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| 2008-05-17 13:04 |
| Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 |
| Public |
| Nirvana—Territorial Pissings |
| mozilla |
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It's Firefox, it's fresh, and it's basically done. ("RC1" means that if nothing comes up during the shake-out period, this is the actual file that will be released as "Firefox 3." Something will probably come up. I still consider it solid enough to upgrade the parents.)
Back in the dim and distant past, on the eve of Firefox 1's release, there was a roadmap for three future versions of the app. Version 1.1 was to be a touch-up release, which made fixes and updated the Gecko engine while keeping the features and look mostly the same. 1.5 would be a medium-grade update, using the same engine as 1.1 but adding a nice pile of new features. And then there was Firefox 2.0, the major, revolutionary release. It would be built on a version of Gecko that didn't exist yet and have features that weren't possible without it, with an entirely new graphics layer, an undreamt-of speed boost, and a whole lot of things the developers had wanted all along but couldn't get. Ultimately, for various reasons, the version numbers were all pushed forward a notch: 1.1 became 1.5, etc. But the reason I bring up those old-ass (2004?) numbering predictions is that this release -- Firefox 3 -- is what became of that original, grail-like vision of "2.0." The last two releases were both evolutionary: visible improvements, but fairly pedestrian ones. This is the version that, right from the start, was intended to be The New Hotness. It is.
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| 2008-05-16 22:39 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
| Ted Leo & the Pharmacists—Dancing in the Dark (springsteen) |
| pastoral, stop posting |
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It's still 70 degrees out, and through the screen door I can hear the train whistles moaning on across the night.
Also, I have whiskey lemonade. (There's more if you want one.)
Also, I got a massage today -- I can has improved range of motion in my neck.
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| 2008-05-15 23:39 |
| An ambition to be more and better and to fly around all over the place constantly. |
| Public |
| Moools—イルミネーション依存症 |
| crows |
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I'm sure you read about the thing months ago, but still: Vending machine for crows, extended remix presentation.
And for reference, this is the story I keep quoting whenever I post about our glossy black avian friends.
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| 2008-05-15 11:13 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
| Drive-By Truckers—Daylight |
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What a nice piece of news from California this morning!
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| 2008-05-15 04:28 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
| Lemon Jelly—The Curse Of Ka'Zar |
| mozilla |
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Firefox 2's theme refresh was a total abortion, but the new themes for Firefox 3 look so good it's practically miraculous. If you'd like to see why, and whet your appetite while waiting for the RC1 release, I recommend this slightly obsessive post by one of the people involved in the project. No, seriously, it's interesting, honest!
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| 2008-05-08 09:41 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
| Andrew Bird—Fiery Crash |
| links |
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![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rachelmanija (remember her?) has been on a mad tear of unspeakably horrifying theatre stories for the last day or two. Read 'em and weep!
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“You know,” said robertcalvin, “my favorite thing about martinis is the gin-soaked olives. If they sold jars full of them, I’d just get drunk on that.” “Shit yes,” said 2ce. Here are the lessons they subsequently learned:
- You can’t just use a martini’s worth of gin on nine or ten olives, even if you’re giving it two hours to soak. I’m not sure what the ideal ratio would be; one might be able to get five olives per martini. Maybe.
- Related to this, don’t add any olive brine, because you want the gin to be as concentrated as possible. Yes, I know you or one of your co-conspirators likes “dirty” martinis, but trust me, this one is going to be pretty filthy as-is.
- Go ahead and give it more time than you think it’ll need. They were markedly improved by the time we got to the last few.
- Use good olives. (Mine were kind of so-so.)
- It turns out that the failure mode isn’t as good as either plain olives or proper gin-soaked olives, so limit yourself to small batches until and unless you perfect this.
As you can tell, we had decidedly mixed success. Further experimentation will be necessary.
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Happy Temporary-Victory-Over-the-French Day!
EDIT: Uptick in native Unicode webpages! (via Daring Fireball) Good. I look forward to the deprecation and eventual destruction of all those obnoxiously indistinguishable-yet-incompatible Western European charsets. It shall be our war chant: UTF-8! UTF-8! UTF-8!
(Explication: If you've ever opened a document only to find all the quote marks replaced by Ò's for no good reason, you have a dog in this fight.)
EDIT: Special preview of Things I Read in May: Go read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.
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| 2008-05-03 10:13 |
| GEHOREFATHAROAYOO |
| Public |
| Björk—downtown |
| bikes, comics |
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Man, I love Yehuda Moon. (I can never understand what cagers are saying to me either, but I always holler back a nice solid "FUCKYOU!" anyway.)
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| 2008-05-03 00:45 |
| Focus |
| Public |
| Coyote Bones—Lightweights Drinking |
| mixology, mozilla |
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If you ignored my advice and are using Firefox nightlies -- and happen to be doing so on Mac -- you'll want the bug 4067301-compatible GrApple theme,2 because it is pretty sweet.
Also, I just mixed my first Manhattan. I think I like these. But I need some bitters and some lemon slices, and a 3:1 ratio is way too much vermouth. Also, it turns out that a small metal tea-thermos makes a pretty good cocktail shaker.
_____
1. I swear, this is the most drama I've seen in Bugzilla since the multiline tooltip bug.
Me, I'm in the camp that says it's a crucial feature -- FF3 needs either a working de-focus effect (even at the cost of weird behavior elsewhere) or a total backout of the Proto theme and a reversion to FF2's thin-bar window design.
2. At least until the Proto3 changes roll through. And always remember to add
.searchbar-engine-image {
margin-left: -11px !important;
margin-right: 2px !important;
display: -moz-box !important;
background-color: #fff !important;
}
to your userChrome.css when using a GrApple theme.
3. I guess they're calling it "Firelight" now?
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| 2008-04-25 20:13 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
| Flook—Glass Polska |
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I wish everyone much fun at Stumptown! I'm skipping this one, since the family is down a car and a half and the train/greyhound fares are a nearly $60 round trip, but I'll try to be a huge nerd this weekend in my heart.
God, honestly, I thought I'd be living in Portland by now. But I am a slow, slow person when it comes to transitions.
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| 2008-04-24 17:37 |
| Fire |
| Public |
| Vienna Teng—Harbor |
| mozilla |
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The quicksand hasn't dried out yet, and new crasher bugs still blow through town occasionally in the nightly builds, so I can't in good conscience tell you to upgrade to Firefox 3 until it hits Release Candidate status. But believe me, you'll want to switch over as soon as it's safe.
Let me start with the low-hanging fruit:
- It's faster.
- It uses way less memory, especially on Windows.
- It's prettier, especially on Mac.
- It makes the web prettier. (Typographic ligatures and kerning! In a web browser! Holy shit! And color management, too, although you have to turn that one on manually.)
So yes, better in all the predictable ways, fine—the real meat is in the weirder stuff. There are all kinds of miscellaneous UI improvements, like the ability to move tabs from one window to another, the oversized back button (which I've decided I quite like), the post-facto password saver, the ability to easily disable plugins, and the increased exposure of the session-restore feature from FF2. But the standout among them all is the combo of the new bookmarks system and something known as... "The Awesomebar."
It sounds simple enough in summary (the location bar now searches your bookmarks and history), but I am using surprisingly little hyperbole when I say that the Awesomebar will change everything you know about web browsing. My ancient and hard-wired custom of filing a bookmark and then digging for it later is almost entirely gone—now I just "star" a page if I think I'll need it later, and when the time comes, I type a word or two into the Awesomebar and the sucker is there. And even if I forgot to star it, the Bar is smart enough to figure out which pages in the history are most important by combining the frequency and recency of your visits.
In fact, the Awesomebar eliminates the need for the entire "bookmarks" paradigm—everything is history, history lives in the location bar, and stars (bookmarks) are how you mark certain pieces of history as permanent and important (with optional tags for categorizing). It's a whole new approach to remembering things; not just a linear technical improvement, but a re-imagining of something fundamental in the way we use information.
And hey, if that doesn't turn your crank, at least it's faster, prettier, and uses less memory.
Also, if you've ever preferred to use a command line for a task, the Awesomebar has some special tricks for you. It's about the closest thing I've seen to a shell for the Web. --And I should mention that you can still use the bookmarks system in the traditional fashion -- your bookmarks menu and folders remain right there for when you need them. I haven't been needing them very often.
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| 2008-04-24 08:56 |
| (no subject) |
| Public |
| Marine Research—End Of The Affair |
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Via Martha Wells, I see that President Bush has done exactly what one would expect him to do and eliminated all funding for Reading Is Fundamental. I mean, of course he did -- why on earth would we ever think he cared about literacy, much less the literacy of the poor?
I figure most of my friends care a fair amount about books. Maybe some of you even grew up in school districts that couldn't afford books for the library without outside help. Probably you didn't, but they're out there, and Bush is showing them the compassion and empathy that made him famous. If you'd rather he not be allowed to do that, maybe you could send a form email to your congresspeople.
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| 2008-04-22 20:29 |
| Advanced Inexcusable YouTube Studies |
| Public |
| Pinetop Seven—On The Last Ride In |
| stop posting |
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Using the one1 as an excuse to link the other.
_____
1. Via BoingBoing.
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| 2008-04-18 17:09 |
| 2008 Lyttle Lytton winners up! |
| Public |
| Mary Lou Lord—Salem '76 |
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Baby, you know it.
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| 2008-04-17 22:34 |
| Major iPod Mini surgery |
| Public |
| Green Day—Scattered |
| ipod, technobabble |
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Replacing an iPod Mini battery
I promised shaneface I would, so here's my rundown on the process of replacing the non-user-serviceable battery in an Apple iPod Mini:
Find good instructions
First, watch this video ([high], [low]). It was the single most helpful resource I found. Then Google and read another walkthrough or two, just to make sure you have the right idea. Pay attention to which parts are super-breakable, don't grab and pull by the plate with the headphone jack in it, watch out for all the ribbon cables, make sure you reattach the bottom cap in the right orientation and have the hold switch in the right position at the end, etc. etc.
Tools
Like they say: You need a thing to pry off the plastic caps with, a thing to remove two tiny phillips screws with, and a series of increasingly improbable and jury-rigged things to loosen those C-clamps with. And if you don't have dainty little bird hands with long fingernails, you might want something plasticky to pry some connectors loose with.
- Metal tools do a real good job of dinging up the aluminum casing. It is not hard to put a serious gouge in it. So like the guy says in the video, you're going to want something non-marring to pry the caps loose with. Ideally, this means one of those specialized tools with a fine leading edge, a bit of a curve, and some structural integrity so you can get some good leverage going. Realistically, it may mean a few guitar picks of varying sizes.
The aluminum flexes a bit, as does the plastic, so this is totally doable. Be careful not to break the tabs under the cap, but don't worry too hard about it; I actually broke or weakened one of them, but there are like 5 or 6 tabs on that bottom cap, so whatever. Have faith, move decisively, etc. etc.
- Those screws are really tiny. Don't lose 'em.
- The C-clamps on the bottom retaining bracket are a bitch. I ended up having good luck using a REALLY fine pair of needle-noses to pull the clamps in, while prying with a screwdriver braced against my belly or the table. Be careful not to hurt the click-wheel ribbon connector while you're doing this, because I don't think it's replaceable. (It's the orange thing. You'll see it in the video.)
- The problem with pulling out the click-wheel connector and the battery connector is that you don't want to wiggle them too hard. So it helps to have something non-conducting and non-marring to get some leverage with. I just used that same guitar pick, so, you know, whatever.
Batteries
The impression I got from my research was that the mAh1 rating of the batteries isn't really the whole story -- sometimes the lower mAh batteries actually last longer than the higher ones, so I just said "fuck it" and went for one more or less at random. (I opted for the Newertech one at Otherworld Computing, because they were the ones who hosted the aforelinked video.)
There are things to think about, though. First, you're going to have a better time of it if you get a battery kit that comes with the plastic prying tool. I thought mine would, on account of the guy in the video had one, but no dice. Secondly, the batteries that have more capacity than the actual Apple replacement part are slightly bigger. They'll get you longer battery life, but you are going to have a harder time putting them back together. If you're worried about the process, you might want to actually just track down one of the blue Apple batteries2 -- I mean, hell, it was good enough battery life for you when you bought the thing, right?
I did end up getting this one back together just fine, but it felt touch-and-go for a minute there, and if I had to do it again, I might opt to not feel like I'm forcing something to go where it don't wanna.
Toxic waste
Do the right thing.
The inevitable WTF
My mom had dropped her iPod on the sidewalk once, and in addition to the cosmetic scratches, there was a huge old dent right at the top of it.
This dent actually went all the way into the inside of the device, manifesting as a raised bump right above that top plate that holds the headphone jack. This made it physically impossible to slide the inner assembly up and out of the aluminum case. I had to spend at least half an hour deforming the wall of the case with a pliers and scraping off aluminum shavings with a butter knife before I could squeeze the thing out.
But it totally worked.
On paranoia
Resist the urge to be more paranoid. Really, this is doable. If you find yourself getting frustrated and shaky, just take a break and come back to it. Hakuna matata.
- Milliampere-hours. Measures how long a charge lasts.
- I am positive I saw someone selling these when I was searching around. So they're out there.
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