Category: Weblog

Jet Audio

At SXSW I met Alex of Hand Coding. We shared a few Shiner Bocks and chatted for a while. I’ve been following his weblog for a while and it’s always interesting.
A few days ago I read about his post on Jet Audio and the fact that it can play Real streams. IMHO, the Real player is a piece of bloated, invasive, spyware that attempts to squelch my attempts to get all my media players to coexist peaceably.
I downloaded the client from Jet Audio and it rocks. I really like the features and the clean design. From the single client you can rip CDs, convert files from one type to another, record audio (even from steams being played back), burns files to CDs, and it will even crossfade one song into another on playback.
You won’t regret the download if you give it a try.

Buttons, Buttons, and more Buttons

Somehow I stumbled on to Tay McKnight’s page of Buttons to Steal. Absolutely kick-ass stuff. Go take a look.
If you scroll down this page, look on the right side and you will see the new About this Site section. I revamped it with this style of buttons.
To make things for Cruft, I made a few buttons myself. Check them out:
Powered by Linux OS – Linux OS
SXSW Interactive – SXSW Interactive
Meetup – Meetup
Friendster – Friendster
I like these images because they are simple and clean. Better yet, I can create them in Microsoft Paint, a graphics program I can use.
So what other buttons are needed?

Mother’s Day is coming

Mother’s Day is coming. How do I know? This is what I found on my desk when I got home from work yesterday.


Yes, when I see a Nordstrom catalog with a page dogearred I have been trained well enough to recognize this hint.
Husbands and sons, May 11th is Mother’s Day. Make you plans now. Do it today. Give yourself time to avoid the overnight shipping costs. You don’t want to be one of those guys driving around early Sunday morning looking for an open store.
I didn’t mention daughters, because women don’t need the reminder. Women are much more on top of these sort of things than men. Women can think about many things at once and look at a calendar regularly. Men, on the other hand, can think about one thing at a time, and that is usually something simple like “want food!”, “mmm, shiny!”, or “boobies!”.
Now I just need to get my ass to Nordstrom for Michele’s new purse and figure out what to get my Mom.
Fatherhood
On a related note, Being Daddy once again describes the experience of being a father today better than I ever could. I guess being an English Professor has it’s benefits.
Another new father site is Blogsprogs where three new fathers are describing their fun. Good stuff.

Blogsharing

Blogshares went live today. The site simulates a stock market based on weblogs and looks at links to simulate cash flow. It’s a fun little diversion. Ego driven like most weblog things.
Alec Saunders .LOG is giving away $1000 blogshare dollars to link to him. I’m not proud. I’ll take the $1000.
I don’t know where he got the cash, but I’ll help launder it.

Beware

Beware the new Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory Beta.
Don’t download it. Don’t do it.
You could end up playing for 4 hours straight and going to bed in the wee hours of the morning.

How to change the agent string in IE

Here’s a snippet of my referrer logs:

Ever wonder what NET CLR 1.0.3705 in your referrer logs means? So did I.
I found out that it’s the version of the .Net Framework Internet Explorer (IE) has installed on the computer looking at your page.
Thanks to Google I learned how to change this string to whatever I want.
I wrote up a page on Changing IE Agent Strings as a reference for others.
There has got to be other cool hacks of the agent strings and other data that is passed to web servers by browsers.
Let the fun begin…