Toys & Tech
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The Pigs Are Out of the Barn
Amazon yanks bought copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles due to publisher’s demands: LINK So, you know that snooty question from the douches that think they’re too hi-tech for dead tree media? The one about what’s so different about printed books and e-books? I guess the difference is that book stores don’t come around to your house and steal back the books you bought unannounced (but reimburse you).
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Tab Mix Plus for Firefox 3.5 (unofficial release)
If you are like me, you need this addon and are willing to install a dev version: LINK I can’t stand having to scroll through tabs in a single row… UPDATE: Just to be clear, clicking the link above will initiate an installation of a Firefox Addon. Please see the comments of this post for clarification. (thx Luis)
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Torrent alternative
Download your torrents via http: furk I tried it. It was free and it worked as advertised. It probably isn’t an RIAA honeypot; they ain’t that smart.
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Still in broken PC limbo
The homebrew LCD hack didn’t work, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. My backyard repair dude rewired and replaced one old broken set of fluorescent tubes with old working (?) ones with some brilliant desoldering/resoldering skills and only charged me 80 baht, and I managed to get the monitor back together again without even having extra screws left over afterward, but it was all for naught. Sometimes you jess gotta say SHEEEEIT Clay Davis style. SHEEEEEIT! Anyway, I’ll get around to taking new photos of Max the Destroyer and posting them from my laptop I guess; sorry it’s taking so long but I’m busy, busy, busy, and hate downloading…
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Working Around Planned Obsolescence
All of the PCs I’m using at home are ones I brought over from Japan in 2006 so they are all either very well-used or broken now. My main laptop is a Latitude x300 which was manufactured about 150 computer years ago*, and the screen hinge broke so it’s held open with a bent metal ruler I jam in the gap between the large-sized battery and the main body every time I use it. All 3 desktop PCs failed in some way or another so I broke them down into parts to create a super franken PC which would have kicked serious ass about five years ago but is now…
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Firefox bold text problem (that wasn’t actually a Firefox problem)
As the title indicates, I noticed a sudden problem today in Firefox (on Windows XP) when checking Gmail – all of the text was bold. So I fired up Chrome to see if FF was the problem and all of the text in Chrome was in italics… These two problems together indicated a corrupted system font. If you have ever have this problem, you need to reinstall the Arial font family (TrueType). The executable installer can be found here or here.
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Sunday Backup Organization
Max and mommy went to his grandparent’s house so daddy took the time to organize five years of DVD (originally all DVD-R but more recently DVD+R for Improved! Error! Correction!; everything important is on genuine “That’s” brand Taiyo Yuden 16x media, everything else is on TDK or SONY 8x or 16x [end historical optical media note]) backups. I must say, we are in a fairly sucklical state of backup media at this point in history. Optical media like CDs and DVDs (and presumably BluRay Disks as well) apparently degrades in a matter of a few years in extreme cases, and keeping things on a form of media (HDs) that constantly…
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Max loves keys and locks
Linky, linky: The Ultimate Lock Picker Exposes Weak Military Installations, Corporate Systems Wired arranged a picking test for the best locks Medeco had to offer, and filmed the results.
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Tuk Tuk USA
From Autoblog Green: Tuk Tuk coming to American roads near you? “…vehicles are currently undergoing EPA and NHTSA testing for road-use approval, though its line of trikes is reportedly already for sale for off-road use.” Of course, for the US market they are completely overdoing it; you can even order colors like Cranberry Red and Clematis blue in standard, metallic, or pearl finish. Also, it seems they are making stretch models: Real tuktuks don’t have 4 cylinders, yo. All that’s left to do is some hydraulics work and installing a decent sound system.
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New Snakeskin Head Drum
On the way to my uni’s sports day a couple weeks ago, we stopped off at a famous temple (from the ancient “kao noi ka mae” story) where they sold various trinkets, sticky rice baskets, and musical instruments at a series of stalls on the dusty temple grounds. After testing out this drum and hearing how nice it sounded, my coworker and I debated about who should buy it. He said he had too many drums already, so I bought it. The man who sold it to me didn’t say who made the drum, who killed the snake, or if it tasted delicious, and I didn’t ask. Just having a…
