Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Take a look at this pretty picture from NiXLOG. Now there’s a mac for everyone, even the cheapskates.

Birthday of the day: Happy Birthday, Seema! A LiveJournal outage isn’t much of a present, though. Next time ask for fic.

I got a baby crockpot (1.5 quarts) on sale at CVS. I searched the net for teeny-weeny crockpot recipes, and all I found was this Stepford Wife porridge recipe. But somewhere I did find the good advice to take a Big Crockpot recipe and cut it down for a Small Crockpot. Duh! That works pretty well.

There’s nothing like coming home to find that the little electronic wife has made you dinner!

Via Geek Press: Will Life Be Worth Living in 2000 AD?, an optimistic 1961 view of the future. About all we have off the list is the computers and TVs.

Several of these cool links are from GeekPress.

• IM or E-Mail Shorthand that Civil War Soldiers Would Likely Have Used in Letters Home Had the Technology Been Available to Them
• BBspot’s Top 11 Geek Break Up Lines
• Make your own Apollo Guidance Computer Replica at home!
• MS Versus, an anti-Microsoft news site
• And callalillie extols my favorite pen: the Pilot G-Tec-C4

…my rock. I wasn’t watching my Firefox RSS feeds yesterday, and I totally missed the new Mac mini and iPod Shuffle. I had heard the rumors from Think Secret, though, so I wasn’t shocked by the headless iMac.

The anti-spam checkbox seems to be working well, so I’ll give out the geeky instructions now. As mentioned earlier, this method was taken from This Chick. Since it does exactly what it appears to do, I’m not giving anything away by revealing the inner workings to the spammers. (The incest spammers already have it figured out.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Jade was having a rant, so I looked up some slang in the online etymology dictionary. It’s lots of fun. (Here’s the word in question.)

Here’s another Mac link dump. They’ve been piling up on my desktop.

• 43 Folders- More Moleskine Hacks - this isn’t actually a Mac link, but I have a Moleskine now that serves as my mac-away-from-the-mac.
• I got 101 problems but Apple ain’t one: 90% Crud on the history of Saving the Mac from Itself
• A neat new way to launch QS
• A Cocoa del.icio.us Client for Mac OS X
• DeskDoodle 1.1 - I tried this, but it was a bit flaky for my tastes.
• Yasu system maintenance software from Jim Mitchell Designs - Software
• Replacing System Graphics [MacGeekery]
• PerversionTracker reviews Faith Converter 1.2 (home page) - offensively funny.
• Tutorial- DVD Ripping and Ripping Redux from the Cult of Mac: more on ripping, for the criminally—I mean, educationally inclined.
• The Cult of Mac on shutting up QuickTime
• Those crazy Newton folks strike again!
• The True Story of Audion
• Introduction to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• I’d never do this, but apparently you can use Finder labels to find stuff [macosxhints]
• Use Apple’s screen saver images as desktop pictures [macosxhints]
• StevenF puts CandyBar in a Box
• And one last link for crazy people who want to run both PHP4 and PHP5 on their macs.

I’m saddened to report that the hentai spammers have already bypassed the anti-spam checkbox. As a consequence, commenters will no longer be able to say “incest” with impunity. Dirty words will once again be moderated.

Here’s hoping the viagra folks aren’t as quick on the uptake.

/. of the day: What’s your favorite vaporware?

John McWhorter on the native tongue of the hobbits (which has of course been mostly lost in the mists of time since the Third Age of Middle Earth):

This year, researching the languages of Indonesia for an upcoming book, I happened to find out about a few very obscure languages spoken on one island that are much simpler than one would expect….
[…]
So isn’t it interesting that the island these languages is spoken on is none other than Flores…local legend recalls “little people” living alongside modern humans, ones who had some kind of language of their own and could “repeat back” in modern humans’ language.

Read more about it at GNXP.