Google SmartLinksâ„¢

Posted by rae in the Net
at 5:59 pm on Wednesday, 28 June 2006

Google smart download link
Check out the “download” and “screenshots” links!

Am I just slow or is this a new feature for Google search? I did a search for “Handbrake”, a free Mac app, and it came up with the above results. There were special links for “download”, “snapshots”, and even “beta”!

Is the Handbrake guy adding special, Google-friendly tags to his site? Or is Google taking another step towards omniscience?

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Steve, Mitch and Bill at the “D4: All THings Digital” conference

Posted by rae in the Net, work
at 12:52 pm on Thursday, 22 June 2006

Steve, Mitch and Bill at D4

Nice shot! :-)

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Trying to de-spam my blog

Posted by rae in Reid, web site
at 10:40 am on Sunday, 18 June 2006

I am often getting around 500 spam comments to this blog to moderate every day. I’ve done a few things in an attempt to stem the tide. I’m too lazy to go look for WordPress plugins or anything, so I am just editing the PHP code directly myself.

The main thing that has helped is that I’ve edited wp-admin/moderation.php to present a much more condensed list of spam. Here’s the spam I’ve had in the last 5 hours:

spam list
click for bigger version

Now in this instance there are only 13 pieces of spam, which would be no biggie, even in the old interface, which would display the entire comment along with two lines of borders around it. This lets me handle spam about 4x faster I would say.

Along with presentation, the code also sorts the spam by the name of the sender. So I can scroll right past the “Buy *” section nice and fast. It also defaults everything to “(*) Spam”, which saves me a good couple of minutes on those long, 500+ lists.

I really should look into WordPress anti-spam stuff. Does anyone out there have any recommendations to help me save some time?

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New camera!

Posted by rae in Reid, entertainment, family, hardware
at 2:24 pm on Friday, 16 June 2006

CyberShot W100
Our new Sony CyberShot W100

We finally replaced our old, dead 2 Mpx Olympus D-510 Zoom yesterday. Here is a quick list of pros and cons:

Pros:

Cons:

You can read a posting to Tech Tok about our camera-buying decision with lots and lots of comments. I also found an excellent online review of the W100.

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Quake levels

Posted by rae in entertainment, family, friends, software
at 7:43 pm on Monday, 12 June 2006

InExtremis by Charon
Radiant
We’ve been talking about playing Quake sometime, and how various buildings would make good Quake levels, etc. So I thought I’d look into tools to build Quake levels. Specifically, the canonical tool, Radiant, which was written by Id Software and released under the GPL.

It took about ½ hour, but I managed to find a Mac version of Radiant (actually, it’s GtkRadiant, running under X Windows on a Mac, so it doesn’t look quite native).

Here are some links I ran across on the way to finally tracking it down:
   Radiant for Windows and Linux
   Tutorial for creating spiral stairs
   Mac GtkRadiant forum
   Manual install of GtkRadiant on a Mac

Oh, Radiant doesn’t only edit Quake 3 levels or something. It can handle pretty much all Id games, from Quake 1 (I think) through Doom 3.

Maybe some of us can get hopping now, eh?

Here is a screenshot of the editor in action (somewhat reduced). Pretty ugly, eh?

Actually, it reminds me of Maya a bit.

Editor
Screenshot of GtkRadiant running

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Camera notes

Posted by rae in entertainment, hardware
at 9:56 pm on Friday, 9 June 2006

I’m posting this so I don’t lose the info. :-)

VartanSony CyberShot DSC-W77.2 Mpxexcellent flash indoors
IainPanasonic DMC-LX18 Mpxgood flash
JeffPanasonic DMC-FX016 Mpx$400 CA @ Aiden Camera
DebbieCanon PowerShot SD550  
 
Canon PowerShot S80 8 Mpx
Panasonic DMC-LX1K “Lumix” 8.4 Mpx
Sony CyberShot DSC-N1 8.1 Mpx
Sony CyberShot DSC-W70 7 Mpx
Panasonic DMC-FX01K “Lumix” 6 Mpx

Jeff says that Aden Camera is a good place for buying cameras.

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new iRiver from eBay

Posted by rae in entertainment, hardware
at 10:35 pm on Monday, 5 June 2006

iRiver IFP 799
1 GB iRiver IFP 799
Today I received delivery of my first eBay purchase, an iRiver IFP799 mp3 player. It’s pretty much exactly the same as Luisa’s old iRiver, except that it has 1 GB of memory instead of ¼ GB.

So instead of recording only 7 hours at 80 kbps/32 kHz, it can record 28 hours. And if I up the quality to 160 kbps/44.1 kHz, it can still record 14 hours!

This means two things:

  1. We don’t have to worry about having enough room to record a whole Rolemaster session any more
  2. Rolemaster recordings will be larger

An interesting note on firmware upgrades. I tested the iRiver as soon as I got it, and was quite happy to note that the persistent beep-beep-beep sound you get when recording via the built-in mic was gone! However, once I upgraded from 1.25 to version 1.85 — in order to get the “UMS” (USB Mass Storage) mounted-on-the-desktop-as-a-disk feature — the beep-beep-beep returned! Not only that, but my maximum bitrate was capped at 96 kbps.

So I quickly downgraded back to 1.25 and both the beeps and the cap on the bitrate were gone. Huh. I guess I will bring the iRiver Music Manager with me on the PowerBook. I’ve put it and the Windows iRiver Manager installer on my USB key, “Atto”, so we can install it on Vartan’s machine and any other PC that wants to download from the iRiver.

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