Bandwidth is both expensive and cheap. It’s cheap at a lot of hosts and for a lot of consumers, because providers expect we’re not going to use what we’re allocated, and yet expensive when purchased in bulk, where the assumption must be that it will all be used. Every time I hear about how expensive [...]
Months ago I installed a player for some DRM’ed media from Hiro Media, which was having a noticeable impact on my system. I caught their daemon running in the background consuming ~10% of my CPU when I wasn’t watching any video. I couldn’t find any info on how to get rid of it, and after [...]
Oil is down to $32/barrel, from a high of something like $140/barrel. What happened? I did some reading a few months ago on the price of oil, and came to the conclusion that nobody really knows exactly why the price of oil ends up where it does. Things that you think would change it don’t [...]
I was waiting in line at a Wal-Mart tonight when I noticed that by the checkout line there were a variety of rolls of 35mm film near the cash register. People still use those? I can understand having some in the store somewhere, probably with the VHS tapes and blank floppy disks, but the cash [...]
Wow, I haven’t blogged much lately have I? Must be the Christmas season. I’m a little disappointed that Google hasn’t done a better job indexing the recipes.stevex.net site. I actually got into the habit of adding “stevex” to searches when I search for recipes. For example, Googling for baked french fries stevex. But look at [...]
So our local transit company, OC Transpo, is on strike. We also had something like 19 centimeters of snow last night with a lovely freezing rain glaze, so getting around today is a nightmare. I gather one of the main reasons for the strike is a proposed change to the booking system that drivers use. [...]
I’ve put enough electronics through the wash that I think this is a great idea: a Washer/Dryer Safe USB Drive. I put my Audiovox Windows Mobile phone (SMT5600) through the wash a couple years ago, and I was amazed that it came out unscathed. So maybe these things are mostly washer safe, I don’t know. [...]
Google Desktop is available for the Mac. There’s even a demo video. But what they don’t mention anywhere is why I’d want to use Google Desktop when Spotlight already does such a great job on the Mac. I get that it searches your Gmail. That’s actually a nice feature. I have Mail downloading my Gmail [...]
I’m in Canada, and every Christmas, we make at least one trip to the US to do some shopping. We don’t necessarily buy a lot there, but it’s just interesting going and seeing some of the Black Friday madness and occasionally picking up a deal or two. This year we didn’t go on Friday, we [...]
One on the Mac, and one on the PC. First, the Mac. When you’re selecting items in a list by holding down shift and using the arrow keys, pressing the arrow in the opposite direction expands the selection the other way, rather than reducing the selection. Let me illustrate: Here’s a finder window where I [...]