Wednesday, November 16, 2005

AOL Getting Desperate

Just turned on my AIM client, and got the following:

AIM added a new AIM Bots group to your Buddy List.

53:32
Send IMs to moviefone and shoppingbuddy for great holiday flicks and gift ideas. (To remove 'em, just right-click and delete! Learn More)


So AOL now can add users and bots to my buddy list? I hate these 'opt-out' days.

Monday, November 14, 2005

Goodbye Eddie

iWon News: "'WWE Smackdown!' Star Guerrero Dies"


MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - A World Wrestling Entertainment star was found dead in his hotel room Sunday in Minneapolis, where he was scheduled to appear that evening in a WWE show.

Eduardo Gory Guerrero, 38, didn't respond to a wake-up call Sunday morning, authorities said. His nephew, fellow WWE wrestler Chavo Guerrero, and hotel security at the Minneapolis Marriott City Center forced their way into the room and found him.

There were no apparent signs of foul play, police said. An autopsy was planned to determine how Guerrero died.

His nephew said Guerrero was open about past drug and alcohol abuse but had been sober for four years. Guerrero was married and had three children.

"This is a huge loss," said WWE chairman Vince McMahon. "Eddie was a wonderful, fun-loving human being. Eddie was a consummate performer."

Guerrero was a featured star on the UPN series "WWE Smackdown!" and son of Mexican wrestler Gory Guerrero. Last year, he became the second wrestler of Hispanic heritage to be WWE champion, though he lost the title four months later.

UPN also aired a special last year on his life, "Cheating Death, Stealing Life: The Eddie Guerrero Story." The program chronicled Guerrero's childhood and his struggle with drug addiction that almost cost him his job, family and life.



Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Column from PC Magazine: WeatherBug Is Not Spyware


Lance Ulanoff writes WeatherBug Is Not Spyware: "Period. I've said it before and I mean it. End of story. . ." Others would disagree, including myself. Mr. Ulanoff seems to be arguing, "I like it, so it's not spyware". Next up, an article on Why the CoolWebSearch Toolbar is really cool!

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

SCI FI Renews Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis for Another Season


SCI FI Renews Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis for Another Season: "10th Season for SG-1 and 3rd for Atlantis. Season 10 will make SG-1 the longest-running sci-fi series in U.S. television history, beating out X-Files." Do we really need a 10th season of SG-1? I'd rather see the money spent on something shiny.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

The Complete opposite of Commercial Advance

TiVo Wants You to Watch Commercials Some of you may have already read this, watching your TiVo could now become more annoying than surfing the web.....

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Stop the Madness

macOSXhints has a nice article on preventing .DS_Store file creation on network volumes. This simple command launched from a terminal window is welcome relief for Windows administrators frustrated with finding .DS_Store files littered everywhere.

Friday, July 08, 2005

Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Command Line

I'll admit it: Apple's Terminal.app has spoiled me silly. Plus I like feeling like I'm some sort of UNIX power-user when I use cp and mv and vim (when I must). As I've moved into using it more and more, I've been longing to be able to invoke native system Apps. Well, the big one being this fancy-smancy Spotlight everybody seems to like.

Well good ole' Apple is smooth like that. According to the Apple Developer API Reference: Man Pages, you can use mdfind to do a Spotlight search. Take a perusal through that and you'll find some nice things to use the next time you have to go without Aqua.

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Google Toolbar for Firefox

The much rumored Google Toolbar for Firefox is now available. It replaces the un-official Googlebar from Mozdev. It has nifty features like Pagerank, Spellcheck, and Autofill. There are dedicated buttons for searching Google News, Froogle, and you Gmail. One feature it does not have that the Internet Explorer version has is a pop-up blocker. Lucky for us, that's not needed. As you all know, I'm somewhat of a fan of Google and Firefox. It's nice to finally have this toolbar available.

Thursday, June 16, 2005

You go get Vera

According to TV Tome, Firefly has landed on the Sci Fi Channel. Of course, now everybody is a-flutter with "new episode" hopes. I'm not getting my hopes up just yet. But I am going to be extremely jeolous that Those Who Watch Cable & Satellite get this series back while I do not.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Physics genius plans to make 'Star Trek' replicator a reality

Physics genius plans to make 'Star Trek' replicator a reality: "Physics genius plans to make 'Star Trek' replicator a reality"

What are the top 10 items you would replicate?

Saturday, June 04, 2005

I (heart) Open Source -- Video Encoding Edition

So I have a need to convert some .AVI files I "obtained" into Quicktime .MOV files. I could never find a decent conversion tool until my buddy Ike started Googling and found ffmpegX. Its a GUI wrapper for the ffmpeg, mpeg2enc, mencoder & other UNIX video conversion tools. It is currently just version 0.0.9s, which means its not totally polished yet. For example, the "progress" window has all sorts of resizing issues when multiple commands are added to it. But it is damn fancy.

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

O & A off the premium

It is kinda old news at this point but post worthy. Opie and Anthony who have been on XM for about 6 months on the premium have moved to the regular service. In the NY area we have enjoyed them for sometime before they got booted off radio for the Sex for Sam incident, but have been able to enjoy them once again with their rebirth on XM Radio, if you have XM check them out much funnier than Howard and much less wining and bitching. Enjoy.

Enterprise dies a slow death in favor of Yankee baseball

As noted by some people on Star Trek: Enterprise Forum - TV Tome apparently UPN has made it their businesses to make us watch the Yankees lose. Normally I would be happy that UPN is airing the game being a fan, but at least wait until the series ends, for those in the area catch the Saturday night replay, I believe it is on @ 8pm Sat nights. The yankees need to win and T'Pol needs to wear less clothes on these final episodes.

Monday, March 28, 2005

Somewhere, Asimov is smiling.

The Hugo Nominees for 2005 have been announced. It's nice to see that Battlestar Galactica has been nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Funny, there's no reference anywhere to I, Robot. In related news, the Science Fiction Hall Of Famers have been named. Funny again, there's no reference to Will Smith or Alex Proyas.

Technorati Tags: ,

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Season 2 gets the green light!

Ron Moore has a great entry on his Battlestar Galactica Blog that talks about season 2 getting the green light and answers bunch of questions from fans. Definitely worth reading if you are BSG fan.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Cheaters Never Win; Winners Never Cheat

Check out the nifty Google Cheat Sheet, which will help you become a more powerful hunter of Internet Stuffs. Thanks to zee Google Weblog for the link.

Will Sci-Fi save Star Trek

CNN.com - Trekkies fight end of 'Enterprise' - Feb 16, 2005: Will the home of Battlestar be the savior to Enterprise? It is only logical, Captain.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

R.I.P. TBE

It's done. My love affair with TBE is officially dead. It had burned me too many times, and I had to put my foot down. For those of you who don't know what TBE (Tabbrowser Extensions) is, it's a fantastic extension for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to do just about everything imaginable with tabs. You can drag and drop tabs, reload closed tabs, and work in single window mode (among hundreds of other options). When it works, it's absolutely amazing. Truly a must have extension. When it works. Over the past few weeks, after dozens of Gmail related crashes, losing the ability to open a folder of bookmarks in tabs, not being able to get in to my web banking, and other tab-related miseries I finally decided to call it quits. If you have similar frustrations, I encourage you to check out the article, Rebuilding TBE's featureset with other plugins. I've managed to get most of what I need with Tabbrowser Preferences and Undoclosetab.

Are you still using TBE? If so, are you as frustrated as I was? If not, what pushed you over the edge, and what are you using to replace it?

If you thought the Element was funny looking...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the 2006 Honda Fugly. I've waited for a very long time for Honda to come out with a truck, and I have to say I'm extremely disappointed. It looks more like an El Camino than an actual truck. Or maybe a Power Wheels version of a Cadillac Escalade. Either way, in my opinion, it sucks.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

More Gmail Invites For Zee People!

Today I logged into Gmail and found 50 invites instead of the usual 6. Looks like they're into increasing the beta group size. You can read more about invites at the Gmail Help Center. The Big Question (tm) is, "Will Google keep the invite system as the only method to join Gmail once it officially is in production?"

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Never Trust a Computer You Can't Lift

In 1984, Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh computer. He doesn't look much like a visionary with that bow tie, but the Mac's text-to-speech brings the crowd to its feet. Thanks to MacBlog for the link.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Picasa2

Looks like Picasa is finally getting its Google on. C|Net is reporting that Google has released version 2 of the free digital photo management program. Earlier versions did not have any real integration with Google services. Version 2 allows you to e-mail pictures using your Gmail account and adds a few more image editing tools. The interface appears to have been tweaked slightly as well. More good, free stuff from Google. Happy downloading!

Monday, January 17, 2005

Nerds are Dreamy

After seeing these pictures, I think I'll start writing Bill G. Fanfiction.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

"End of Line" Just Doesn't Make Any Sense Today

I love Tron for about the same reasons other love the movie; campy yet cool, futuristic yet lo-tech, a family-friendly jaunt into (at the time) the undiscovered cyberspace. It really captured my imagination when I was a kid. When I heard Tron 2.0 was going to be a videogame, I thought Disney made a mistake by not making a movie sequel; when I heard the game was decent, I felt vindicated and sad.

There is a lot great storytelling that can be done within the setting of "inside a computer." (ReBoot is a great example of that.) The Tron universe is pretty much left wide open. There's plenty of room to write a great sequel of the movie (with ties off the game); but a remake (as reported by Empire Online)? I'm thinking another mistake.

I guess Disney needs a project like a Tron remake to get self-sufficient in their 3D animation, since there's a good chance they'll lose their development deal with Pixar. Their current non-Pixar 3D stuff has been flying under the radar since its lame. No matter the reason, I hope Disney makes an actual effort to support and produce this movie, and not choke off funding and advertising at the drop of a review.

And that whole Disney's DVD Vault? Don't get me started! Don't even get me started!

64-Bit Apples Might Be Too Hot For Your Lap

Apple Insider is reporting that during the Apple Q1 Conference Call, chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer said that getting the G5 processor in a Powerbook will be the "mother of all thermal challenges." Getting the G5 into the new iMacs was a good sign of the progress made thus far. As I was telling one of my friends today, as much as I love the power of the G5s -- boy, those dual processor towers sure can run applications -- I wish IBM and Apple would have prevented some of the heat issues in the initial design, if it was possible. (There are several 64-bit laptops out there, ya know.) There's some talk about liquid cooling for the laptop, but the case is still just too damn enclosed.

Edit: Check the comments for an update on recent developments.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

The Firefox Pipeline

Previously, we told you people about some Firefox tweaks. One of those tweaks involved using the pipelining setting to boost Firefox's download speed. Now, why was the pipelining setting turned off in the first place? Well, "There are issues with some web servers and proxies," according to caillion.blog. So if you have some strange problems with firefox accessing web servers, be sure to disable the pipelining as one of the first steps of troubleshooting.