Familiar with the Bonnaroo Music Festival? This years festival took place a couple of weeks ago. Bonnaroo has become something of an event for me, since shortly after it happens the audience recordings of the show come online and I get to check out a bunch of live music. Some of it is from bands I know, but a lot of it is from bands I’m not familiar with and it’s great fun to check out new music. The highlight of this year’s festival so far has been Radiohead’s show, but the GRAB show is also phenomenal, especially if like me you have a fondness for the Grateful Dead. Anyway there’s an extensive collection of concerts available. This is legal music folks and anyone who likes jam bands has every reason to check it out. I found a great directory of lossless (mostly flac) recordings of it on this post at the Live Music Blog.

Kudos to my brother for poking me about this. I went looking for the shows a couple of days after the festival ended and came up empty. Jesse sent me links to a couple shows and that ended up with me tracking down the link above, which at this point has almost all of it.

A minor pipe dream of mine - actually go to this festival one year and relive the days of my youth. Anyone game?

Ever done any side work or sold something on ebay or elsewhere and needed an invoice? Chances are if you’re like me you used some crappy word processing template or simply typed up a bill of sale. Blinksale offers a credible alternative to this. It’s a free (depending on how frequently you need to use it) web service with great templates and an excellent interface. Log in, create your invoice, print, and you’re done. It’s capable of more if you need it - tracking payment, invoice date and so on, but it’s also drop dead easy if all you need to do is create and send an invoice.

My neighbor noticed a fox den on my property about a month and a half ago, and after it was pointed out to me I would watch for them to come out of the den most every evening around dusk. Their den was about 2-300 yards from the side of my house in a little clump of trees right in the middle of the farmland that’s adjacent to my place.

About a month after I noticed them I saw a dead fox on my drive to work, at the point on the road that is closest to the den. A month later, a second dead fox, same place. This saddened me, and I wondered how the fox kits would survive if it was both parents who had been slain. Then things got weird. The afternoon after I saw the dead fox, I got home from work and took Soolin out to play in the yard. I noticed on the way into the house that one of the foxes was wandering the farmland, which was unusual. While I had occasionally seen them out on the field during the day, every other time it had been either in the early morning or very late in the day.

The moment Soolin came down the stairs and into the yard, the fox looked up and made a beeline for her. Not in a brazen ‘attack!’ sort of way, more like in a ‘let me creep up on her, but as quick as I can’ kind of way, with a very alert expression - ears forward, eyes focused like lasers on her. I rushed her into the house, not sure what to make of it. For the next several days I was constantly seeing the fox out in the field, and almost every time I brought Soolin outside it would come running for my yard, even when it was in its den. At one point it even came right into the yard and onto the driveway and crept around the garage, peering around the side of it to look at Soolin, who was looking back at it through the back door.

Then one day - no more fox. Since then I’ve seen it only once, and it was far enough off that I can’t even be sure it was the same fox. I’ve no idea what to make of this behavior. Did it think Soolin was possibly one of its missing parents? Blame her for their disappearance? Need to eat and think ‘hmm, tasty blond snack!’ Have rabies and basically gone off its gourd? Anyone have a clue what might cause a fox to behave this way?

I should also note it’s not clear to me this was even one of the kits - it seemed over large to have been born in the spring. I know they grow quickly, but this seemed large even by grown fox standards.

Scrapbook is a Firefox extension which allows you to capture portions of websites or the entire website and store it locally on your machine, where you can then search the contents, make notes on them, and organize them as you see fit. It’s free and is good at what it does.

I’ll confess that I don’t really buy the use of the browser as a scrap booking tool. I’m doing similar things using Devonthink Pro though (capturing the full contents of websites along with snippets from them) as a knowledgebase tool so I understand where this is coming from conceptually. It just seems to me that lacking some of the intelligent filtering that Devonthink provides this isn’t nearly as useful. Still, many folks seem to use and like it. Maybe you’ll become one of them.

Check out this handy web-based .htaccess generator. Can’t remember how to add that cgi handler, or how to match against a local passwd for authentication? This is the tool for you. Fill out the form, submit, and it will provide you with the text to tuck into your .htaccess file. Drop that into the directory and you’re good to go.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about the unexpected passing of Michael Bartosh a few weeks ago, but I did want to take a moment to acknowledge it and wish him a fond farewell. Michael was a frequent (constant) contributor to several MacOS forums I visit and his knowledge of OSX was second to none. I learned a lot from him over the last several years and my copy of his Mac OS X Server Administration manual was well thumbed and frequently relied upon. Here’s a picture of Michael on flickr, a link to the TUAW post that initially brought his death to my attention, and to his book on Amazon.com. Happy trails to Michael and best wishes to his family and friends, his presence will be sorely missed.

If you’re not familiar with it, Hamachi is a very handy personal VPN tool that allows you to do things like connect the file system/s of your home computer/s or network to your work machine/s. It’s really very slick and extremely useful, especially if you’re sitting behind a firewall that’s blocking more easily accesible methods of connecting to remote machines. To help illustrate this, imagine you could access your home music collection from work, instead of having a copy of some of it on a thumbdrive/mp3 player/portable disc that you cart to work with you.

Hamachi is not open source, however, and that gives some folks pause since it’s hard to assess how secure the tool is, plus while it’s free for personal use there are no guarantees that it will remain so.

If you’re troubled by these issues, consider tinc as an alternative. It’s not nearly as easy to configure as Hamachi is, but it’s also free, is open source, and runs on more platforms than Hamachi does. Two thumbs up from me, though I did swear a good bit when I was first getting it running.

Another amusing story about my Grandfather Fisher that will help folks understand from whence my sense of humor came. This one happened when I was 10 or 11 years old. My Grandparents would sometimes take us into a train-themed restaurant in Akron or Canton. I think it was in an old train station and they had extensive train paraphernalia on the walls and an elaborate model railroad installation upstairs. While we were ordering an odd exchange took place between the waitress and my Grandfather that I noticed but couldn’t figure out. The reasons for it became clear when the food arrived at the table, because the server had to have help bringing out a 4′ long sub, the kind of thing you would order to feed a softball team or something, which they plopped down in front of my Grandfather. My sister, cousin and I were incredulous: ‘you going to eat that Grandpa?!? My Grandfather played at being surprised and chagrined and made much hay of being the big man about it an accepting it - ‘I ordered it, I’ll just have to eat it all,’ while my Grandmother gave him grief. The amazing thing is he did eat almost the entire thing, and my Grandfather was not a large man - 5′6″ at most and slender.

I’ve posted about Jotspot several times, and at one point wondered how they’d actually make it with a for-pay wiki play when there are plenty of free alternatives out there. Partner with the big boys seems to be the answer - ebay began testing the use of a wiki for their customers and Jot is the vendor who’s providing their wiki engine. Kudos to the Jot folks - I love their tech, used it quite a bit when I was at Skidmore, and am happy to see them getting commercial recognition for their excellent tools.

What a great weekend. Summer finally arrived, with temperatures pushing 90 and humidity to spare. I had Stan the black lab for the weekend since my friend Andrew was headed to Cape Cod and needed a dog sitter, so Soolin, Stan and I spent the weekend hunting swimming holes and found several nice ones, including some excellent currents on an isolated spot near the stillwater bridge, (gmap, googlearth) and Lake Mattawa (gmap, googlearth). The worst event of the weekend - scurrying across route 2 west of Orange I lept down an embankment with the dogs to avoid traffic and found myself waste deep in a poison ivy patch which Soolin immediately proceeded to roll around in. The best? A 1/2 mile hike upriver from the Stillwater bridge, ankle to waste deep in water and clambering over and around boulders. Awesome! Soolin and I were in our element. Stan was not as sure of himself around the water but he’s known Soolin and I since he was 8 weeks old so he put on his game face and clambered after us, only stopping to complain occasionally but always scurrying up the bank when he could.

Next week weather permitting I’m heading back to Lake Mattawa in the early AM to get out on the lake with a float and Soolin on a line for some swimming and soaking action.

There have been a variety of studies that seem to demonstrate that over zealous cleanliness can have an negative impact on the human immune system. Science Daily has an article on research at Duke suggesting that the higher incidence of allergies in nations with more fastidious habits is due to their immune systems not having to confront the diverse soup of microbes and allergens found in the habitats of less fastidious nations. There’s an important lesson here for those paying attention: stop vacuuming and cleaning obsessively and let a little mother nature seep into your house - you’ll sneeze less. This also validates the cleaning strategies of bachelors like myself - less is more, baby!

This one has been out for a while now and has gotten better and better, to the point where it’s worth mentioning. Like role playing games and jonesing for something new? Check out S.C.O.U.R.G.E., a free, cross platform, open source RPG that draws on elements from Diablo, Baldurs Gate, and the Rogue-likes to come up with something not exactly fresh but definitely fun. It’s still a little raw around the edges but has gotten to the point where it’s very playable. Worth a look for RPG fans.

[edit] whoops! Guess it would help if I include the link.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a trick that enabled you to get in on the yahoo email beta. A little history is on order here. Several years ago a company called Oddpost began offering webmail accounts with a really slick interface. It was IE only though, and after a bit Yahoo snapped them up and indicated they would enhance the client and make it cross browser compatible. At least two years have passed since then. For whatever reason Yahoo seems to be struggling with this, and in the interim gmail came out and pretty much defined what a web 2.0 mail interface ought to look like. This is the core of Yahoo’s problem now, because their new interface suffers in comparion. Much like Yahoo’s homepage, the webmail client is too cluttered with crap, and what’s worse is that it’s an ajax app so it streams this crap in piecemeal and this can literally freeze the browser or make it very unresponsive while it pulls the elements that make up the interface down.

Long story short, after about a month and a half with the beta I’ve switched back. It’s possible that Yahoo can address some of these problems - for example, they might not have enough bandwith/servers allocated to the beta which could be causing the slow streaming in of the data and the browser sluggishness - but even if they address that, it doesn’t address their clumsy and cluttered user interface. Given the evolution of their homepage it seems less likely they’ll effectively address this (they seem to subscribe to the ‘more is better’ school of design at a time when google and many web 2.0 companies (37 signals, del.icio.us, digg, to name just a few examples) are demonstrating that the opposite is true.

Still, I’ll keep an open mind and try it again when they go live with it for all customers, or announce another round of beta testing, to see if it’s improved to the point of actually being usable.

The user interface isn’t as elegant as my current favorite, Ecto, but Bleezer is an otherwise excellent cross platform blogging tool that has the added benefit of being free. It’s java based so there’s an initial bit of sluggishness when it’s first launched but once it’s running it’s speedy. It also supports publishing to more blogging systems than any client I’ve seen to date, and it supports tagging for del.icio.us and Technorati. It’s also capable of downloading your current blog postings and keeping a local archive of them, which not all blogging tools can do. Setup was a breeze and it’s a tiny download. This is definitely worth checking out if you haven’t invested in a blogging tool yet or if you’re managing a lab or campus computer image and need a cross platform tool for consistency of user interface and ease of documentation.

Me too. In case you’re not aware, Firefox leaks memory like a sieve. On the Mac this doesn’t cause too much of an issue normally, but on the PC it can be a real bitch, slowing the browser down to a crawl after a while. There’s no 100% solution to this problem but there is now at least a diagnostic tool. Some of the memory leaking is caused by poorly written extensions. If your Firefox memory leaking is chronic, you might try the Leak Monitor extension, which will help you identify which extension/s are causing the problem. Free, cross platform, and a tiny download.

This actually happened some time ago but the Mac version finally released today so I’m mentioning it now. Google bought the company some months ago and announced a free version which is somewhat feature limited compared to the commercial (~$495) version but still very capable and useful for things from shelf construction in the garage to landscape planning for the yard. If you’re not familiar with it, Sketchup is a wonderfully intuitive Computer Assisted Design (CAD) program for macs and pcs. The Mac version is not yet a universal binary but it runs and performs competently enough. It’s also integrated with google earth so you can add the fabulous garden of eden you design for your backyard to the global info-stream should you so choose.

I originally notice this over on the unofficial apple weblog, but you can also link directly to the download on google’s site.

… so to speak, anyway. My friend Larry passed along a piece that ran in the Boston Globe recently about the trend of folks like me who are choosing to be single rather than pursuing a relationship. The timing is ironic in that I posted to a personals site for the first time in my life, but there are definitely shades of me in the folks they interview in the piece. Worth a look if you’re interested in the subject.

This is one of my favorite uses of google’s mapping api - pinthemap.com. Find the spot on the map you’d like to mark, left click, provide some descriptive text (here’s where my house is, by way of example) and that’s it. No account needed, no complicated process required. Kudos to the developers for a really useful and drop dead easy to use implementation.