Tag: Geek

Voyeur 2.0

So, I’m pretty hesitant, overall, to kick folks while they’re down, but this is just so completely surreal and 21st century that I can’t pass it up.

My name is Rachel and my (now ex) boyfriend, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, just broke up with me via an announcement on Wikipedia. It was such a classy move that I was inspired to do something equally classy myself, so I’m selling a couple of items of clothing he left behind, here in my NYC apartment, on eBay. Jimbo was supposed to come visit me in a couple of weeks and pick up some of his stuff, but obviously that won’t be happening now. [From Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia | The Register]

Ah, when Missy finally wises up and leaves me, I am completely sure I will be eating some similar crow.

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let your Kids Do

I caught this on TED Talks (a feed to which to subscribe if there ever was one). It’s 10 minutes, but it’s completely worth watching. (After you read the post)

The 5 things?

  1. Play with fire
  2. Play with knives/Own a pocket knife
  3. Throw a spear
  4. Deconstruct Appliances
  5. Break the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
  6. Drive a Car

Quotes:
“But, you know, they’re young, they heal fast”

I would (and intend to) add

  • Ride a bike in traffic
  • Sail a boat/paddle a canoe
  • Kill, clean, and eat an animal (or a fish)

What would you add?

CRITICAL UPDATE

Dave, from EagerFeet points out that getting lost is a wonderful life skill, too. The lesson to be taken from getting lost being: “(H)onestly, how lost could we be?”

F’n Webkinz

So, my kids got Webkinz for Christmas, and there’s a little snag.

Using a Mac, OS 10.5.1, with a fully patched version of Safari 3.0.4 and a fresh install of Flash Player 9, I cannot see the confirmation code when trying to register a new account.

Cannot get confirmation for Webkinz login

I tried using a system with Ubuntu 7.10, Firefox 2.0.0.11, and Flash 9 as well, but could not see the login.

The minimum requirements are:

Windows Requirements

  • PIII 1.2 MHz or higher
  • Windows OS 2000/XP
  • RAM: 512MB recommended
  • Browsers: Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 7.2, Firefox 1.0, AOL Explorer 1.5
  • Monitor Resolution: 1024×768
  • High Speed Internet Required
  • Adobe Flash 9

Mac Requirements

  • 1.2 MHz or higher
  • Mac OS X 10.3
  • RAM: 512MB recommended
  • Browsers: Safari 1.2.3 or higher, Firefox 1.5
  • Resolution: 1024×768
  • High Speed Recommended
  • Adobe Flash 9

I clearly meet the Mac requirements, yet when I try to register – Bupkis.
To make matters better, you can’t even request help from Webkinz without having created an account (I deleted my email and the Webkinz code before taking the screenshot):
Send Help request to Webkinz
While I’m thrilled to see that Webkinz is trying to work with Macs – decent low end specs as their minimum requirements, I will not purchase any more Webkinz until they actually are compatible, or can tell me what’s wrong with my machines.
And I do have to give them Kudos – on my Ubuntu machine (Firefox and Flash 9), everything was working flawlessly until the same breakpoint I got on my Mac. So it does look like Webkinz is making an effort to be cross platform.
Postscript: I tried to do this with Parallels and an XP virtual machine, but that was running IE 7, so it didn’t work. Finally, our computer for running Quicken, a Windows 2000 machine, was able to get us logged in. Not quite sure what the trouble was.

Gripe with iApps

So, I’ve got my first major bone of contention with Apple’s iApps, iPhoto in particular.

I’ve been trying to burn a CD with some pictures from the Church’s Christmas Pageant to share with the Christian Ed director and another woman at the church. Which should be as simple as selecting the album, clicking “Burn CD”, and getting asked how, exactly, I want to burn the CD. In my case, I shot in RAW with my DSLR, and wanted to burn to JPG to share with folks who just want the snaps.

Instead, I had to:

  1. “Export” the pictures as JPG to a folder on my hard drive (This should have been the only step, IMO – I should have been able to use this dialog to burn the CD)
  2. Create a burn folder in Finder
  3. Drag the exported folder to the burn folder
  4. Burn the disk

I wouldn’t use this to suggest that the bloom is off the Mac rose, but merely to suggest an improvement.

Freaking Problem Solved!

I’ve been bashing out my brains trying to get SMB sharing set up between my ubuntu machine in the basement and my MacBook running Leopard. It worked flawlessly in 10.4, but for whatever reason (likely a simultaneous switch from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 and a mac upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5), it died.

After much digging, a rebuild of the Ubuntu machine (which lead, conveniently, to my realizing I can mount the BIG hard drive as /home/, mount the little hard drive as /, and not have to wipe and rebuild every time I want to try out a new build), and wailing and gnashing of teeth, I found fishfishfish who pointed out that it’s useful to add some Samba users to the Ubuntu system before you can log in.

Now I can quit swearing.