Woah. I must have been sleeping in a cave somewhere. Thanks to Ars Technica, I was pointed to an Apple page describing 250MB combined iDisk and .Mac Mail storage. It’s not a flat-out gig, like GMail, but it’s a heckuvalot better than the 15MB for mail, and 100MB for iDisk…
I just poked around on .Mac, and it’s official. Cool! You have to dig into your account settings to tweak how you want the 250MB used (by default it uses 125MB for mail, 125MB for iDisk). I have my .Mac account forwarded to my GMail account, so I set my iDisk to take the lion’s share of my space.
I’ve got a couple of outboard brains. This weblog is one of them, but I also use an app on my PowerBook to store stuff that I don’t necessary want Google to find (passwords, source code snippets that don’t make sense out of context, list of the members of the Illuminati, etc…)
I’d been using DevonThink PE as that “private outboard brain”. It works really well, and handles all kinds of file formats (as well as web pages). I just switched to Notational Velocity, though. At first I didn’t get it. I thought NV was a gimmicky app that I wouldn’t find useful. However, after a bit of use, it’s turned into a LaunchBar/Quiicksilver for data. One part wiki, one part fulltext index, one part note taker. Very cool.
OK - this is a blatant plug, but we’ll be losing money on the deal, so no worries about conflict of interest ;-)
My wife has been running a cookie dough home business - she prepares 2 types of cookie dough each month, and delivers them in frozen, vacuum-sealed packages.
For the month of October, she is teaming up with a friend to donate $4.00 per dozen cookies sold to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation via the Kitchen-Aid Cook For the Cure program. The cookies are sold for $4.50/dozen. You do the math.
Albert Ip just posted a description of a potential use of Flickr.com: Learning Object Authoring… Looks pretty cool, and perhaps one of the simplest way of doing this (until APOLLO and Pachyderm go live… ;-) )
Update: I had incorrectly typed Albert’s last name as “Yip” - Sorry, Albert! All I can think of is some kind of latent Vern Yip flashback from too many episodes of Trading Spaces or something… (Janice was a Trading Spaces junkie, so I was exposed to entirely too much of that - there is an upside to downsizing to just basic cable ;-) )
Sometime over the weekend, this site received its 30,000th visitor since mid-2003, as recorded by SiteMeter. As I write this, it’s sitting at 30,135 visitors (about 100 per day).
That’s actual human visitors, with image-enabled browsers (bots and spiders aren’t included in this, because they don’t download the image used by SiteMeter). I’m constantly amazed that anyone comes to read what I dump here. This site began as (and continues primarily to serve as) my outboard/online brain. Persistent searchable memory. But if others find it useful, you’re welcome to help yourself. That’s harder to do with the stuff inside my skull (but perhaps this site is more useful to others… ;-)
Wordpress, out of the box, is pretty decent at avoiding spam. It could be better, and there are a few plugins that will help:
3 Strikes Spam Prevention Plugin - Kinda like an email spam filter, calculating “spam scores” for new comments, and killing ones that pass a threshold.
Looks like our Subversion repository got a bit corrupted today. Here’s the instructions to restore, for future quick reference:
Subversion’s repository database schema has changed occasionally during development. Old repositories, created with a pre-1.0 development version of Subversion, may require the following operation when upgrading. If a schema change happens between Subversion releases X and Y, then repository administrators upgrading to Y must do the following:
Shut down svnserve, Apache, and anything else that might be accessing the repository. All commands should be run as www user (sudo -u www)
I wonder if this bit may prove to be the most valuable part of the conference:
A Policy Day, held at the end of the conference, will see 40 invited guests collaborate to determine the directions that the convergence of new media and scholarship will take interdisciplinary research.
This is pretty cool. The SciQ project - which was one of the early adopters of CAREO (and now APOLLO), is sponsoring a contest to get students to talk about science.
It’s got the flag-and-archive posts feature I liked from Shrook. It’s got the smart folders I liked from Shrook (and iTunes, etc…) and a bunch of other stuff. I just re-imported my 247-strong blogroll into it, and will be trying it out for a while. It’s MUCH more responsive than Shrook… That may be reason enough to change. NNW 2 doesn’t have the “distributed checking” feature that Shrook has, but that actually failed or got in the way as often as it helped (but when it works, it’s pretty cool…)
Just checked my GMail account - 176 spam messages neatly sorted and out of the way. Went through them all, and not a single false positive. Wow. Score one for the G-Men (and women)!