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{ Category Archives } Technology

Time Machine works

…and I am here to testify.
My (MacBook Pro) disk drive got flaky a week ago, making odd noises and refusing to do its disk-drive things (like read the disk). Last Saturday I carted it down to the Apple Store, where they agreed that It Shouldn’t Do That, and also agreed to fix my crunchy trackpad [...]

Random gripe

Is it really asking too much that AC adapters identify the device they’re intended to connect to?

Better thinking through chemistry

Cognitive enhancement | All on the mind | Economist.com
Provigil and Ritalin really do enhance cognition in healthy people. Provigil, for example, adds the ability to remember an extra digit or so to an individual’s working memory (most people can hold seven random digits in their memory, but have difficulty with eight). It also improves people’s [...]

Reading “unreadable” CDs

I have a longish commute, and I like to pass the time listening to audiobooks. I get them mostly on CD from my local library system, but because my commute is evenly split between car, train and walking, I rip the CDs to my iPod.
Unfortunately, library CDs are often not in the best shape, and [...]

Travelling Light

George Monbiot, in a nice piece on airships, points out a neat solution to the problem of hydrogen fuel storage:

Traveling Light
Even when burning fossil fuels, the total climate-changing impact of an airship, according to researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is 80-90% smaller than that of ordinary aircraft. But the airship [...]

Mailx, a NetNewsWire style

Mailx is a simple NetNewsWire style based on Chris Clark’s Mail style, with readability enhancements. Thanks to Oliver Boermans for some of the ideas.
My aim was to display all the relevant meta-information cleanly, and specify enough leading to improve readability, but no so much as to waste too much screen real estate.
Download Mailx here, put [...]

CSS Follies

Damn, but CSS is frustrating.
Over the weekend, I was designing a simple site, to be maintained by the members of our local Green Party without anyone having to worry too much about an over-fussy design. The idea was simple enough: a banner across the top, a main column of blog-like content, and a navigation column [...]

Safari Tidy

I’ve been using Safari Tidy for a few days now, and recommend it highly. The author says:

The Safari Tidy plugin is a small plugin that lets you validate the webpages you browse for (x)html compliance. The actual validation is done by Tidy. This plugin was modeled after a similar plugin for Firefox, which can be [...]