The coolness of the satellite mapping continues. These folks built hooks into Google’s satellite maps, which now superimposes roads on top of the images, enabling one to create a basic route map. Mapping out my bike route to work took about five minutes. Here’s the result. Pretty cool stuff.
Satellite/road map hybrids Read More »
I first tried moving to a CSS-based layout a couple of years ago to shed my use of multiply-nested tables used for positioning. While I was ripping everything apart, I added some fancier stuff. The site looked great in Firefox, Safari and even Opera. My enthusiasm was folded, spindled and mutilated when I previewed the
Least common denominator browser Read More »
Google finally issued a check for my last ten months’ participation in their AdSense program. Despite the $100 minimum, AdSense has produced much more in the ten months than Amazon’s Associates program has in the five-plus years I’ve participated. It’s certainly a lot less effort and, to some extent, more entertaining. We hit another record
On the surface, Windows XP’s automatic updates seems to be a good idea: your system is regularly patched, the updates are downloaded during off-hours, installation is painless. A problem with this is the implementation of the nag-you-until-you-capitulate-and-reboot option. For example, consider the dialog above. After installing the (snicker) Windows Installer Update Patch, I’m asked to
Automatic Update Usability Read More »
I saw the buzz (and the ludicrous conspiracy theory) about Amazon’s investment into 43 Things. Amazon’s interest makes sense given many of the principals were previously involved with Amazon’s rocking p13n team. They make features like this that sucker you into spending more time and money on Amazon’s site and enjoying it. I don’t mean
While browsing through Sunday’s newspaper ads, I saw a vendor advertising “Wireless N” with some magical, rounded integer percentages of improvement over “Wireless B.” I’ve also been reading stuff about “WiMax” and “Wi-Fi.” Since it takes an EE to spell geek, and I happen to be one, I thought I’d find out what all the
WiFi versus WiMax – what’s in the numbers? Read More »
Sometime Tuesday, my laptop crashed. I don’t know exactly what happened, except when I woke up, the machine had powered itself off and would not get past its POST. I power-cycled the machine several times, expecting different results. No, I’m not crazy; computing is just that nondeterministic. I undocked the laptop and tried again. This
Computing was supposed to make life easier Read More »
My Dell Latitude is nearly four years old, which is about 85 in Laptop-years. Sure, the glide pad has an unnatural sheen in the middle, buffeted by hundreds of hours of hackery; the bumps on the “F” and “J” keys wore off a long time ago; and the cooling fan groans whenever I do serious