I’ve just upgraded movabletype, the software I use to run the weblog on this site, to the latest version. It’s been a couple of years since I upgraded so I was a little worried things wouldn’t go smoothly. And they didn’t, but I managed to recover before anyone was likely to notice. Anyway one of the side effects of this is that I’m turning comments back on, at least for the short term, as the update supposedly helps tremendously with comment spam. If you post a comment now you’ll have to wait for me to approve it for it to appear, which is a little frustrating I suppose but less frustrating than having to plow through 100 viagra and cialis spams to read the actual comments on the weblog.

I also spent 2 hours (!!!) cleaning out all the comment spam that was in the system since the newer movabletype provides a mechanism for more easily deleting unwanted comments. Hopefully legitimate comments remain but some might have fallen victim to me trying to wade through a lot of data as quickly as I could. So if you’re comment is gone, sorry. I did my best.

Consider yourself warned - if you’re weak of stomach, eating, have no taste for tales containing more scatological detail than a proctologists report, or hate dogs, move on to the next post and do not read this one. Everyone else is in for a fantastic if maybe slightly disturbing laugh at my expense.

Soolin, my 6 month old golden retriever pup, is crate trained. I get up around 6AM and most mornings I let her out of her crate then crawl back under my covers. She hops on the bed and we play for a little while before I let her out. It’s our morning ritual. This morning she woke me up before 6AM, scratching at the door to her crate and making a racket restlessly moving around. I let her out, figuring she had to go to the bathroom and would make a beeline for the door. Instead she hopped up on the bed. She was spade on friday and I’ve been keeping her from engaging in too much physical activity so I concluded she was just restless because she’s spent half a week laying around. Anyway, I crawled back into bed with her. Not two seconds after I did this, Soolin hopped in my lap and exploded in a miasma of wet gloopy diarrhea so foul, so utterly and completely disgusting that I literally shrieked in horror and shock. I couldn’t fucking believe what had just happened. It was everywhere. On me, on my spendy down comforter, an old and beloved blanket I’ve had since college days, and all over the bed itself.

Soolin herself was terrified, partly I’m sure because she is completely aware that she is not supposed to excrete inside, and partly because she’s never heard me shriek. I don’t think anyone has ever heard me shriek, come to think of it. She ran off to the corner of the bed (my bed, which came with my cottage, is enormous - a california king which is more than 6 feet wide) and cowered. I sprang into action, trying to contain the damage. I didn’t want it to penetrate into the bed mattress, and I managed to get everything off the bed before it did, though I left a trail of poop across my house that still reeks despite hours of cleaning.

The down comforter and college blanket were a total loss. It took three cycles through the washer to cleanse the bed pad. The sheet took only 1, thankfully. I had to go buy a new comforter, a cheapy at target since it’s summer and I won’t need a full thick one like the one I lost until winter.

Thank god I’m basically an easy going person. I was infuriated at nothing in particular for most of the morning - there was no one to blame, it’s not Soolin’s fault she got sick and there was nothing I really could have expected to do differently that would have saved me this travesty. By the afternoon though I was laughing about it and figured ehh, might as well share. So laugh it up at my expense, assuming you can stomach imagining a poop-drenched me, murfled hair and angry glare ablaze, running in my skivvies through the house this morning cursing up a storm and dripping unspeakable horror about the house. I don’t mind

Holy cow is this ever good - Xylescope is similar to aardvark, the mouseover DOM inspector and the mozilla web developer’s extension, in that it allows you to explore the structure of an html document and the CSS that’s being applied to every element, including the best visualization of the parent-child relationship I’ve yet seen. The only caveats are that it costs money as compared to these other free tools (but only $15, it’s cheap), it can’t perform direct transformations in the way that aardvark and the web developer’s extension can, and you really need some serious screen real estate to take full advantage of it. Even so, anyone doing web development on the mac should check this out.

Another example of free, legal video downloads to add to your bit torrent client. If you’re a videogame player, get a few episodes of Consolevania and check it out. These guys know and love their stuff, they’re irreverent, profane and occasionally wonderfully funny. It’s not a show for the casual fan, but for those who know their games and can parse the sometimes thick scottish brogue, you’re in for a treat.

Fetch, the venerable ftp client, has recently been updated and now supports sftp. I’ve used Fetch off and on for at least 10 years. It may not have all the bells and whistles of newer products like transmit, and it costs money as compared to the free fugu or cyberduck, but it’s rock solid and a comfortably familiar interface if you’ve used it as long as I have. $25, osx only.

My hate of flash intro animations and useless UI widgets knows no bounds. I’ve got nothing against flash in principle, but gods do designers ever misuse it, and increasingly advertisers are using it, leading me to constantly re-jigger my adblock settings. I’ve been using flashblock to address this. Basically it intercepts any flash object and replaces it with a clickable link. If you need the flash, you can click on it and use it as the designer intended - if you don’t, you never have to see it.

If you enjoyed diablo or diablo II, check out fate, a nearly perfect homage to diablo with a nice dash of the roguelike mixed in. What a bargain this is - $20, a relatively small (120MB) download, and it’s easy as pie to mod. Superb! I’ve been addicted to it since it shipped last week. PC only, and it’s the wild tangent stuff, which was for a long time spyware. They’ve since cleaned up their act but your spyware blocker might complain. Act as you see fit, meanwhile I’m on level 15 and me and my small horde of summoned skeletons are kicking ass and taking loot.

Check out this dog powered scooter. I want one! Soolin could easily pull me into work every morning using one of these, and it would be good for both of us as well as the environment. All told it would run me about $500 to get one of these. A bit steep, and I’d probably catch grief from folks who think it would be cruel to Soolin. If I had a husky this thing would be perfect, they have energy to burn.

I commented a few times about the merger of TechTV and G4TV and how it ruined a reasonably entertaining and informative show (The Screensavers), as well as most anything else good on the techtv channel - only X-Play has come through largely unscathed. Not that there was much else on techtv worth watching, but anyway, stated plainly, the G4 folks suck, they seem to have no idea what they’re doing. How these people manage to be in charge of running a television network I don’t know. Anyway, a cool observation - the core of the screensaver show, Patrick and Leo, are back together along with Yoshi, Robert Heron and Kevin Rose over at thisweekintech.com, where they’re offering up a podcast. They’re using skype, RSS and bit torrent to push their stuff out to the community, along with weblogs to help publicize and talk about it. This is well worth checking out, and if you were a fan of the old screensavers, it’s a must. This is also a hint of things to come in terms of niche content publishing. This stuff wasn’t enough to sustain a tv network, we’ll see if it’s enough to sustain their hosting and bandwidth bills and pay their rent. A telling clue is that Kevin Rose announced that quit Attack of the Show (what techtv’s screensavers evolved into) effective this friday in order to focus on his internet publishing stuff, which includes thisweekintech.com as well as systm.org, a new show (video, again RSS/torrent stuff) that he’s putting together, as well as a few other projects. The same is true of a lot of the former techtv folk, a lot of both on and off air people seem to be involved in a set of ‘new distribution model’ projects.

Wouldn’t it be interesting in a year or two if it turns out the former techtv folk are able to effectively put themselves back on the air using this stuff? It’s not mass market yet by any stretch, but is it a sustainable vertical niche market? Can they get this stuff to the point where they’re pulling in the numbers equivalent to what they were when they were a cable show? Even if they can only get a fraction of that market, the larger, more precise dataset they’ll have about their viewers as compared to what they can get from broadcast tv should be worth more to their advertising clients. I have no idea how the economics of this would work but it’s all fascinating to see. And not to get to far down the rabbit hole, but the next generation consoles, particularly the xbox 360, have a potential role to play here as well.

I’ve covered FireANT before, but it’s had a major revision since the last time I pointed at it. Looking to get legal, publicly available video down into your machine but found monkeying with Azureus and the RSS plugins too much of a pain? Check this client out, it aims to simplify the process.

Check out Broadcast Machine, another tool that allows relatively easy video content publishing. This one’s php based. RSS + .torrents = the tivo-ization of your computer. Whether it’s this app or another, this stuff is basically ready for primetime now for technically proficient folk. You’ll spend more time figuring out how to get the appropriate video and audio codecs going than you will getting your pseudo tivo working.

Note, the be clear - this is a publishing tool. I’ve covered ways to get the content to yourself a number of times. This is a tool to get your content out to the world.

Man, I don’t know when folks will get the message and really start paying attention to this. I suspect not until the generation this article refers to ends up swamping the health care system as the bills come due for not paying attention to their condition. For those who don’t want to click through on the link, it’s an article covering how 2/3rds of the folks with type 2 diabetes are basically doing little or nothing to manage their condition, which will ultimately lead to serious health complications as they age. I’ve said this before, the end-game for folks with unmanaged diabetes is spectacularly unpleasant - the best you can hope for is a sudden heart attack, but you’re more likely to suffer kidney and liver failures along with possible blindness and limb amputation before you get there. They should do shock therapy for these folks in the way they did for smoking when I was young (this is a healthy lung, this is the lung of a 20 year smoker, and hey, take a look at the guy with the hole in his throat). For what it’s worth, I’m not in that 2/3rds category.

I’ve mentioned repeatedly how Feeddemon is by far my favorite RSS reader across any platform. Apparently I’m not alone in feeling that way - today, Newsgator, the popular RSS tool for folks using Outlook on PCs, announced that they’ve acquired Bradsoft and will continue developing both Feeddemon and Topstyle (a superb PC-based CSS/XHTML editor). I own both these tools. I’m happy for Bradsoft - the guy is a class act and he makes excellent products. He was also the author of Homesite, which was one of the first decent PC-based HTML authoring tools back in the day, still available (barely!) from Macromedia. I’m also bummed though. While I am getting a 2 year paid subscription to Newsgator out of their purchase of Bradsoft, and it will allow Feeddemon a method of providing feed synching across platforms (read a feed at work, when I look at it at home it shows as already read), I had already basically solved this problem for myself via Powerfolder, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that Feeddemon and Topstyle don’t suffer the same fate that Homesite did, and that Feeddemon continues to innovate under its new corporate parent. Meanwhile it’s time to start paying attention to projects like RSS Owl, or maybe switch back to my old favorite on the mac, netnewswire, which has recently moved to version 2.0.

If you’ve been watching my photo galleries you might have noticed that I’ve been putting QTVR panoramas of the mountains I summit in lately. Panorama Factory is what I’ve been using to produce them and it’s just fantastic. I’ve been making QTVR’s for over 10 years now and for most of that time I relied on vrworx. When I left Bowdoin I lost access to my legal license for it, and my personal license was for a pre-os x version. I started hunting around for alternatives and after testing a bunch of stuff decided on the Panorama Factory. Nothing against vrworx, but $299.00 versus $60 made it an easy decision. vrworx is more featureful but it’s mostly things I wasn’t using and all in all it’s harder to use and seems to generate QTVR’s of lesser quality from the same set of photos. With Panorama Factory I literally just point, shoot, rotate myself a bit, and repeat, no tripod and no real effort to maintain a level plain, yet Panorama Factory kicks out QTVR’s of more than acceptable quality. It’s PC only but well worth a look if you’re interested in creating your own QTVR’s, or even just wide angle panoramic shot.

I updated the software that runs my photo gallery and added several new photo albums. Before I get to the links for those, I want to commend the menalto’s gallery folks. It’s just a superb piece of software and a shining example of open source at its best. The upgrade process went off without a hitch and was clearly and comprehensively documented, and they added a bunch of new features to the system. One of the new features is a handy RSS feed system. I haven’t gotten it configured quite right yet so you might want to hold off on adding it to your feed list, though the address won’t change so there’s no real harm if you do.

Anyway the new albums are all under the ‘Other hikes in the adirondacks’ section, which you can access here, and include photos of several recent hikes, including a monster 13 mile hike to the top of Pharoah Mountain, a short hike in and around the Split Rock area on the west shore of Lake Champlain, and a hike to the summitt of Crane mountain. The Crane and Pharoah galleries both have excellent QTVR panoramas to check out, and there are tons of photos of me, Soolin, beautiful vistas, and even a few of Andrew. Check em out.

Got a USB thumb drive? I’ve mentioned Tiddlywiki before, the clever little self-contained wiki that consists of a single html file. It’s continued to evolve and gotten its own domain/website. A new version recently shipped. This is a handy way to carry data you have to have around with you - simply copy the file to your thumb drive and load it up at whatever computer you happen to be sitting in front of. There’s also a modified version called GTDTiddlyWiki based on the ‘Getting Things Done’ model of productivity management, if you’re interested in such things. Neither is really a replacement for a full-fledged wiki engine, but if you’re looking to test the waters or you just need something simple that’s slightly better than a sticky or emailing yourself reminders, one of them might be a good fit, and they’re painless to check out.

I happened across this cool watercraft - $600 gets you a super light weight water skimmer. I’m somewhat tempted to pick this up for my two Lake George camping trips this summer, we’d have a blast playing on the thing. Check out the video for details on how it works. Anyone know of a DIY kit or other source for a watercraft like this that isn’t quite so pricey? Seems like you could build something very similar relatively easily, the toughest part would be getting the wings angle correct. It also seems like it would be possible to make one that had a better way to transfer energy to the thing instead of hopping like a kangaroo. Still very cool though.

These band-aids cracked me up. These are definitely going in someone’s stocking this christmas.

Building QTVR’s on your mac? Check out PanoPreviewer, a handy little plugin that lets you examine QTVR files you’re working on in photoshop. Unfortunately there’s no windows version and that’s where I’m building my QTVR files these days, but if you’re in a Mac this is super handy.

Check out Synergy2. It’s an amazingly useful little utility that allows you to use one keyboard and mouse to control as many computers and monitors as you like. I’ve got it setup at work to control two machines, one mac and one pc, each of which has 2 screens, and it works beautifully. The setup is a bit of a bear to puzzle out despite the extensive documentation, but once you get it working you’ll never consider a KVM setup again. Just the ability to copy and paste between platforms makes it worth considering over a dedicated KVM.