Okay Plus / Design & Technology

Thats right. The man behind Delicious Library is giving away an Intel CPU for which he has no use.

The CPU is is supposed to be worth, like, $1,000, and it’s still sealed in its original box with a giant heat-sink and everything, and I’ve decided to give it away to some lucky blog reader. Rather than have you perform some menial task, I’ve decided to combine my loves (attention-whore and the environment) and give the CPU to the greenest, gamingest reader out there.

Good luck.

WriteRoom is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

This is a great little program. I love seeing people make things simpler, instead of constantly getting more complex.

Ask Dave Taylor has a very simple technique for getting your widgets out of Dashboard and onto your desktop. This is a cool little trick, but not terribly useful as the widgets float on top of all your windows. If they behaved like other windows, or just sat directly on the desktop, I would get much more use out of them.
Regardless, I think my little orange calculator has found a new home.

In a valiant attempt to suddenly become organized in regards to my time, and by extension my life, I have just set up, synchronized, updated, and published my future online. I know I’m a huge geek, but I really do think this could help me. As long as I don’t spend more time fiddling with different tools, feeds, protocols etc., than I do actually using the god-damn thing then I should be fine. Really, I just set up three tools to talk to each other:

1. iCal.app
2. Google Calendar
3. Basecamp

I use iCal to post all my personal events, basecamp to keep track of work, and Google to access it all from anywhere. The only drawback to this set-up is that I can’t edit my iCal events from within Google Calendar (ie. when I’m at work). I am publishing my iCal calendars to .Mac, but the web inteface for .Mac is horrible, only allowing you to view one calendar at a time without editing. Maybe eventually I will move my personal calendars to Google Calendar, but for now I like how iCal feels. It seems like there should be a way to have all of my calendars in one central place, such as a folder on this webserver, which I could then link to from any calendar tool, whether it was an application, a web page, or a cell phone. The current situation only lets you “subscribe” to calendars, which means you can’t edit or save events in the central repository. We need two-way communication between all these different services. Any ideas out there?

“Liberal media blasts heartland with deadly heat ray.”

From MacUser.com:

Before Halo, Marathon was the hot game Bungie Studios made. It was even for Mac! The series was naturally very popular in our little community. I fondly remember the afternoons I spent playing it. Rubicon X is a completely new game, downloadable for free.

This is really cool. There are all new levels, etc., and the whole thing runs on the Aleph 1 engine which is open source, so… you know… nerd points. I remember getting a demo of Marathon at Macworld Expo Boston in ‘94. It definitely seemed ahead of its time, and it was great that it was for Mac. Then Microsoft swallowed Bungie, and the rest is history. Anyways, it’s free, so go get it.

Yeah, I know this is pretty old, but I thought this was a pretty thorough compilation. Two simple changes stick out for me: when renaming a file, the extension is not selected (duh.) and when changing an extension you can opt out of the friendly reminder that it may change the file’s behavior.

This is the first computer I ever had. The Mac Plus. What a sweet little machine. No hard drive. 1 MB of RAM. 8 Mhz processor. 512 x 342 pixels. Totally awesome. I’m going home in a couple of weeks and I’m going to fish this thing out of my mom’s attic. My girlfriend is going to give me that look, like “Are you fucking serious?” Absolutely. [update: PC World magazine just named the Mac Plus the 4th greatest computer of all time.]

A while a go I asked whether there was any utility to keep you updated on your current IP address, if you are stuck with a static IP. Well it seems there are actually a few tools (mostly free) out there that do just that and more. If you are in this predicament check out www.no-ip.com or DynDNS.

Well, I’ve got that warm fuzzy feeling all over again. I have my site back up online after a short hiatus. I decided that running my own server, while interesting, was more than I could quite handle right now. And while I was able to get my local machine up and running on the “inkernet” I was concerned about security and bandwidth (assuming the forthcoming deluge of readers). So I broke down and got a hosting plan with (mt) and everything is going swimmingly. Seriously, these guys really seem to have their shit together and they are fans of new media.

Well, that was a pain in the ass. My IP address changed, but all the links in wordpress were set up using the old address. So getting back to the admin page was tricky… but do-able. I think the moral of the story is twofold - A: I need to break down and pay for hosting until I can afford to set up my own server and do it right. B: localhost, localhost, localhost. Until I get my shit in gear this set up is strictly for development purposes only.

Thanks, and goodnight.

Oh and by the way, tomorrow is the start of a long birthday weekend for myself.

Ok - so I figured out how to have my router assign my server the same local address from now on, so that should not be an issue. All ports are go. Well 8889 at least. I still have a dynamic address for my router, but it usually stays the same for at least a few weeks at a time, so I guess it should be suitable for now. Qwest does offer static IP addresses for residential accounts… $6.95 a month after a $25 set up fee. Pretty reasonable I suppose (in comparison to what, I don’t know) Nonetheless, I don’t feeling like forking out any cash right now. Or ever now that I think about it, though I have been known to make exceptions.

I figure keeping up with a dynamic IP address should keep me on my toes. That brings me to a general question I have for my audience. I know in reality I’m just talking to myself, but you never know. Couldn’t you set up some sort of bot that would ping your computer and request some sort of signature… then if your IP address changed, the bot would not locate the signature… which would cause it to alert you somehow. Or if the bot was inside your local network, then it could go back to your router and figure out the new IP address assigned to it. Then send you an email with that info. Then update everything that was referring to the old IP address. Then clean your house and make a batch of blueberry pancakes. Isn’t that possible? I know someone out there knows how to do this. I would even settle for just the first part. Or, I guess I could just pay the damn 7 bucks and be done with it.

I found this at the The 9rules Network.

1. Love what you do.
2. Never stop learning.
3. Form works with function.
4. Simple is beautiful.
5. Work hard, play hard.
6. You get what you pay for.
7. When you talk, we listen.
8. Must constantly improve.
9. Respect your inspiration.

I haven’t got past number one.

I am not sure why my opinion makes something “official” but it sounds good. My IP address did switch overnight, but it was very easy to update the site. I definitely need to get a static address before I forward to this site from a nice address like this one. But in the meantime everything is working great. I can’t believe the number of plugins and themes available - I can see using wordpress as a framework for all kinds of sites. Now to get some people over here…

Well after struggling to get an install of MySQL working properly (or rather an old version of MySQL, as apparently Wordpress doesn’t like 4.1+) I stumbled upon MAMP and I was up in a matter of minutes. If you are reading this it has probably been a few days at least, since I don’t have a static IP address yet - which makes it hard to really be out there. I hope to get this up and running full time, and really like the idea of maintaining my own server. I have an old iMac I am trying to get OS X installed on, so hopefully I will be able to port this all over there somehow. In the meantime I’ll be running intermitently on old faithful here.