Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

In about a hour I’ll get in a car, head to the airport, fly to New York, arrive at 6:30 AM, wait for a meeting that runs 9-6, get back on a plane and fly back to LA, arrving at Midnight.
There is a meeting I ‘must’ attend, or so I am told. I fear it will be powerpoint hell.
Modern business travel is amazing, silly, and tiring all at the same time.

After reading my post about Bud Extra, Travis’s friend Nick was inspired to do his own research into beer.
Take a minute to read Nicky’s Beer Tasting.

A fraternity brother sent me this tip. It may be old news, but for me, it worked great to speed up the already fast Firefox browser if you have broadband.
1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
Sites that loaded slowly in the past pop up quickly now.

Here you can see HDTV being recieved the way it was meant to be, with rabbit ears antenna.

In a sling, originally uploaded by Argyle.

Zoe slipped a fell on the sidewalk. Looks like a minor fracture in her forearm. We’ll know more tomorrow when she goes to the ortho doctor.

My brother Matt, who quit his weblog last year, made a nice little “Post-Inaugural e-greeting…”

Hi all…
Ok, so this started out as my holiday e-greeting, but December was
kind of rough for me, so it got bumped to being a “New Years”
e-greeting, but that didn’t happen either… So I ultimately turned
this into my post-Inaugural-blues e-greeting…
https://mattmedia.net/bright.html
Hope you get a smile out of it… Feel free to pass it along to any
bitter, jaded, or depressed progressives out there…
Best wishes…
– Matt

Take a look and I’m sure you’ll get a laugh out of it.

I would have preferred that the President took a cue from his predcessors.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

I turned on the computer today and an instant message popped up to tell me I was the center of a war.
Now, my mother likes to see my name in print, but this is a little silly. We make decisions to switch vendors all the time with no fanfare. Those deals are hundreds of thousands of dollars and nary a peep.
We make a change where the cost is less than I spend on soda pop for the office and it’s a war. I don’t think so.
The point isn’t what software we are using, but can we get people to use wikis at work? I tell ya folks, it ain’t easy to wean people off of email…

For a few months Michele and I have been using a piece of software called StationRipper and it is fantastic.
Michele is a devoted listener of 97X – Woxy, a radio station from Cincinnati that made the jump from over the air to over the net. After 20 year on Ohio radio, the station was sold and the previous owners created a net only version. They have DJs, commercials, and in most respects sound like a regular radio station.
The station plays new alternative rock music and we are always hearing something fresh. Michele keeps a notebook at the computer just for writing down new songs she hears.
A few months ago, when I went to the computer show with James & Mark, Mark told me about doing streamrips from MP3 stations. A lot of net radio broadcasters use a system called Shoutcast to send out their music. Shoutcast allows anyone to make a playlist of their MP3s and let others on the net listen to it.
Some smart guys realized that Shoutcast was simply sending the entire MP3 file via the HTTP protocol and started writing code to save the MP3 as it arrived. This is the Streamripper project.
The best Windows implementation of Streamripper is StationRipper. It couldn’t be easier to use.
You launch the software, hit the Shoutcast link, choose your station, and hit the ‘Tune In’, and the MP3s start getting recorded.