It’s later than my DVR thinks…
March 10, 2007
Speaking of cheap patches for the Daylight Savings Time thing...
I was looking through the program guide on my DVR (a Dishplayer 622) last night, and I see that they “solved the problem” by offsetting the guide data by an hour. I assume that this will go on until the first Sunday in April.
Not a bad solution, but not exactly smooth and subtle, either.
I’ll take “Grande Latte” for $100, Alex
March 10, 2007
A fragment of conversation while making a bit of after dinner coffee the other night…
“That’s a grinder, right?”
um hmmm.
“And what’s that thing?”
This? It’s a portafilter.
“No, the thing on the front of the grinder, with the handle.”
Oh. Doser.
“And that’s a tamper?”
Yep.
“So what are you attaching the portafilter to?”
That would be the brew group.
“Okay”
(While pulling the next shot…)
“Let’s see… That’s grinder, doser, portafilter, tamper, and brew group?”
Is the question ‘Name five things you will no longer find at Starbucks?’
Time Out
March 9, 2007
If you live in the US or Canada, and just stumbled in here from the dark side of the moon, perhaps, or an extended stay on a desert island, there’s a remote chance that you are not aware that:
a) The semi-annual disruption of your circadian rhythm known as “daylight savings time” is happening this Sunday (May 11) — three weeks earlier than in previous years. At 2:00 am your time, the clock moves ahead to 3:00am, and you lose an hour of sleep that you’re not getting back until the first Sunday in November.
and (perhaps more importantly, if you’re a gadget hound)…
b) Only having a year and a half or so warning, software manufacturers predictably waited until the last moment to make changes, so there’s a chance that some of the devices you expect to keep track of daylight savings time for you won’t, at least unless you update them.
Windows Mobile 6 Beta for T-Mobile Dash
March 9, 2007
For those brave, foolhardy folks who just can’t wait, apparently there is a beta of the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade for the T-Mobile Dash floating around.
According to the folks at the XDA-Developers Excalibur Forum (the Dash is an HTC Excalibur), there is a lot to like:
- It’s noticably faster
- It adds the ability to edit Word and Excel files
- HTML Mail
- Windows Live integration
- Lots of eye candy
There are also the usual Beta compliment of problems — in some applications the number keys don’t automatically change to Text, it apparently broke Blackberry Connect, as well as a few other applications.
You can find more details, as well as a raft of workarounds for the various problems on XDA-Developers.
Me, I think I’ll wait a month or two for the official upgrade to show up…
5 Ways to copy music OFF your iPod (Windows / Mac OS X)
March 9, 2007
So, you’ve got music on your iPod that you don’t have on your computer?
It doesn’t matter how you got in this predicament — maybe you’ve lost a hard drive (or an entire computer), or you’ve accidently deleted just a little too much, and for one reason or another, you don’t have the original source of the music.
If any of that sounds familiar, the time to fix it is now — before you lose your iPod (and your music), or iTunes manages to get set to automatically sync your entire library (its default state, if you have to re-install it) and starts deleting all of the songs it doesn’t know about.
Unfortunately, the standard tool for transferring music between your iPod and your computer (iTunes) is one-way — it’ll put music (or videos, etc.) onto your iPod, but it won’t retrieve it back. Why? Uncle Steve wants it that way, I suppose.
The good news is that there are several ways around this, for both Mac and Windows users, ranging from free to cheap ($30 or so).
Tony Bourdain – Food Network Smackdown, Take II
March 8, 2007
A few weeks ago I posted about Tony Bourdain taking Food TV to task on Michael Ruhlman’s blog…
Apparently the punch line was that a week later he was on stage at the South Beach Food & Wine fest (which is sponsored by the Food Network), and decided to take it all a little further — with many of the network’s stars and execs in attendance.
Bourdain stood to speak his mind in person, no hiding behind the safety of a blog.
“Up until the last minute,” he said yesterday, “I didn’t know if I was going to pussy out.” He didn’t, apparently—if anything his vitriol was more voluminous than on his post—he lanced the boil and the pus just kept coming. Apparently Mikey from Top Chef was in the audience—Bourdain singled him out as an example of hope for the future of food television.
It takes balls to stand up there and mouth off at the TV folks at their own festival, while they’re signing books a few hundred yards away. I always thought the guy was a coward hiding behind his big mouth. I was wrong. The guy’s got balls.
After the jump, there’s a short clip of Tony going off on Sandra Lee at the festival…
Alabama3 – Glade Festival 2006 Video
March 8, 2007
The boys from Brixton doing “U Don’t Dans 2 Tekno Anymore” and “Bulletproof”, live at the Glade Festival, 2006.
(Caution – some NSFW lyrics here…)
(via FreeA3)
Slobodan Milosevic Staked, Still Dead
March 7, 2007
Better safe than sorry, I suppose.
Serbian vampire hunters have acted to prevent the very remote possibility that former dictator Slobodan Milosevic might stage a come-back – by driving a three-foot stake through his heart.
According to Ananova, the politically-motivated Van Helsings, led by Miroslav Milosevic (no relation), gave themselves up to cops after attacking the deceased despot in his grave in the eastern town of Pozarevac. Milosevic popped his clogs back in 2006, while on trial in a UN war crimes tribunal for various unsavoury activities connected with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.
Miroslav Milosevic said “he and his fellow vampire hunters acted to stop the former dictator returning from the dead to haunt the country”. His team explained that the wooden stake had been “driven into the ground and through the late president’s heart”.
I hope they considered cutting off his head and burying it in the shadow of a church, while they were at it…
(via Warren Ellis)
iHome iH6 iPod Clock Radio (Review)
March 7, 2007
(iSwear iM getting sick of the whole iProduct naming thing…)
Oh well; lack of originality in a name never hurt anything, iSuppose.
In any event…
I got my first iHome iPod clock radio (the iH5) for Christmas, 2005.
It was exceedingly cool, and then pretty cool, and then mostly cool, and then (just recently) it sucked enormously.
The concept was great — wake up to your playlist, keep your iPod handy and charged, and it doubled as a damn good iPod speaker dock.
Unfortunately, the execution lacked a bit — the display was hard to read (there were very few brightness settings that were readable during full light that didn’t try to give you a fluorescent tan while you slept), and the clock had a tendency to lose a minute or two each month.
Annoying, but livable.
Lately however, it started making a horrid noise during iPod play if the iPod wasn’t in the dock just “so”. Then it started making it regardless of how the carefully the iPod was placed in the dock. At the same time, the iPod or radio buttons would turn on the associated function (or noise, as the case may be), but not turn it off.
At which point it got kicked to the curb.
All in all, not overly terrible — while fifteen months isn’t a tremendous life span for an under $100 piece of consumer electronics, it isn’t completely unreasonable, either.
Still, I decided I’d give the iHome another shot, with the iH6. Since the original product has been on the ground for well over a year, hopefully they’ve had an opportunity to sort out some of the issues.
So far, so good…
Read more
Updated Microsoft Keyboard & Mouse Drivers 6.1 for OS X
March 5, 2007
In the process of mucking about with all of my HID (“human interface device”) drivers the other day, I managed to mess up my keyboard mapping (I use a Microsoft keyboard) so that occasionally it would get in the mode where the “Alt” key to the right of the spacebar was mapped as the Command key, and not the one on the left side.
Sheesh…
(Yes, I know Mac keyboards should only have one of these keys, and it should be labeled with the little “Command Key” symbol. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows with this keyboard occasionally, Microsoft makes better keyboards, and feel free to burn me in effigy as a heretic.)
So, I do a little digging around, and it turns out that Microsoft released version 6.1 of their “IntelliType” and “IntelliPoint” (read “keyboard” and “mouse” drivers, respectively) drivers on 11/30/2006.
Who knew?
Read more
you had my hope up 
