So, I added my del.icio.us tags to my rss feed via feedburner , just to try it out. One of the guys subscribed to my rss feed with Thunderbird is seeing the del.icio.us tags added again and again and again. Bug in thunderbird? Is anyone else seeing this?
Oh, and for a slight update. According to feedburner, I have 37 subscribers. Hi subscribers!
Today two guys from FeedBurner come to visit another team at work. I asked if I could sit in to get some idea of what FeedBurner can do. Right now I don’t really get any stats out of my blog that Technorati or awstats can give me, and those aren’t that useful. It’ll be interesting to see if I get any insight on my blog this way.
The cool part is that this took almost no time to setup. Registering at FeedBurner and pointing it towards my blog took about 2 minutes, and there is a feedburner plugin for WordPress that automatically redirects the RSS feeds (with a 307, so I can switch back at any time.) All in all, pretty painless.
Via TV Squad. This is brilliant.
So, my mom pointed us at a device that you can use to help you fix burnt out Christmas light strings. I had to post about it because I would have thought it was a totaly scam if you told me about it, but having seen it work…
Yes, lights are usually cheap enough that you can probably just buy a new set every year and not really empty out your pocketbook, but its really wasteful. Also, for those of us with a fetish for prelit trees, its not always easy (or possible) to restring.
Anyway, its called the Light Keeper Pro. You just plug in the affected string of lights, replace a bulb with the tool, squeeze the trigger a few times, and your light string works again. The burnt out ones are easy to see as they aren’t lit, you replace those, and you’re golden. Supposedly there is a demo video on their site. Still, I don’t think I would have bought it except for watching my mom use it not 2 feet from where I was standing.
This post reads like an infomercial to me, but the tool just blows my mind. I’ve "saved" 4 strings of lights for our main Christmas tree. None of which worked when I pulled them out of storage and plugged them in. I haven’t even gotten to the outside ones
yet…
[Update 12/4: I know I haven’t described this well, but the how it works section on their web site does.]
I grabbed my camera and took a few pictures during the snow storm yesterday morning and while fighting to get to work.
So, I’ve wanted to make some changes to my WordPress theme for awhile. The biggest one was to add my del.icio.us tags to the page. I’m not sure why I wanted to do this, but I did. A few months ago Dave posted about his switchover to sandbox and some other tweaks he had done. He also talked about it on irc.
I made the switch this morning. The ability to drag and drop the sidebar widgets is a killer feature and what will keep me on sandbox for awhile. If you’re visiting the page, you can see i still need to tweak the CSS to be less ugly. Its not a big deal and it can certainly wait. Tweaking CSS always causes my brain to bleed. However, this looks straight forward. I made the big hurdle which was switching themes.
We rule that since the Holographic bunny isn’t alive, it cannot be killed by a terrible misfortune.
So says Chris, Sarah, Jill, Mark, Melissa, and myself.
I love that jwz ported XScreenSaver to OS X at about the same time I moved to OS X for my laptop. I got to keep all the screen savers I use and have used over the past decade or so. Especially some of the cooler GL based ones. (Its also nice that someone ported rss-glx as well, but that’s a different story.) The only piece XScreenSaver is missing is the controller to randomly call only selected hacks. Luckily, RandomExtra fills that hole.
One issue I’ve had with xscreensaver on OS X has been the difficulty/impossibility of having the text displaying hacks use fortune (or any program, for that matter) as the source of the text. Mike mentioned this morning that all those hacks appear to be able to call out to a URL. This morning I felt strangely motivated, so I whipped up a quick ruby script that is basically an HTTP based fortune server. Since ruby ships with OS X, it’ll make it easier in case anyone else wants to get it running as well. Once I got that working, the question was how to have this launch automatically on OS X so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. I’ve played with Lingon on and off, and it seemed like the tool to help me do it. I used Lingon to create a UserDeamon that should launch when one logs in, and should die when one logs out. I then went through the screen savers that call out to text and pointed them at the localhost URL, and boom, I was back to fortune city.
To recreate this you’ll need this fortune_helper.rb script I whipped up, Lingon to create the launcher or this fortune.plist (put in /Library/LaunchDaemons) and fortune installed somewhere. I installed fortune via DarwinPorts.
This mourning in Roselle I saw a gold Corvette with the license plate "PWNED U" Something is wrong about this, I’m just not sure what.
Not to make light of a sad situation… But here’s our quote of the day.
"Open source means that your software can continue even after you’re arrested for murder!" — MARK