DHTML Lemmings

DHTML Lemmings

Play Lemmings in your web browser.

Cookies

Katherine and I got chinese food last night (the usual: chicken lo-mein and hunan bean curd). Our cookies both had the same fortune in it. I’m not sure quite what to make of that.

del.icio.us and TypePad

A few years ago I wrote an entry about how to merge two TypePad weblogs onto one page so that you can have a “sideblog” with links in it. That method should still work, as does a Links TypeList, but I’m using del.icio.us to do it nowadays.

As a Sideblog

If you’d like your links to appear on the sidebar of your site, use this option.

1. First, create a free del.icio.us account and post a few links.
2. Within TypePad, select the weblog you want to use, go to the Design section, and click on “Change Content Selections” to select items in your sidebar.
3. Under “Feeds”, click “Add a new feed”.
4. In the pop-up box, enter:
   http://del.icio.us/username
   where username is whatever you chose for del.icio.us.
5. Choose how many items you want in your sidebar, and press “Save”.

As Daily Posts

You can set del.icio.us to make a daily post with all the links from the last 24 hours.

1. Log into del.icio.us, and go to:
   http://del.icio.us/settings/username/daily
   where username is your del.icio.us account name.
2. Click “add a new thingy”.
3. Enter the following:
   • jobname: any name you’d like. I used “typepad”.
   • outname: the name of your weblog, as it appears in TypePad.
   • outpass: your TypePad password.
   • outurl: http://www.typepad.com/t/api
   • outtime: the hour of day you’d like the links posted, in GMT. 0=midnight GMT, 23=11 PM GMT.
   • outblogid: Your TypePad blog ID. If you go into TypePad and select your weblog, the URL will look like this:
     https://www.typepad.com/t/app/
     weblog/manage?blogid=somenumber
     Enter in the number at the end.
   • outcatid: The ID of the category you’d like to publish into. I haven’t gotten this to work, but it works fine without it.
4. Press “Submit Query”.

You’ll have to wait until your out_time to see if it worked, but once it does it’ll post an entry every 24 hours containing all the new links you’ve entered into del.icio.us.

Pros and Cons

Both approachs have their virtues. Using a sideblog keeps links out of the main flow of your posts, which is nice if you want to seperate what you write from what you link to. It also keeps links out of your XML feed. Readers who want to read your links can subscribe to your del.icio.us feed, but people reading your TypePad feed will continue to just get “real posts” you’ve written.

Using digest posts is good if you’d prefer to keep everything in one column. The daily post method will put the links into your feed, so anyone reading your feed will get everything on your site. If you don’t post entries that often, but you post links every day, this’ll keep content flowing on your site, which might be a good thing. On the other hand, it may also mean that your page will be filled mostly with links to things instead of full posts, and some people don’t like to be reminded about how prolific they’re not.

iTunes 5 Look-and-Feel: What Do You Think?

iTunes 5 look-and-feel: what do you think?

Discussion about the new look of iTunes on Inessential. It may grow on me, but my first impression is a negative one.

Sleepy Dexterity

I always put two pillowcases on my pillows, one facing one way, the other the other way, so that the zipper is never exposed, nor is any part of the real pillow. Having two cases on there makes me feel like the pillow is protected enough that the fact you can’t wash pillows isn’t a problem.

Saturday morning I woke up and my pillow only had one case on it. Somehow, during my sleep, I managed to pull off one of the pillowcases. The inner one. At some point in the night I was able to pull of only the inner pillow case but leave the outer one on. WTF?

New Orleans / 2005 Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans / 2005 Hurricane Katrina

Before and after satellite images of New Orleans.

Rubik's Cube Solver

Rubik’s Cube Solver

Enter in your cube’s current setup and get the solution.

Gmail Notifier for Macs

Gmail Notifier for Macs

gCount stopped working recently. Good to see this out.

What We Can Learn From George Romero About Surviving Disasters

It’s as if the AP has never seen a zombie movie. (Here’s one of those news pieces from a source of the fifth kind.) Convention cleary has it that, in a disaster, you’re specifically allowed to break into:

1. Grocery stores, to get food,
2. Gun stores, to get weapons,
3. General stores, for other supplies and weapons,
4. Gas stations, to gas up your (possibly stolen) vehicle and get sweets to eat if you skipped number 1, and
5. Malls, for safe harbor and amusing montages where you’re watching large televisions, playing with sports equipment, and sleeping on very large beds.

Not a single horror movie to my knowledge has ever condemned people for such things. In disaster situations, society pretty much thinks it’s okay to break and enter for your own safety. Who’s going to argue with this?

Apparently the Associated Press. If you’re white, you “find” food in a grocery store. If you’re black, you “loot” it.

Interestingly, there’s lots of stuff in Night of the Living Dead and its sequels about race. Black characters are heroes and white people get eaten. The smartest zombie movies have lots to say about how civilized society breaks down in crises. The horrifying thing is to me is that there are times, like now in New Orleans, where stuff like this actually happens. Turns out you don’t need a plague of undeath. Just lots of rain.

Salon.com News |"Looting" or "finding"?

Salon.com News | “Looting” or “finding”?

Salon does a little bit of research on the issue.