DC Blogger Meetup
After a hiatus of several months, I finally made it to a DC blog meetup last night. It was at Pharaoh’s, which is pretty convenient to my house, and it was warm enough to ride my bike. Turnout was slow to start, but we ended up with probably 12 or so folks. Much discussion was had. Also, much drooling over Rob’s new, free cellphone.
Must-have Firefox optimizations on OS X
Here’s a list of Firefox optimizations, add-ons, extensions, and hacks that make Firefox livable on Mac OS X.
- Forecastfox
- Adblock
- keyconfig - allows the backspace key to function as “back” like it does in Safari, FF Windows, etc.
- Firefoxy - pretty form element widgets. They don’t look like Safari, but they do look better than the default, which is awful on Firefox OS X builds. I used to use Aqua Firefox Set but I couldn’t get it to work with 1.5b1.
- Grapple - makes the menubar look pretty and OS X-like
Nothing really earth-shattering here, but it makes Firefox OS X look and play nice.
The Future is Here
On the bus ride home today, a guy was using his laptop with a Verizon EV-DO card installed. That’s right: he was surfing the Internet. On his laptop. On a bus. No wires. After I got off the bus I remembered my camera has a phone and I could have taken a picture of him reading Google News on the Fairfax Connector #951 bus. I could have sent it to Flickr from my phone. The future is here.
Airport Express, Linksys WRT54G, and Ethernet
This is wonderful:
My Mac mini doesn’t have wireless (Airport Extreme) built-in, but I do have an Airport Express. You need to set up WDS on the Linksys, by following the directions here at Inderjeet’s blog and here at Troy and Gay. Also check this Ars Technica site for a little more info. The links to the Sveasoft firmware for the WRT54G didn’t work for me, but I found another location of the Sveasoft Satori .bin. Follow the two blog links, and play around. Make sure both the Express and your base station are on the same channel. My Linksys was on channel 6, and I tried to set the Express to 6, but the changes would never stick. I ended up changing the Linksys to 1, which the Express defaults to, and all was happy! Plugged the Mac mini directly into the Airport Express and … HOUSTON, WE HAVE LIFTOFF!
My First Panorama
A month or so ago Anne and I went down to Roosevelt Island on one of the first warm days of spring. I decided to try my hand at a panoramic image. After a bunch of searching, I realized Photoshop has a wonderful “Photomerge” tool that’ll do panoramas for you. Here’s my first try: Georgetown and the Potomac from the island. Click the picture for a big version.
OS X Firefox Widgets
There are a bunch of competing (for lack of a better word) widget sets floating around on the net to make Firefox look more “OS X-ish.” They vary in their ease of install, prettiness, and updatedness. The best I’ve found so far is “Aqua Firefox Set.” Give it a whirl!
The declining relevance of area codes
I was talking to Anne yesterday about area codes and their increasing loss of significance. The high rate of transience among recent college grads coupled with the high rate of cell phone usage among the same demographic means area codes are getting fractured. I still have a (315) number from Central New York, even though I live in the DC area. Ditto with Anne, with her Chicago area code. Even though I’d like to get a snazzy (202) Washington, DC number, I’m not looking forward to updating my number with everyone I know or do business with. This Wired News article deals with some of these issues, though it concentrates on them from a business perspective.
Combine the fracturing of area codes due to cell phones with the need to always dial ten-digit numbers in many metropolitan areas and you come up with phone numbers lacking any sense of significance or locality. They are simply indices through which connections from one party to another may be made. Which may have been the idea all along.
Lego logic gates
This is very cool: Lego logic gates. I spent more time dealing with, doing homework about, and desigining from lower-level compenents the stuff on this page in engineering classes than I care to remember. Those readers who’ve taken any EE or CE course will know what I’m talking about—it seems like RS flip-flops, JK flip-flops, NAND gates, etc., would never die. Of course, they weren’t made out of Legos, but silicon, or, more commonly, they were just on paper.
Handy Windows utilities
I recently got a new computer at work, and I’ve been setting it up just the way I like it over the past couple of weeks. It’s a Dell Precision 340 running Windows XP.
My job includes a lot of data wrangling, and my preferred environment to do that sort of thing is a Unix-style system of some kind. The only Linux box I have access to is a somewhat-aging Dell that serves the web site for my group’s project.
What’s a Windows user to do? Grab these useful utilities, of course, and make Windows more Unix-like!
- UnxUtils—native Win32 ports of a bunch of GNU utilities. No need for screwing around with Cygwin.
- ActivePerl. I first learned about this about seven years ago in high school. The goodness of Perl on Windows. Life is good.
Any other cool utilities that you can’t live without?
Disable autocomplete in OpenOffice
Every time I install OpenOffice the silly AutoComplete (a.k.a. auto complete or word completion) “feature” really annoys me and it usually takes me too long to figure out where to disable it. I always look for it in “Configure” or “Options” but of course it’s not there. To disable auto completion in OpenOffice, do the following ::
- Tools -> AutoCorrect/AutoFormat…
- Word Completion tab
- Uncheck “Enable word completion”
Ta-da.
Update: This post has generated lots of comments. Here’s where to disable this behavior in OpenOffice Calc:
- Tools -> Cell Contents -> AutoInput
