Monthly Archives: September 2005

Pepper Pad — First Impressions

September 30, 2005 – 12:25 pm

The Pepper Pad (available at Amazon) has a very clean out of box experience. There’s nothing to assemble and no questions about what order to do things in. Just open, unwrap, plug in, startup.
I attempted running through the configuration in my office, but the WiFi propagation is very weak there and Pepper Pad couldn’t catch [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (4)



Those Crazy K-Fee Ads

September 30, 2005 – 7:53 am

It turns out that K-Fee, the company that pushes its energy drink with the scary TV ads, has a English-language website. It also turns out they’ve got the scary car ad and eight others online. Here they are:

Angler
Car
Buddha
Golf
Beach
Meadow
Yoga
Soothing Waves
Ocean Path

tags: angler, beach, buddha, car ad, energy drink, ghost, ghosts, k-fee, k-fee energy drink, kfee, kfee [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (106)

Pepper Pad — Arrival

September 29, 2005 – 6:25 pm

The Pepper Pad’s technical details — a lightweight Linux powered device with an 8.4-inch SVGA touchscreen, Wi-Fi auto-configuration, Bluetooth device support, multi-gigabyte disk, full QWERTY thumb-keypad, stereo speakers, and more — are already well reported. But I’ve been arguing that attention to such details runs counter to the purpose and intended use of the device. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (4)

Must Read: Ambient Findability

September 29, 2005 – 3:19 pm

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good.
Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a necessary [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

Mt. Moosilauke

September 29, 2005 – 12:17 pm

Will and I climbed Moosilauke in early August, but it was only now that I got around to stitching the panorama.
The view is considerably wider than 360 degrees, composited from 33 photos. The ?full-size? version on Flickr contains 8 gigapixels of data. The real full-size version is a over 34 gigapixels.

tags: 4000 footer, moosilauke, mount [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Travel, Warren | Comments (5)



bsuite_innerindex WordPress Plugin

September 29, 2005 – 7:10 am

[[pageindex]]
About
?Blogging? typically connotes short-form writing that needs little internal structure, but that’s no reason to cramp your style. As people start to explore WordPress’s Pages feature, it seems likely that we’ll need a way to structure content within posts or pages sooner or later. That’s why I’m working on bsuite_innerindex.
It’s a WordPress Plugin that puts [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (10)

Game Law Redux

September 28, 2005 – 12:43 pm

Matt says my attempts to analogize online roleplaying games to more familiar contests like chess or automobile racing are ?just silly.? But his response appears to reinforce my point rather than refute it. It is the responsibility of the gamers and gaming organizations to create and enforce rules. People violating those rules are subject to [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (6)

Teachers Get Paid Crap

September 28, 2005 – 6:43 am

From AlterNet: Teaching In America: The Impossible Dream. Tagline:
Many public school teachers today must work two jobs to survive, and can’t afford to buy homes or raise families. Why do we treat our teachers so poorly?

tags: america, education, impossible dream, jobs, low pay, poor salary, public education, public ignorance, public school, public school teachers, school [...]

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Politics & Controversy | Comments (2)

Open Source GIS

September 27, 2005 – 12:50 pm

Here’s an interesting GeoPlace.com article on open source GIS tools, including GIS extensions to PosgreSQL and MySQL. Via The Map Room.

tags: geo world, geocode, geocoding, geographic information system, geography, geolocation, gis, gis development, gis guide, gis tools, map room, mapping, mysql, open source, open source gis, open source tools

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Technology | Comments (0)

Distracted By My Shiny New Camera

September 27, 2005 – 3:44 am

My Olympus C4000 is hard to beat. Steve’s Digicams reviewed it well, and many friends with newer cameras find features or capabilities in it they miss on theirs. So, despite my schoolboy giddiness at the arrival of new gadgets, I’m waiting to be convinced that my new C7000 will replace it. It too was well [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Technology | Comments (1)

bsuite_geocode Plugin For WordPress

September 26, 2005 – 5:57 pm

I’m a big fan of the WP Geo plugin, but I want more.
My biggest complaint is that I want to insert coordinates using Google Maps or MultiMap URLs, rather than insert them in the modified story editor. So I wrote a bit of code that reads through the URLs in a post, finds the ?maps.google? [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (8)

Home Theater Remote Control

September 26, 2005 – 7:24 am

I have a sort of guilt complex about looking at home theater issues. Nonetheless, I’ve been building one piecemeal ever since I found an incredible deal on a video projector. Now I’m working on assembling a video jukebox of sorts and I need to face the remote control stumbling block.
That’s why I like the Logitech [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)

Helpful Pages In The Wordpress Codex

September 25, 2005 – 8:18 pm

The following pages from the WordPress Codex were surprisingly helpful recently:

Creating a Static Front Page « WordPress Codex
Creating Tables with Plugins « WordPress Codex
Alphabetizing Posts « WordPress Codex

tags: documentation, wordpress, wordpress codex, wordpress development, wordpress documentation

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Technology | Comments (36)

The Potential Of Political Campaigning in Online Games

September 25, 2005 – 12:35 pm

Matt and I have been talking about online role playing games lately. He’s more than interested in the new challenges they pose to our legal system, the new media opportunities they offer, the ways they’re altering culture. We got into a conversation about how companies are taking advantage of them in marketing campaigns, so I [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (4)

What’s Zimbra?

September 25, 2005 – 7:00 am

They say ?Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology.? What I’d like to know, however, is whether Zmbra is a community driven, social software answer to the problems of groupware — typically driven by management’s needs.

tags: collaboration, collaboration technology, community needs, community, groupware, management needs, open source, oss, social software, [...]

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Technology | Comments (2)