Time Unknown

Next time you are bored (but you never are, are you, dear reader...) take a roll of cellophane tape, locate the end of it, and go into a dark room. Really really dark room. Then just pull and enjoy the friendly photons.

If this was interesting, now thing about this: If the same is done in vacuum, you get enough xrays to take xray pictures. Very cheaply. Now, how cool is that?

Immersion might be just about the creepiest thing I have seen for some time.

I'm selling my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet at Huuto.net. I was very happy with the device but decided it was not something I wanted to carry with me anymore after getting a netbook.

LifeBalance seems like a really great Palm GTD application. Really yummy and pretty much perfect for my needs. It even has the nice nested places that I have been wanting to see in a Getting Things Done app. However, LifeBalance is proprietary software and does not seem to allow exporting of any kind, at all. That means, once you are in, you are really in, probably fenced in and stuck. Damn you pretty LifeBalance.

1. Facebook does not allow fake users except as test users.
2. Test users, being fake, are not allowed to be friends with real users.
3. Only real users can create new apps.
4. Real users can add their friends as other developers of the app.
5. There is a Developer Mode, that limits adding the app only to the developers of the app.

All these things make sense, but alas, it means you cannot test a Facebook app with a test user without publishing the app to everyone and some poor real person will have to publish the unfinished piece of crap and seem like an incompetent fool doing it.

Why does Facebook have test users when they are so useless?

EscapePod does it again! Their excellent audio version of David Brin's Those EyesThose Eyes is beyond belief, and I recommend it even to people who are usually not very fond of Brin (that includes myself).

Today I got a replacement piece of velcro for my plush toy. Unfortunately I had never gotten the toy itself. So, now I have a piece of velcro and plush toy envy. Woe is me.

When Chrome came out, there was a huge outcry about the EULA. Now Picasa 3 has pretty much the same evilness in the EULA, but no outcry is happening. Bizarre. One would have expected people to care more about their own photos.

I forgot to take a brooch along on my trip to the Netherlands and I desperately needed it to keep a wrap top from gaping. So I went to jewellery store to buy one. There was none. I tried couple of other ones, still none. One jewellery store clerk did not really even know what a brooch is. Eventually I found a pretty lizard brooch from an antique store. I felt ancient. My favourite whole category of jewellery has been buried.

Small business plural: One person company calling itself we/us in order to not seem smaller than all the other one person companies. See also me&dustbunnies and me&houseplants

I struggle with this myself too and today I ran into a most wonderful solution to this problem. sensible.com is using a simple sensible solution for this problem. You can find it by clicking on the "Who we are", for example.

Many of you might have seen the amazing CSS parrot. Now, if you were, like me, wondering "how do you get the triangles" there is a nice CSS slopes tutorial just for that.

Compared to most other such dialog boxes, this one, from Konqueror is a thing of beauty. I don't need to hesitate a moment when I see it. It assumes I know what I'm doing and has Quit as the default. It's just perfect.

My two major bookmark annoyances with Firefox 3 were not having a "bookmark this page" option in the bookmark hierarchy and having to open Organize bookmarks just to look at tags. Seems that Bookmark This Page Plus add-on solves the first issue and TagSifter solves the second. If in addition you feel tired to always have to open the bookmark tree when adding a bookmark the normal route, OpenBook add-on will let you change that.

I discovered my Serendipity database was huge, really big - almost 90M. Turned out every nasty spam comment had gotten logged into serendipity_spamblocklog table. I changed spamblock settings so that it logs to a file, and then did TRUNCATE TABLE serendipity_spamblocklog;

Now the database is less than 1M and I'm one happy camper.

I needed to learn about visual hierarchies for web design purposes and shocking the most illustrative guide to them seemed to be a map making book called Making Maps: a visual guide to map design for geographic information systems. Quite a mouthful, that. There are excerpts of the book available online for the curious and the needy.