Archive for February, 2005
02.28.05
Posted in Software at 9:37 pm by Nicholas
Lately I’ve been learning AppleScript as a means of automating certain repetitive tasks and because I might some day finish writing a proper Mac application, which of course I’d like to make scriptable. AppleScript Studio piques my curiosity, too.
Anyway, in the preferences of Apple’s Script Editor are a couple of interesting options: Default Language and Plugins. Turns out Apple isn’t really doing anything with those right now; they don’t seem to distribute any plugins and the only language available is AppleScript. But in searching the web for things I could do with those preference screens, I found Appscript, which is pretty cool. Appscript is a Python-based substitute for AppleScript. You get all the power (as far as I can tell), but with a syntax more familiar to experienced programmers. That’s not a small thing, either — as friendly as AppleScript strives to be, its verbosity and stubborn insistence on doing things its own way can be a difficult adjustment to those of us who pretty much grew up with C-based syntax.
I still intend to learn AppleScript, because I’d like to be able to distribute the scripts I write and I can’t depend on end users having Appscript installed. Still, for those of us who know Python and have repetitive personal tasks to automate, it’s a nice option.
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Posted in General, Software at 11:29 am by Nicholas
Until today, visiting my current favorite online map in my current favorite web browser yielded a “we’re working on it” sort of message. Now it actually works. For those using the Google Map Of… and/or Get Google Directions Applescripts to map locations in Firefox, instructions to modify those scripts for Safari are on the macosxhints discussion thread (scroll down to the comment titled “Modifying Applescripts”). Or, if you’d rather not get your hands dirty, you can download my modified scripts. Just drop them in ~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins (creating this directory if necessary) and restart Address Book to make it work.
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02.27.05
Posted in Humor at 2:42 pm by Nicholas
One of the coolest things I’ve seen in months is The Unfortunate Animal of the Month Club. For a mere $39/month (for the highest level of service — there are cheaper levels), you get a … shall we say … remixed stuffed animal, handmade to your specifications: options include two heads, two bodies sharing a head, “headflop”, or even something incorporating real animal parts. Baby-safe versions are available, too.
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02.24.05
Posted in Humor at 4:27 pm by Nicholas
Apparently passengers viewing Sideways on international flights have noticed a rather creative insult spilling from Best Supporting Actor nominee Thomas Haden Church‘s mouth. Apparently where theater-goers hear “asshole,” the censored version substitutes “Ashcroft.” Brilliant. I have a new favorite insult.
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Posted in Software at 3:05 pm by Nicholas
For those who like to get their news straight from the source, The Associated Press has just added consumer-accessible RSS feeds.
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02.23.05
Posted in Music at 10:05 am by Nicholas
TiVo has a very cool feature called TiVo Desktop that pulls music from your computer and plays it over whatever stereo you have hooked up for your TV, while displaying the song, artist, and album names on the TV. Unfortunately for iTunes users, the TiVo Desktop download page warns that the feature “does not support AAC audio files (including music purchased at the iTunes Music Store).” As it turns out — for Mac users, at least — half of that statement is a dirty, rotten lie.
As posted on PVRblog this morning, playing AAC files over TiVo Desktop is as simple as installing a command-line MP3 encoder called LAME. You don’t even have to use the command line to make it work — a handy package file on Vas the Man’s Downloads page will install the program for you, and then the feature just works without further ado. I don’t know if there’s a way to make it work for iTunes-using Windows users, and since I’m not a Windows user myself, I have no motivation for finding out.
But the other half of that warning on TiVo’s page remains problematic: TiVo Desktop won’t play DRM-encoded files, like the ones you get from the iTunes Music Store. So you’ll just have to strip the DRM nonsense from your AAC files if you want to play them on your TiVo.
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Posted in General at 9:14 am by Nicholas
There’s so much you can do with Google these days, it’s hard to keep track of it all. A good place to start, though, is Google’s own cheat sheet. After you’ve committed that page to memory, there’s a somewhat more complete list of search features and how to use them (did you know you can search movie listings in Google?). Finally, O’Reilly’s Google Hacks should keep you busy with cool Google tricks for a few weeks, at least.
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Posted in Music at 8:54 am by Nicholas
For those who use AllofMP3 for their music downloads, now might be a good time to burn through your download credits. The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office has thirty days to decide whether or not to bring charges against the service for copyright infringement. And I just added $25 to my balance yesterday, damn it. No mention in the article of similar services, like MP3Search.ru.
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02.20.05
Posted in WordPress at 4:46 pm by Nicholas
I’ve been using SpamKarma to fight comment spam on this blog, and it’s exceeded all of my expectations — thus far, it has caught every attempt at comment spam while yielding absolutely no false positives. My only complaint is that it has no real effect on trackback spam: there is experimental support for trackback spam filtering, but it hasn’t worked for me. One particular spammer has hit me once an hour, every hour, all day today.
But I managed to find, via this post on BloggingPro, a link to a trackback host verification plugin for WordPress. It compares the IP of an incoming trackback to the URL linked in the trackback, and if they don’t match, it puts the trackback in the moderation queue. Since most spammers submit their trackbacks from open proxies, and not from an actual working weblog, this should be enough to eliminate the vast majority of trackback spam. Pretty slick — makes one wonder why this isn’t a standard feature in every weblog system that accepts trackbacks.
The site the plugin is on is in German, but the plugin itself is in English. To install, just download the plugin file, change the extension from phps to php, and drop it in your plugins directory (from the WordPress root directory, it’s at wp-content/plugins/). Then, from the WordPress root, open up wp-includes/functions.php, find the function definition for trackback_response, and comment out the last line, die(); (that is, change it to // die();). Finally, go to the Plugins page in your WordPress control panel and activate the Trackback Host Verification plugin.
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02.09.05
Posted in General at 10:32 am by Nicholas
Blogger Michael Buffington has begun an experiment: he’s created a blog called Asbestos News on which he aggregates any asbestos-related news items, which he finds via the Alert feature in Google News. Then he sells Google TextAds at $15-100 per click. He’s not particularly interested in or knowledgeable about asbestos, though he’s learning.
I suspect that if Asbestos News does well, I’ll probably try to find another hotbed topic to blog on, and will continue to spawn what I’ll call, with trepidation, “topical news aggregator blogs” until the concept stops working.
I already take a much more personal approach with digitalslr.org and as far as advertising revenue goes it does fairly well compared to my original expectations. If I can emulate its success while doing less to get there, that’s what I call a good thing.
Damn, that’s a good idea. Now I’m wondering if I should do the same. Any subject ideas? What else is hot these days?
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