Yesterday, my trusty 128MB USB Flash keychain drive gave up the ghost. Dead. Unrecognized by any machine. I originally picked it up a couple years ago to transfer a large number of files too big for email, yet passed back and forth too frequently for the slow mount/unmount of the iPod. It’s served me well. […]
Category: Useful Things
Lori’s 17-inch Laptop Diaper Bag Coolest Messenger Bag Yet
If you follow the First Crack Podcast, you know I have a couple of laptop bags, both with their strengths and weaknesses. Neither bag is perfect, and there aren’t that many bags available for a 17″ Powerbook. This summer, Jen and I were on a similar quest for a stylish diaper bag. Best we could […]
Treo Replaces iPod for Brush Clearing Listening
Finally had a few moments to clear out the tree damage we had from the late summer thunderstorm I mention eariler. About halfway through, the battery in my 40gb iPod started flaking out – as it’s so prone to do. With the battery only reliable when it’s plugged in, the usefulness of the iPod is […]
Mapquest Drives Faster than Google
Looking for the best route for the first leg next week’s roadtrip (Minneapolis to Rapid City), Jen and I checked out MapQuest and Google Maps and found something very interesting: MapQuest drives across South Dakota at 71 mph Google has the cruise control set at 61 mph
Setting up a Web Development Environment in Tiger
This message means the upgrade is complete. Last week I started the upgrade Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” around the house. To my pleasant surprise, it went extremely smoothly. The most tedious and frustrating part was waiting for my newly enclosed external hard drive to copy tens of gigs of files back and forth for […]
Your Attention.xml Please
If you haven’t heard me proclaim, “RSS killed the visual web designer”, now you have. Quickly stated, RSS is a structured format for distributing text, audio (podcasting), video (vlogging), even applications in a convenient and anonymous way. For the publisher, RSS means the timeliness of email without the worry about spam filtering. For the reader, […]
gFeed Now More Valid
If your news reader didn’t like the gFeed – I’m looking at you, NewsFire – then give it a second shot. I’ve tweaked the gFeed RSS feed and it should be more compatible with validation-hyper-sensitive readers – I’m looking at you, NewsFire. Also, if your reader supports it – NetNewsWire – the audio of the […]
The Elmer’s Glue of Home Improvement
This weekend, Jen’s parents came by to help us finish some projects around the house. The projects we’ve procrastinated for a year now and just needed a dedicated time to complete. The list included: Install crown molding in the bedroom Repair and paint walls in the hall closet Repair and paint walls in the hallway […]
How to Set Up a Linksys Router with Mac OS X
“INSERT CD FIRST”, screamed the sticker on the back of the Linksys wrt54g router. A decade with Macintoshes has taught me the suggestions are normally for Windows machines. The router was persistent – and the sticker was blocking the power port – so, I thought I’d humor it. I was right. The CD shipping was […]
WishRSS Now Offers Buy for List Owner
I’m extremely pleased to announce an update to WishRSS. You can now purchase items from your friend’s WishList and for them, just click the “Purchase for WishList Owner” link in the list’s webpage or in the RSS feed. Of course, if you’d rather purchase it for yourself, there’s the “Purchase for Yourself” link. Enjoy. WishRSS.