Category: Toys & Tech

Chris Pongpitaya’s Supercar Knockoffs

…Because nothing says genuine 911 like a spoiler the size of a Cessna wing (and judging by the height of the hood, front wheel drive as well).

(thx Mark)

This video intrigued me so much, I had to dig around a bit. Here’s the juicy bits:

UPDATE:
Here’s some alternate contact info I found; I have no idea if it’s correct.

Chris Pongpitaya Schoenes Co.
229/3-4 Soi Akamai 7, Sukhumvit 63
Bangkok 10110 Thailand
Phone +66 2392 4177

Deleting Gmail Trash

Today is Mother’s Day in Thailand since it’s the Queen’s birthday, and the Queen is mother to all Thais. Nam and Max went to Khon Kaen with my mother-in-law and I spent the day watching Mina. She basically slept on me all day, only waking to feed and put everything within reach in her mouth before throwing it on the ground.

While she slept, I trashed several thousand mailing list messages in Gmail that I’ve no longer got time or interest in keeping up with, and hit the Empty Trash Now link. The following message ran across the status ticker thingy up top:

Oops… the system encountered a problem (#793) – Retrying now…

Gmail continued to suffer from Excedrin headache #793 for a few minutes, after which the beautifully empty trash page appeared with this message in the middle:

No conversations in the Trash. Who needs to delete when you have over 7000 MB of storage?!

Cheeky.

—

On a related note, I don’t really like the new Gmail interface (mainly, the Compose mail button sticks out like a wart), but I can live with it. If you can’t there’s a way to switch back to a much older version of the interface, albeit without Labs support.

WordPress: Configuration and Find & Replace

I’ve basically decided to break all hyperlinks from the past 7 years and am now publishing to the root of this site instead of the /blog directory. Screw it. It ain’t money to me, and everything going to /blog is getting redirected to / now. To be honest, I can’t be bothered with URL matching from my old MT blog to this new WP one. Like I said, screw it. Google can play catch up with their invincible green nanosecond cloud, and all the hotlinkers (some of them using my pics in their forum sigs for nearly seven years) can suck my /.

It was curious to see that there is no native Search and Replace tool in WordPress, but I found a couple plugins to do the job immediately:
Search and Replace (This one worked just fine for me.)
Search Regex Plugin (You can apparently use regular expressions with this one.)

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the complete absence of spam for the time being. It feels like 2003 again:

100% of my love...

Fuck Six Apart

Once upon a time there was a great hunk of code called Movable Type. It was a powerful tool for self-publishing on the web, unmatched in both flexibility and utility. It was the premiere blogging platform, for many good reasons – new users and developers were infected with joy spread by the more experienced. This was the golden age of MT, and its roots seemed to be spreading far and wide.

And then, tragedy.

After several key mistakes, Movable Type’s developers decided that hosted services were the wave of the future, and concentrated on feeding their new cash cows. Once king of the barnyard, MT was neglected for years, to the point where it really should have been taken out behind the barn and shot, but instead, its owners let it starve and waste away. Then they fired the keepers…

You know what? A parable is a horrible way to end a 7-year relationship. What I really mean to say is: FUCK YOU, SIX APART.

You made your vox, now go sleep with it.

Google Talk Plugin Crash – Windows 7 Home Premium

I bought an ASUS UL30A laptop when we were in the states to replace my trusty, crusty old Dell Latitude x300 that lasted for seven whole years and still wouldn’t quit. I decided on the X5 variant because it was black (as opposed to the silver option) and cheaper than the updated version, but still good for ten hours (actual; ASUS claims 12 hours but all of the reviews say 10+. Good enough.)
It’s my first extended experience with Windows 7, and with a x64 Win OS. It kicks ass very hard.
One of the few problems I’ve had with it was with Google Video Chat crashing Gmail when I’d try to pop out the chat window, only when using video. Clicking on the pop-out button would result in Chrome locking up but often still sending and receiving audio streams from the chat.
Popping-out the chat screen isn’t a necessary feature, so I tried to ignore it. Hitting that pop-out button is a twitchy habit, though, so I’d often inadvertently crash the browser and go through the force quit, no error report, hurry up and terminate please, restart browser, yes restore pages I had open before Google Chrome didn’t shut down correctly, reinitiate video chat and don’t pop out the window this time cycle.
Then today, I had a strange error a couple times just when starting Chrome: The following plug-in has crashed: Google Talk Plugin
This new error meant something had to be done, and this is what I’ve come up with:

  1. Close Google Chrome
  2. Uninstall the Google Talk Plugin via the appropriate Control Panel in Windows
  3. Reinstall from http://www.google.com/chat/video

I’m just guessing, but this procedure might work for other problems with the Google Talk plugin on other platforms as well; it seems this particular one springs up in Vista most often.