Online T-Shirt design

Posted by rae in the Net
at 2:46 pm on Thursday, 28 July 2005

I’ve always had an eye out for an online T-shirt place that would let you design the entire shirt instead of just an 8×10 patch on the front and back.

Well, Spreadshirt is the closest yet. They let you upload designs in jpeg or Adobe Illustrator formats. And while they don’t let you use the entire shirt (i.e. not the sleeves), you sitll have about 80% of the area to work with.


Note the nice big design area

6 Comments

Wasaga pictures

Posted by rae in family, friends
at 7:59 pm on Thursday, 21 July 2005

I’ve posted our pictures from our annual week off, both on Flickr (high resolution) and on my site, tnir (lower resolution).

Add the first comment

High Fructose Corn Syrup vs Cane Sugar

Posted by rae in the Net
at 1:22 pm on Tuesday, 19 July 2005

As an aside to a current discussion on slashdot about ethanol, someone mentioned a company called ADM that pushed the US into replacing sugar in most products with corn syrup.

An interesting discussion ensues about how corn syrup is worse for you than cane sugar, or maybe not. :-)

Add the first comment

Upgrading a G4

Posted by rae in hardware
at 2:19 pm on Wednesday, 6 July 2005

Note to self: this page has all the info you need to upgrade G4 tower hardware. I found the movie showing how to do it all incredibly helpful.

Many thanks to Mark and Iain for their help with upgrading a G4. Ronnie’s piano teacher, Sharon, uses the G4 and she recently upgraded from Mac OS 8.6 to Mac OS 9. Well, I couldn’t let this stand, so I took her on a shopping spree, getting some RAM and a new, big hard drive. This was much cheaper than a Mac Mini, and I thought she would be best served saving up for a Pentium Mac next year anyway.

5 Comments

Deep Impact has .. impacted!

Posted by rae in science, the Net
at 2:25 am on Monday, 4 July 2005

Just watched NASA’s Deep Impact space probe crash into the Tempel 1 comet.

Yowza!

The impact was way, way brighter than people were expecting. One guy on NASA TV wondered if they happened to hit a pocket of gas underground or something. *My* theory is that the comet is partially made of nitro-glycerin..

Michael and I tried to find something on TV, checking Discovery, the Learning Channel.. but nothing. Discovery was busy playing MythBusters. CNN was talking about sports when we checked, although John Chew told me he was watching spotty coverage that consisted partially of assurances that the impact would not send the comet to earth, destroying civilization.

Egad.

I tried various means by which to get to NASA TV, including RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, but what ended up working best was Video Lan Client on my PC (wouldn’t work on my Mac).

Here are some pics..

1 Comment

Our 5-day internet outage

Posted by rae in Reid, web site
at 11:36 am on Friday, 1 July 2005

Well, it looks like I’m not the only one who lost their internet connection for a few days recently. Our ISP, istop.com was cut off from the Internet by Bell Canada. istop then decided to sell their business to someone else!

The long and the short of it is that I am now a customer of igs.net. The good news is that they have a “no caps” policy, which istop did *not* have. I will have to review the situation when my one-year contract expires around November sometime. Hopefully prices will remain good.

istop’s news page had these entries on the whole kerfuffle (copied here in case the news page goes away):

June 28 2005 - PPPoE login change

Bell has cut off the DSL service used by IStop.com. They chose to do so even though they received a $300,000 deposit for the service in March 2005. In addition, they have been paid well in excess of their General Tariff Item 5410 rates. Considering the situation and the lack of support by the CRTC, IStop.com has made arrangements with Cybersurf to continue service for our customers. PPPoE logins should be changed to

istop:userid@igs.net
Your password does not change. Staff at IStop.com and Cybersurf expect to have the new login working by 1900 today. We will issue another update on June 29 to further assist our customers with this transition and provide more details on the actions of Bell.
June 29 2005 - Cybersurf Agreement

IStop.com has made a preliminary agreement to transfer its customer base to Cybersurf. Cybersurf will take over the ADSL internet access and web hosting business of IStop.com. Customers will not have to change their email address and Cybersurf will continue to operate the IStop.com domain name and brand.


June 29 2005 - Cybersurf account transfer

In order for ADSL customers to maintain line sync, the account must be transferred to Cybersurf. A web page to process an account transfer will be available on June 30. IStop.com customers with a static IP will not loose their IP assignment by transferring the account. UPDATE: Cybersurf is placing orders with Bell Wholesale to maintain line sync for IStop.com customers; it will not be necessary to transfer your account to maintain a connection. Bell has apparently expedited the disonnection of IStop.com customers, so some lines have arleady been cut off. As Bell processes the orders from Cybersurf these lines will be reconnected.


June 29 2005 - Cybersurf hotline for IStop.com customers

IStop.com customers needing assistance switching to Cybersurf can call 1-866-833-4164. IStop.com customers that transfer their account to Cybersurf will recieve one free month of service. IStop.com will also refund all customers that have pre-paid for service that has not been used. IStop.com customers that have paid a deposit for modem rental can keep the ADSL modem and will no longer be charged a rental fee.

1 Comment