Adobe products are rare in that I’ve never regretted upgrading — each upgrade has brought changes I’ve liked enough to think the upgrade was worthwhile. Contrast this with Quicken, where I’ve regretted every upgrade as it made the product slower and less reliable (until finally I’ve said “no more” and will not upgrade […]
It’s All Text! is a pretty handy Firefox extension. It lets you set up an external editor and puts a little ‘edit’ button in the corner of every textarea that pops open an external editor of your choosing. Then it watches the file the external editor is editing and refreshes the textarea whenever […]
I’ve previous posted about using PixVue to edit image metadata directly from Windows Explorer. I just stumbled across Microsoft Photo Info while going to download Microsoft RAW Image Viewer so I could see thumbnails for CR2 files (Canon RAW images) in Explorer.
Microsoft Photo Info enables easy editing of “metadata” for […]
I’m playing with Adobe Contribute CS3. I haven’t had much to say here lately, but maybe a clever client will remind me to post more. I’ve been posting the occasional photo. I figure at this point that folks interested in my photos have probably subscribed to the feed there so I don’t usually cross-post them […]
I picked up a Logitech MX Revolution wireless laser mouse a week or so ago. It replaced my 3 year old Logitech wireless laser mouse. Who doesn’t like wireless lasers?
The new mouse is shaped a little differently than the old mouse and has a couple more buttons and one new wheel […]
A tool and a library I’ve been using or at least trying out:
Launchy
Free, open-source Windows app that indexes Program Files and any other directories you tell it to. Then alt-space pops up a command line box and it autocompletes as you type. I installed it a while ago and meant to mention […]
Ad-Supported services like many (most?) web sites and broadcast television are clearly a valid business model. I just wish more of them provided a simple way for me to pay the producers of the content (and a suitable fee to the entity distributing it to me, if they aren’t the same) to give […]
Last weekend I ordered a Canon SD800IS from Dell. Dell shipped it on Monday. So far so good.
Dell used DHL to ship it. I’m sure DHL is cheaper than UPS or Fedex because otherwise I don’t understand why anyone uses DHL. I got a call on Thursday from DHL […]
I’ve given up trying to play Far Cry: Vengance. The game’s crashes combined with the typical console “save point” nonsense has broken whatever desire I had to see the ending.
It was fairly weak as a game but it did prove that I could reasonably play a FPS with the Wii’s UI. The graphics engine was clearly ported […]
If you have to fly across the country, Jet Blue is a decent way to do it. Nice seats, better seat pitch than the economy-class of other airlines I’ve used, and free DirectTV in the seats make for a better-than-average experience.
Wii
I won the opportunity to buy a Wii from Amazon. UPS delivered it three days later — Amazon apparently took a day more than usual to ship it. The results among my friends that also applied to win the opportunity to buy a Wii caused speculation about the effect of being an […]
Important safety tip: Don’t disable anything in the “Common Dialogs” section of TweakUI for Windows XP if you also use CorelDraw 12 or X3. Disabling “Enable AutoComplete” and “Remember previously-used filenames” caused CorelDraw 12 and X3 to crash whenever they displayed a File-related dialog box. Reinstalling CorelDraw had no effect on the […]
The software update seems to have fixed the problems I had with the Comcast DVR. The UI is still a little clunky compared to the TiVo but the DVR does work and I’ve been using it instead of the TiVo for the last week or so.
The search interface abysmal but On Demand is probably cool enough […]
Best Buy delivered my new TV on Wednesday. It’s pretty great. I wish I could say the same about Comcast HD service. After the TV came I went out and swapped my digital cable box for a new Comcast HD-DVR. The HD signal is great but the box does not have accurate channel information. The […]
In normal operation my PC plus monitors uses between 180 and 320 watts. It’s much more variable than I expected. The monitors by themselves account for a fairly stable 70 watts (30 watts for the 18.1″ Sony and 40 watts for the 20″ Dell). When “off” the monitors use 0.5 watts (more or less, that’s near […]
I saw a large bird gliding around in San Jose the other day. It was too far away for me to see enough detail so I could remember details to try to identify the species later. I marveled at how his economical motions allowed him to glide apparently effortlessly between updrafts. In 20 minutes of watching the […]
I thought I’d give Windows Live Writer a shot. It aims to be a WYSIWIG blog post editor. It supports photo upload, but only via an API that the version of WordPress I use doesn’t support and FTP. Dreamhost obviously supports FTP but I don’t want to use cleartext passwords.
The HTML it generates seems to be […]
Stories like “Google developing eavesdropping software” remind me why I have a healthy distrust of any company where the end-users are not the source of revenue. In theory, if I’m paying a company $x/month for some service then that is how the company makes money.
If a service is “free”, then I […]
I recently extended my Amazon Marketplace scripts to print shipping labels with postage using Endicia. I’m in the “30 day free trial” now and it is very convenient to be able to print shipping labels with postage and skip the lines in the post office. Alas, probably not $10/month convenient for […]
I’ve been selling some books on Amazon.com Marketplace. The listings are offered as a link from the product page for the book. People that follow that link seem to be selecting purely on price, so I don’t bother listing when the existing lowest price is too low for me to […]