Vermyndax vermyndax

I’ve been doing a pretty bad job of updating this blog. Part of the reason is that I wanted to update the URL to move the blog to the root. I finally got around to doing that today. It’s not that painful, so I don’t know why I waited so long to do it.

In the meantime, I’ll start off by sharing an interesting WordPress trick that I picked up here. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to stop spambots from registering on this site and my many other WordPress sites. I may have finally figured out a way to do that. I just implemented it. We’ll see how well it works.

Are you curious how I will spend the first day of the new year? Well, here you go. Our Wii has been jacked up for a few days now.

How to Fix Wii Disk Read Errors | GameFront

Here’s a little productivity tip for those of you who may need it. In OS X, one of the features that I find is vastly underused is Spotlight comments. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a way to tag your files quickly and easily with say… a “TODO” tag or something so you could easily find them and remember to work on something?

Using Automator, you can do this very quickly. Open up Automator and build out a Service that looks like this:

This is a crosspost from The Cat Convention.

If you’re not familiar with Dropbox by now, you should be. Dropbox is what MobileMe‘s iDisk aspires to be one day. For now, it isn’t.

For the uninitiated, Dropbox is a fantastic cross-platform bit of code that synchronizes files across all of your computers. It also provides a look into the folders via a web browser if you should need it. They also offer an iPad app that allows you to browse and download files to local applications such as Pages.

On a Windows machine, the Steam application allows you to relocate the “SteamApps” folder to a different drive. This allows you to effectively shift your content around anywhere you like. When you install a new game, it’ll even ask you where you want to install it.

For some bizarre reason they did not afford the same convenience to Mac users. Initially when Steam was released for the Mac they even forced you to keep the SteamApps folder in your Documents folder. This made it really painful to use a portable home directory. Valve relented after a huge user outcry and relocated the folder to ~/Library/Application Support/Steam, which is probably where it belonged anyway.

I have this blog post percolating in my head in which I will impart unto you my knowledge of using several tools on the Mac and PC for syncing your calendar, email, tasks and contact information. It’s a pretty large post and probably deserves to be its own article. I want to offer suggestions on how to accomplish many syncing scenarios for several situations that might fit your bill. I’ve experimented with enough of these syncing utilities to know what works best and what doesn’t… well, for me anyway. If it works for me, it’s gotta work for someone else, so I will write it up in the hopes that it will help someone who has one foot in the Mac world and one foot in the PC world.

I was just installing the latest Java update on my Windows VM and noticed that it was pushing me to install OpenOffice. Not only did it offer to do this for me, it checked the box by default.

I unchecked it, then while receiving the Java update I was fed an ad on why OpenOffice is good.

The press would be eviscerating Microsoft for doing this in an update – why aren’t we saying anything to Sun? Is it because they’re “not evil” in some respect?