ldopa.net

I’m pretty pleased at how my new business cards came out. I use PSPrint, by the way, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. They let you download a Photoshop template, you pretty it up and upload it back to them, and $25 later you have 250 full-color business cards.

~jeff

This might be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen (QuickTime 7 or VLC required).

~jeff

Here’s a nifty AppleScript that allows access to Google’s new VPN service via Mac OS X. It’s also an excellent study of how to very efficiently parse XML into AppleScript variables using grep and perl.

~jeff

I’ve finally located the bug where MySQL would choke on emailed weblog postings in WordPress. For future reference, or for others that might have the problem, the problem was:

• the wp-cron.php script was sending unescaped characters to the MySQL database, for example, apostrophes.
• the MySQL database would complain.
• the emailed post would stay in the queue, but since it never got into the MySQL database, it would not get posted.

To fix it, I changed line 155 of wp-mail.php from:

$content = trim($content);

to

$content = addslashes(trim($content));

…the downside to this approach is that only plaintext emails will post in an attractive manner, HTML-formatted emails will probably look very very bad.

~jeff

When I first got my first-generation Roomba, curious people invariably asked me two things about it:

1) Does it recharge itself? which it didn’t.

2) Can it be set to run itself? which it couldn’t.

With the release of the new Roomba Scheduler, iRobot has addressed both those concerns. The new Roomba can both (in theory) recharge itself and run itself at a time while you’re away. So that’s cool; however, I bet it still has a dustbin the size of a roll of quarters, so truly unattended robot vaccumming is still not entirely at hand. This is good news, however, as it means that robot-slave-type products that come out after this will be expected by the marketplace to charge and run themselves. I’m still waiting for my Omnibot 2000 to do that.

~jeff

My friend Josh makes some cool beep sounds. This one, I believe, is a sine wave lovingly shaped, enveloped and modeled into one of those soothing sounds you hear in the airport, when they are trying their best to calm you down and curtail your inevitable air rage. And it works: I’ve been using the sound for years, and I have yet to experience any air rage, anywhere inside my apartment or otherwise.

Download (thoughtfully provided in both AIFF and WAV format for all platforms).

~jeff

(pictured: my afternoon glass of gin.)

I don’t know if it’s a company-wide thing, but my local Newbury Comics is giving away really nice pint glasses if you just give them an email address. And any email address will do; you could give them larsbendybendy@gmail.com and they have no way of knowing. Their marketing department sure must be hard up for new people to spam!

~jeff

Ahoy! Today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, and if you see anyone actually doing this, shoe them right square in the nuts for me. Thanks in advance.

~jeff

The third season of “Arrested Development” starts tonight on Fox at 8 PM. It’s the best and funniest show on network TV in years — don’t miss it.

~jeff

I just recently fixed my Windows XP machine and, to be honest, I’m not completely hating using it as much as I used to. A good deal of that not-complete-hate is due to actively ignoring all the Microsoft software and replacing it with better alternatives; also, Google Desktop 2 rocks.

However, I’m really liking the new-ish Royale Theme that Microsoft unofficially released a while back for XP. It makes the XP user interface elements pleasantly shiny and “lickable” in a fairly blatant rip-off of the Apple glossy Mac OS X style; and the interface colors have been greatly improved as well, favoring subtly darker hues over the stupidly-bright XP colors. If you have to use XP, I recommend giving it a look.

~jeff

I find it hard to believe that Bootsy didn’t get a single entry — not even an honorable mention for his lifelong dedication to star-shaped sunglasses? — but this list is still a very good list indeed.

~jefff

Dig the World’s Ugliest Dog.

I… that’s really ugly.

What can you say about this but, “what the fuck?”

Okay, you’re just going to have to take my word for it when I tell you that I hate David Spade as much as the next guy. I’ve gone on just as many crazy arms-in-the-air, why-is-this-obnoxious-douchebag-popular rants as every other well adjusted person. So I’m finding it pretty disturbing that I actually found myself watching his new show The Showbiz Show on Comedy Central and even more disturbing that I found it to be kind of funny. Does this make me a bad person? Sadly, I think it does.

This thing is insane; it’s a wireless controller that works as a “mouse” in 3-D space. More details are here; I love Nintendo, you gotta respect their nerve to put out such wildly innovative hardware when Sony and Microsoft are seemingly content to remake the PlayStation2 over and over.

~jeff