People have said that Macs are more expensive than PCs. Until Apple made the switch to Intel chips, we had to basically eat that, because there was always the Apples-to-oranges comparison. Now that all new Macs are running the same chips that Dell etc. use, it’s fair to make direct comparisons. And the result blows me away. Not only are Macs NOT more expensive, they can be cheaper. Much cheaper. Like, half the price cheaper.
Read MoreAfter a nearly month-long hiatus due to an unforeseen DNS snafu, SocialLearning.ca is back on the air. There’s still some work I need to do to get the entire site up and running (mostly just porting content from the old Flexinode to the new CCK custom content types).
I should be able to tweak the content types on the fly, so after much ado, SocialLearning.ca is open for business once again.
Read MoreMy Newton MessagePad 120 came in the mail yesterday (well, it almost came on Friday, but Mail Dude decided to not even try my house, and left a card in the box to come get it the next day after 1pm. nice.)
It worked out of the box - needed AA batteries, but I knew that. I’ll be picking up a new internal backup battery asap as well. It turns out that it was very handy having an antique PowerMac 8600/300 still running in the home office, because installing the Newton Connection software (and connecting the old school serial cable) was trivial.
Read MoreI was at the mall with Evan today, and we popped through the Toys ‘R Us store. They had a cool looking little toy digital camera for $19, so I just had to pick it up for Evan to mess around with. The box said the software was only for Windows, but I just assumed that MacOSX would be able to see it magically, as it does for everything else that claims to be Windows-only.
Read MoreI’ve been following Pharyngula for awhile - it’s a really interesting biology blog, where PZ Meyers prolifically links to a wide range of (often cephalopod-related) topics. Cool stuff. Today, he links to this, which would make an awesome geek T-Shirt:
If you spend (too) much time in Terminal.app, this one is a keeper…
Read MoreI spent some time playing with Flickr’s cool new geotagging tool - which lets you add location metadata to any image you upload to Flickr. It works very nicely, letting you easily cluster locations, and quickly add multiple images. Here’s what I’ve done with a handful of images I’ve taken of the UCalgary campus:
Flickr Geotagging UCalgary
They also provide an easy link feature, so I can add a link directly to this map view .
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The U of C threw the switch over the weekend, and the new Drupal -powered website is now live. It’s got some (temporary) gaps, as content is migrated over from the old site, but it’s much nicer than the previous whack-a-mole navigation we had previously. And, since it’s managed by Drupal, content updates are likely to happen more often.
IT is testing the waters with the homepage migration - the site is authored/published by Drupal, but is exported as static HTML and that’s what is living on our main webserver. As they get more comfortable with hosting Drupal and with performance/scalability, they’ll start rolling out dynamically-driven sites rather than HTML snapshots.
Read MoreI’ve gotten absolutely sick of hearing about how wealthy Albertans are. On the news tonight, every other story was about how we’re so stinking rich. We’re buying everything in BC. We’re buying new cars. We’re buying so many new mansions that there aren’t enough tradespeople to build them.
Janice and I walked through the showhomes in our neighbourhood on the weekend to see what’s up. These are the same builders we used when we built our house in 2000. Except, now the price of the lots are higher than what we paid for our whole house package. The “starter” homes in our community now begin at $450,000 - almost 3x what ours cost just 6 years ago. That’s absolutely insane. We fell in love with one of the homes - but at $650,000 it’s not bloody likely. But someone’s buying this stuff.
Read MoreSo, 2 months after I finally get my Canon Digital Rebel XT (350D), they announce the upgrade. The 400D/XTi sounds pretty nice, but I’m not regretting getting the XT when I did.
Things I like about the 400D/XTi:
Things I don’t like about the upgrade:
Read MoreCole just posted a note about PSU’s podcasting training session, including a screenshot and link to the Podcasts @ PSU website. Looks very well done - I’m sure we’ll be borrowing liberally from it when we get our butts moving here.
What’s interesting to me is that the site is done in Drupal. Taxonomies to organize content. Drupal’s RSS feeds spitting out the podcasts. Very nice. It looks like a pretty stock implementation without much hackery to get things going - but knowing Cole, he’s probably added some cool stuff to streamline the publihsing process.
Read MoreI think I missed a set of Faves, so here’s a batch to catch up. Yeah. I want to be on a tropical beach right now, Rip Van Winkling…
Thanks to some great work by Christoph C. Cemper, there is now a module available to enable email notifications for comments by anonymous users (which, on my blog, is everyone but myself) on a Drupal blog. There should now be a “follow comments by email” checkbox underneath the comment submission form, which adds the much-missed feature.
It needs a (minor?) change to the stock comment.module, but Christoph provides a modified version of that. Hopefully the changes aren’t drastic enough to make upgrading Drupal less straightforward.
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