Displaying posts 141 - 150 of 650
Gmail has just added full-on IMAP support, and it's awesome. And by awesome I mean totally sweet.
This has pushed me over the edge. I'm finally ready to use Gmail as my primary email provider. Now that I can access all my email (including my old archived mail) however I want to from whatever client I choose to use, whether that's Gmail itself, Thunderbird, my iPhone, or good old Pine, Gmail is perfect.
Google, you rock.
The lovely thing about email is that it works no matter where you are. Email addresses are tied to people, not locations. This makes your email address a convenient globally-unique identifier, since it follows you even if you move across the country.
It's high time that snail mail addresses worked the same way. When you send a letter or a package, you're sending it to a person, not a location. You don't care where it goes, you just care that it makes it into the hands of the intended recipient. Street addresses are great when you're giving someone directions to a party, but they're suboptimal when used as mailing addresses.
As someone who tends to move about once a year on average, I've begun to dread changing my address in a hundred different places almost as much as I dread packing and lifting furniture. I invariably forget to update it somewhere important, the USPS invariably continues to deliver the occasional important piece of mail to my old address instead of forwarding it to the new address, and by the time I've finally got everything sorted out, I've moved again.
What I want is a single, unchanging, globally unique identifier that will serve as a pointer to my current physical address. It would rock if I could use my email address or even OpenID for this. The USPS would maintain a central database mapping unique IDs to street addresses and would provide a simple REST API to allow authorized consumers (such as UPS, FedEx, etc.) to retrieve the current street address for any given ID.
Never again would I have to update my address in a million different places. I'd just log into usps.com, change my address there, and all my mail would be delivered to the new address automatically from that point forward. In addition to making things more convenient for me, this would also save the postal service huge amounts of time and money by eliminating the need for temporary change-of-address forwarding and drastically reducing the amount of misdelivered mail that gets returned to sender.
Why hasn't this been done already?
I just finished playing through Portal. It was short, but oh so sweet. I haven't laughed harder at a video game since Sam & Max Hit the Road.
Along with its dark, sick sense of humor, the game manages to establish an atmosphere reminiscent of the movie Cube, only more actively sinister. I loved every minute of it.
Now I want some cake.
One of the awesome things about getting to work on Yahoo! Search Assist is that I got to toss a few extra little features in there just for myself. I haven’t seen these mentioned in the press or blog coverage, possibly because nobody’s noticed them yet.
On search.yahoo.com, the cursor is automatically placed in the search box when the page is loaded, but on the search result page, we don’t automatically give focus to the search box because that would prevent you from scrolling using the keyboard.
So, what if you want to edit your query without moving your hand all the way from the keyboard to the mouse to click on the search box? Well, now it’s easy: after the page loads, just press tab. Voila, cursor in search box, ready to edit, no mouse necessary.
By default, Search Assist isn’t displayed unless you appear to be having difficulty deciding what to search for. It does this by analyzing your typing speed and noticing when you pause longer than usual. Sometimes, though, you want to see suggestions right away without waiting. You can use the mouse to click on the little arrow beneath the search box, but that requires more pesky hand movement. Luckily, there’s another option.
When the cursor is in the search box, you can simply press the down arrow on your keyboard to expand the tray. If you decide you don’t want the tray after all, hit the escape key to close it again. As has been mentioned elsewhere, you can also use the arrow keys to select suggestions and concepts.
If you’re a mouse person and aren’t fond of having to click the tiny arrows to scroll the lists of suggestions and concepts, just move your cursor over the list you want to scroll and use the mouse wheel. When the cursor isn’t over a suggestion list, the mouse wheel causes the entire page to scroll, but when the cursor is over a list, the mouse wheel only scrolls that list.
I can’t take credit for this one, but it’s one of my favorite new features nonetheless: Yahoo! Search goes up to 11. Google only goes to 10. You do the math.
At work I have a dedicated FreeBSD dev box, but I prefer to write code on my Windows laptop. Until today I was using the NFS client in Microsoft's Windows Services for UNIX package to mount my FreeBSD home directory. This worked okay, but for some reason it's ridiculously slow when doing anything that involves walking a directory tree.
This morning I finally got fed up. I killed NFS in the face and installed the trial version of SftpDrive. It's such a huge improvement over NFS that I've already bought a license even though the trial version is free for six weeks. I highly recommend it.
As the days grow shorter and the sunset tends to precede my evening drive home, I can't help but notice that roughly one in every five of my fellow highway commuters is—how shall I put it—an addlebrained fucktard.
This is a scientific fact which I know to be true because only an addlebrained fucktard would rocket down 101 at 85 miles per hour after dark with his headlights off. And yet, every evening, I observe so many examples of wanton fucktardery that I can only assume the state of California lacks the ability to properly educate its citizenry in the delicate art of headlight usage.
As a public service, then, please allow me to present this simple beginner's guide to using your fucking headlights.
The following things are headlights:
Here are some things that are not headlights:
You can tell when it's dark outside because you won't be able to see the sun. Sun equals light. No sun equals dark. Dark equals use your fucking headlights.
If you like dying in car crashes, you can disregard the advice given in steps 1 and 2. Here's how to tell if you like dying in car crashes: stab yourself in the eyeball with a fish hook. Did you like that? If you did, then you'll probably like dying in car crashes.
Congratulations. Now you know how to use your fucking headlights.
Last Thursday I ordered a pair of lovely new Polk RM50T speakers from Woot. They were shipped via FedEx on Tuesday and were scheduled to arrive today.
I checked the tracking page this morning and saw that they were out for delivery, so I relaxed and played some TF2 while I waited. A few hours later I checked again and saw that they had been delivered. They were signed for by R. Grove, which is odd, because R. Grove had been sitting on his ass for the past three hours pwning bitches.
The signature on the proof of delivery document certainly
isn't mine. Whoever signed for the packages didn't even bother signing my name. It looks a lot more like "Paul L." than "R. Grove".
Naturally, I called FedEx to ask them where they had delivered my expensive new speakers. They put me on hold for a few minutes, then told me they'd ask the driver when he got back this evening, and then they'd get back to me by Tuesday. Couldn't they just ask the driver now and save some time? No, they couldn't. Surely, if the driver is capable of transmitting the signature to the website electronically, there must also be some way of contacting the driver while he's out and about? No. Apparently not. But "don't worry," said the FedEx support agent, "this isn't the first time something like this has happened."
Clearly, FedEx has incompetence down to a science, so I should sit back and allow them to do what they do best. In the meantime, if you happen to have taken delivery of a couple of fancy speakers that you didn't order, could you hold onto them for me? Thanks.
Update: At around 5pm, the FedEx guy showed up at my door with my speakers. It turns out someone else on his route had ordered the same speakers from Woot, but in a different color. Since they were in almost identical boxes, he accidentally delivered my speakers to that guy (which is where the strange signature came from). He eventually realized his mistake, swapped out the speakers, and got everything sorted out.
Talk about a funny coincidence.
Hey Valve, guess what I'm doing right now? That's right: not playing the Team Fortress 2 beta. Can you guess why I'm not playing Team Fortress 2 beta, Valve? Because you haven't released it yet, that's why. Can you guess what I've been doing since Team Fortress 2 was announced back in 1999? Yep: not playing Team Fortress 2.
Something tells me I'm going to continue not playing Team Fortress 2, in spite of the promises that I'd have it today if I shelled out my $44.95 a little early.
Update: 12:04am PDT and everyone who preordered and preloaded TF2 has discovered that, even after Valve finally activated the game with 10 minutes to spare, it does nothing but crash a few seconds after launching. Way to tease your customers until the last minute and then poke them in the eye with a sharp stick, Valve.
Update 2: Finally got to play the game. Is it hilariously fun? Yes. Was it worth $44.95? Hell yes. Was it worth an 8-year wait? Um, no.
I found this lovely little critter in my dinner this evening. Very nearly ate him, too. Yum. That's what I get for trying to eat healthy for once.
The salad was triple washed, though, so at least it was a clean grub.
Way back in March, I posted the sad story of how Mozy Online Backup completely failed me when I lost a huge amount of data to a hard drive crash. As it turned out, even though the backup client was a joy to use and worked like a charm, actually restoring my data took weeks of painful trial and error.
Even after Mozy sent me my data on DVD for free by way of apology, I still ended up losing some of it because their self-extracting restore archives don't automatically decrypt the encrypted backups and the standalone decryption tool will "decrypt" anything you throw at it, even if it's already been decrypted or you enter the wrong passphrase. As a result, I ended up double- or triple-decrypting some of my files, which essentially scrambled them. By that point I was sick of fighting with the Mozy software, so I decided to give up and cut my losses.
I did get most of my data back, though, and Mozy refunded my money and gave me a free year of service. Unfortunately, I no longer trusted them, so that year of service was ultimately worthless and I began looking for other backup solutions. In the meantime, my blog post became a forum for other Mozy users who were lulled into a false sense of security and then betrayed by Mozy's horribly broken restore functionality (which they apparently still haven't fixed).
It's now clear that, despite their good intentions, Mozy is not a reliable online backup service and should be avoided.
For the last few months, I've been using (and loving) CrashPlan. It's a little more expensive than some other online backup tools since you actually have to pay for the software itself, but it has the lovely benefit of being able to back up both to CrashPlan's servers and to your own (or your friends') computers.
As a result, I now have multiple encrypted backups of my files: one on a friend's computer, one on another of my computers, and one on CrashPlan's servers. I've tested the restore functionality, and it works like a charm. Restoring from my other computer over my local network is quick and painless. But if, for example, my house were to burn down and my friend was on vacation, I could still restore over the 'net from CrashPlan's servers.
The only real snag I've run into so far is that CrashPlan tends to be a bit of a memory hog, which is unfortunate. But hey, RAM is cheap and it's a small price to pay for knowing that my data is safe.
Rumor has it the developers are working on implementing Amazon S3 support, which will fill me with glee if it's true.
