with the unfortunate result that I forgot to drink coffee until like two o’clock. Headache City.

Coming from an historic peace church, I’m not much for patriotism and the holidays thereof. But I’ve always liked watching the fireworks, and this afternoon I found myself — quite inspirationally, mind you — whistling Stars & Stripes Forever. Sometimes things just stick with you.

A family member gave us a gift card to Cracker Barrel¹ recently, and it was a fun Fourth-y place to eat brunch, even though it’s somewhat stressful to take a 15-month-old to a sit-down restaurant. Afterwards, I picked up Practices of an Agile Developer and Dreaming in Code at the nearby Books-A-Million², though I am now annoyed to see that it looks like I could have gotten them both for half what I paid, had I purchased them from Amazon’s Used section. I’m glad I got them, though. Hopefully I can find time to get through Practices this weekend.

Jennifer is sitting in her chair next to mine working mapping out our debt snowball³. I’m hoping she finishes soon so we can go crash.

Oh yeah, and I hope to make this blogging thing a regular deal.

I hereby declare the digital television transition a success

In Life on 1 June 2008 tagged analog, digital, dtv, television with 1 comment

Context: On February 17 of next year, analog television stations will cease broadcasting. This will no doubt upset a lot of people living in rural areas who do not currently pay for cable. Fortunately, the government is partially subsidizing digital converter boxes for those who do not yet have a television with a digital tuner (if you bought a new TV in the last few years, you probably already have one).

When we decided to purchase a television at the end of April (a controversial move on at least one side of the family tree), reception was pretty poor. We could somewhat blurrily receive the local NBC and CBS affiliates, and squint to watch public television and a very snowy ABC, but pretty much every time we changed the channel, the antenna had to be moved from one side of the TV to the other. That’s rural South Carolina for you.

So a few months ago I signed up for a TV converter box coupon. To make a long story short, yesterday I finally got around to purchasing it. Several trips to Wal-Mart (twice) & Radio Shack (twice) later, I had a 50db amplified antenna ($30) and a TV converter box ($20 after coupon).

Now, because of the way a digital signal works, you either get:

1. perfect reception,
2. a blocky picture and spotty sound, or
3. nothing at all.

Whereas an analog signal degrades gracefully, the picture going snowy first, and the sound accruing only mild static until the signal is completely gone.

Initially only one or two channels came in perfectly, and I was about to dismiss the whole transition project as a huge blundering government intrusion. But after two days of playing with it, and balancing the antenna on top of the nearby window’s curtain rod (not attractive), we now get perfect reception on all stations for the first time. Yay, technology!

Sure beats $60/month for Charter cable service.

You can find more information at the FCC’s official DTV transition website, and also claim your converter box coupon(s).

Weather Twitterbot for Greenville/Spartanburg/Anderson, SC

In Internet on 23 March 2008 tagged cool, Internet, twitter, twitterfeed, weather, yahoopipes with no comments

A week or so ago, we had tornado watches/warnings in our area. I decided to use Yahoo! Pipes and Twitter to make an early alert system. Weather.gov already offers a ton of XML & RSS feeds. I just needed to filter out the events and areas that didn’t apply, so that only local watches or warnings are reported.

Twitter users near Greenville, Spartanburg, or Anderson, SC should subscribe to it.

And in case you want to subscribe some other way (RSS, email, etc.), or make your own customized version, you can visit the actual Yahoo! Pipe.

It seems to work quite nicely; we’re apparently having a Freeze Watch tonight. Who knew?

Safari 3.1

In Mac on 18 March 2008 tagged browsers, css, webdev with no comments

Safari 3.1 is finally out, and it’s fast. There’s a new Develop menu, and the Web Inspector has received some welcome polish. But there is one expected feature that is missing in action, described in the post “Web Inspector Update” on the WebKit blog:

Inline CSS Editing

This is the biggest new feature of the Inspector. You can now edit CSS styles simply by double-clicking them in the Inspector’s Styles sidebar. This is really handy for tweaking the look of your site live in the browser.

It’s referred to again in the Safari 3.1 release notes, but I can’t get it to work in the final downloaded version, though it still works in the WebKit nightlies. Perhaps the feature was deemed yet too unpolished for official release — there are still a lot of bugs reported on it, and FireBug’s CSS editor is arguably better (and MacRabbit’s CSSEdit even more so!).

P.S.: The future of the Web Inspector looks even better.

When Stacks Go Bad

In Humor and Mac on 12 November 2007 with 1 comment

Not sure what happened here, but my Dock is still like this:

Closed:

Open:

Notes on Leopard

In Mac on 8 November 2007 with no comments

These are just a bunch of small things that either I’ve noticed or have been pointed out to me about Leopard:

• iChat supports IRC-style status updates. You can type “/me is installing Leopard” into an IM window, and it will display it in a style similar to iTunes track notification messages, or away message changes, substituting your name for “/me”. (thanks, Andy)

• GOOD: iChat now has a profile editor, catching up with the official AIM client. From 1998. BAD: Lime green and/or white italic underlined text on hot pink backgrounds.

• Because iChat officially supports invisibility now, it no longer displays the ‘This person is not online.’ alert when you try to message an offline contact (since it has no way of knowing if they’re offline or just invisible). Instead, AOL seems to be queueing messages for the next time they log on. That’s cool, because now you can leave a message for someone, instead of setting up an alert to notify you when they do log on, in hopes that you’ll still remember whatever it was you wanted to say.

• GOOD: iChat can log into multiple AIM/Jabber accounts simultaneously. BAD: Five simultaneous accounts means five separate buddy lists. Still, slowly catching up to Adium.

• Spaces is awesome, especially on an untethered laptop (meaning: away from additional 20” display). I never “got” virtual desktops before I used this implementation.

• Screen Sharing is nice to have in the OS, but I was very disappointed that it doesn’t go all full screen and swoopy when used outside of iChat. It also doesn’t work out-of-the-box with Ubuntu’s built-in VNC server (Gutsy Gibbon). (Update: It works using instructions found here.)

• Stacks are ugly. Which folder is that, anyway? Also, you have to mouse around with the contextual menu just to actually open the folder. No amount of clicking, double-clicking, or mashing modifier keys helps.

Some issues that it would be wonderful if plugin developers could address:

• Time Machine should issue a Growl notification when a backup finishes (because it gives me a fuzzy feeling to know that the last hour or two of work is now safe)

• Time Machine needs a Dashboard widget displaying its current status, which is currently only viewable in the system preferences pane.

• Quick Look needs to report on the contents of archives: .zip, .gz, .tar, .dmg, etc. A nice little list of the files’ names and sizes would be extremely helpful (I shall arrogantly assume Aladdin Allume SmithMicro is already working on one for .sit). Also, CSS files’ previews should render as text, like .txt and .php files do.

• iChat should employ some sort of Quick Look-like view for inline images. Once you’re used to Quick Look in the Finder, it’s frustrating to hit the space bar and have nothing happen, then remember you have to launch Preview to see that image at a comprehensible size.

And, as is tradition, I’ve already got my installation hacked up with a bunch of plugins, some Alpha-quality, some not:

• Chax 2.0 — Adds the features Apple forgot

• WidescreenMailPlugin — Makes your Mail window extremely narrow

• MiniMail — Like the mini iTunes window, but for Mail

• Saft for Leopard — Essentials like type-to-find, double-click-for-new-tab, and undo-tab-closing

• PlugSuit — Plugin enabler and manager prefpane. Lets you use many regular old InputManagers on Leopard.

Amazon MP3 Store: Better Value, But Not the Best

In Internet and Music on 26 September 2007 with 1 comment

Amazon.com just opened what looks to be the most worthy iTunes competitor yet. Purchased tracks play on nearly every media player ever made, since they’re DRM-free MP3s. And at 89—99¢ (with variable album pricing), they’re occasionally more economical than iTunes’.

So let’s do a price comparison of some music old and new:

I should point out that I’m motivated by three factors here: price, convenience, and audio quality. iTunes and Amazon MP3 are convenient, but a used CD still wins out in price and audio quality. Amazon’s 256KB/s encoding beats iTunes’ 128KB/s, and when iTunes does offer 256KB/s DRM-free downloads, they’re always more expensive than Amazon’s.

And I much prefer having physical media waiting in my closet in case I run over or otherwise destroy my iPod. That said, for any quick impulse purchases I do allow myself, I think I’ll go to Amazon before buying from iTunes.

The Tale of the Wireless Mighty Mouse

In Mac on 25 September 2007 with 1 comment

We spent last week in Maryland, visiting with my family. I planned to work some of time we were there, and when I pulled my Mighty Mouse out to use it, I discovered that it had been damaged in transit. Or at least it appeared to be; the side-squeeze buttons must have been messed up somehow, for they kept registering clicks over and over, zooming my Dashboard in and out quite alarmingly.

So off we trekked to the closest Apple store. I once tried to make my whole setup as wireless as possible (including sound), but found it impractical with the technology of that time. I thought I might start heading that direction again, so I used the opportunity to pick up a wireless version of the Mighty Mouse.

Either I completely forgot my prior experience with MacMice’ The Mouse BT, or else I figured Apple’s quality would be better. The Mouse BT was (and presumably still is, since I still have it somewhere) a two-button alternative to Apple’s then-current Apple Wireless Pro Mouse, it suffered from a slight, annoying lag which I suspect affects all Bluetooth mice to some degree. Plus, it ate batteries.

Back to the present: I was initially impressed with Apple’s new wireless mouse. It looks and works just like the wired version (which is still my favorite mouse, second only to my MacAlly iOptiNet). Except for the lag. The stupid, unpredictable Bluetooth lag. Like, when I move the Bluetooth mouse in small, tight circles, I don’t even get a consistent circle from the cursor. In my opinion, a wired mouse just feels Snappier™.

So I’m selling it, of all places, on Craigslist. It’s sort of an experiment. If you live in Upstate SC, or if you want to pay for postage to where you are, feel free to send me $60 for it —- which is a $10 savings over buying it new, I might add. Enjoy.

Oh, and if anyone wants my old The Mouse BT, you can have that for like $30 ($70 retail in 2004). Same deal with the postage.

Update: As Doug points out, it could be my hardware. This time, I’m using a Belkin Bluetooth adapter, since my internal Bluetooth module is fried. However, I was using the built-in Bluetooth with my The Mouse BT back in the day. Coincidence? Maybe. Either way, I can’t use the mouse now.