"Welcome to the life of a system administrator ... spending all day fixing the bug that lets you read the documentation that helps you diagnose the issue that was stopping you from implementing your original five-minute fix."

Livejournal is secretly, and deliberately, changing certain outbound links that you post.

If you have affiliate links set up at places like Amazon, Livejournal is stealing money from you.

Even if you don't, this is a serious privacy issue, and they are breaking your links. For example, www.crittersbythebay.com goes to the front page of eBay ( Read more... )

In a publicity stunt for the Google Fiber for Communities project, Topeka's mayor has renamed the town to "Google, Kansas" for the month of March.

On one claw, this strikes me as desperate attention-seeking, like running down the street topless on Mardi Gras. (Full disclosure: I'm on one of the planning committees for 95959Google, Nevada City's ( Read more... )

 
Cruising through my mailbox just now, I happened to glance at a piece of spam before deleting it, and did a double-take:


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Back in the ancient, crazy days of 2002, I bought a graphics tablet for a very reasonable price. It plugged into those newfangled USB port things, and only one of my computers had a USB card installed, but (even on a Mac) I ran it with almost no trouble. The included software worked well, the drivers caused no issues, the plugins for my graphics ( Read more... )

In among the barrage of Obama/Clinton coverage today, you might have missed a quiet piece of interesting news: GM is going smallThey're closing four pickup truck and SUV factories; throwing brand weight into their smaller and more fuel-efficient cars like the Cobalt; talking seriously about their battery-operated Volt; and -- shock -- may drop ( Read more... )

Just registered SizzlingKeys to the tune of $7 for a "family pack" (five-computer license). Highly recommended for all Mac OS X users. And virtually all of its functionality is available in the freeware version ( Read more... )

Last weekend, we had a little incident with our clothes washer. By "incident," I mean "flood." And by "little," I mean "half the kitchen and living room, and also through the walls so that both our next-door and downstairs neighbors had to mop up too ( Read more... )

Now you, too, can make up charts like this one* on the fly and embed them in your posts -- even if you don't have a website to host them on:


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What is it about modern consumer operating systems that has cast the perfectly useful idea of "version number" into disfavor?

I mean, it's bad enough that Windows gave it up after Y2K ... ME, XP, and now Vista (née Longhorn, aka Aero).

... But Apple? Okay, seriously, guys: Enough is enough. Yes, the cat thing was cute. But it's overstayed ( Read more... )