what is wisdom?

a child answered the
question, “who is wise” by say-
ing, “the candy jar.”

Roll your own Windows

No, it’s probably not what you are thinking. We love WindowBlinds for a lot of things. Chief amongst them is that you can change around the metaphor (slightly) of your desktop. But second to the ability to roll up your windows.

Behold, where there’s a will, there is a freeware. WinRoll does an awesome job of rolling up your windows so that you just have the title bar floating in space. This is way better than minimizing them all the time. And you get the added bonus of people coming over and saying “How did you do that?” Just right-click on a title bar and voila! Smack your mama and call her Sally! Cuz that’s just how we roll.
Oh yes. One of the features we always liked in the otherwise destable Nortan SystemWorks is the ability to recall stuff that you might have accidentally lost or thrown out or otherwise cleared out of your recycle bin.

Behold (again): Restoration will scan your files and then make sure you don’t lose them. Plus, it won’t tell you have 250 errors on your machine when in fact your compy is just fine. W00t!

necessary software: the life hacker pack

We are big fans of The Open CD, which is a great collection of open source software for Windows machines. We found plenty of great software thourgh it, and consider much of it required software.

And, in response to the recent release of the Google Pack, our friends at Lifehacker have released their own collection of software they consider necessary, the lifehacker pack. And wouldn’t ya know it, much of it mirrors the Open CD. But we have to hand it to them, that VLC is one bad piece of — shut yo mouth — I’m talkin’ bout VLC, baby. We can dig it.

Audacity is new to us, though we see it pimped in both. We have been traveling with Total Recorder for a few years and have loved the heck out of it. And its 10 dollar price range was none too bad, either! But we will give Audacity a try.

Faststone looks interesting to us, as well. But we wonder if we will love it more than Picasa.

Perhaps the most interesting software there is 7-zip, which would be a good WinZip  replacement. We don’t think we’ve ever bought a WinZip license and have been using their “evaluation versions” for years. It would be nice to go “legal” with someone who doesn’t care if we’re not laying our money down.

gmail: are you deleting how we’re deleting?

2 weeks ago, we wrote about a great Greasemonkey hack for gmail: the delete button. Well, it turns out that Google really does listen and that you can move a sailing ship by a million people blowing on the sails. Today we saw in our own gmail account, gmail’s own delete button.

The sad part of it was that the Greasemonkey script no longer works, so it had to be uninstalled. (On our system it is the darker of the 2 buttons.) The delete button is gone! Long live the delete button.

We got pimped in lifehacker! =D

children of the corn maze

Last night on American Idol (yes, you will now endure the next few months with periodic updates. Deal with it), there was a set of sisters from Spring Grove, IL. They boasted that they had the world’s largest corn maze in their town (Google concurs). And, wouldn’t you know it, it is a dedication to the 1985 world chamption Chicago Bears. (”It was 20 years ago today….”)

Man, we wanted to get a good view of that one. Sadly, though, the maze was not up (corn not in season, maybe?) when Google Maps flew over and took its pictures. The official address of the maze is 9407 Richardson Road. It’s all brown. So we just have to take the Richardson people’s word for it (more info). It appears that they change around their maze every year, which is pretty neat.

It turns out that there are a lot of corn mazes in the United States. The most well known of the Victorian garden mazes is probably the one from The Shining (though it doesn’t exist in America). No, in America, we don’t do just shrubbery mazes, we like corn mazes. Like, a lot. There are 2 in Texas, and we don’t even hardly grow corn!

Anyway, the sisters from Spring Grove were good singers, and they made it “to Hollywood”.

What it looks like to be you 2

In light of not being able to get all our Mac dreams to come true, we fell back on another solution.

Btw, if you use a 10-switch adapter to connect a VGA monitor to the Mac, the Belkin manual for their adapter is excellent. Mode 1 worked excellently for us.

We love snugtech’s Safari browser tester!It’s not as public as some other previewers we have come across and it’s dead easy. So, hooray.

What we love about snugtech is that it’s private. We have been racking our brains to find another site we saw once that previewed with Safari similarly, although (and this is a bad choice) it displays results publically. Behold, we have found it (when snugtech went offline for a bit): iCapture. Dan Vine, the creator of iCapture, also has a nice utility that allows you preview on IE, if you don’t have that browser (Mac users, I am looking at you): ieCapture (currently in alpha test).

Something we’d forgotten in terms of coding out a style sheet is making IE-specific attributes. Last year, we used Eric Meyers’ asterisk hack, and that is what we had forgotten. Today we used a variation on that theme from cavemonkey50, which he is calling an underscore hack. They have the same effect. In short, what you do is add a special character (say, an asterisk or an underscore) in front of an attribute, and only IE will read it.

How it works. Two things make it possible: 1) the cascade part of CSS, and 2) IE’s stupidity (to put it bluntly). So define your attribute for all browsers but IE first. Then redefinte your attribute with an underscore in front of it. Other browsers will see this as poorly formed and skip it. But IE will blindly read it, accept it as a redefinition in the cascade, and use the second malformed attribute instead.

technology will save us! gmaps

As we’ve mentioned before, we wonder what technology and innovations the taquitos will live through. Nice to know that they (as a generation) have a positive view of tech. Ah, idealism. We remember when we thought technology would do away with gas-powered cars, too.

Perhaps we have mentioned our love for Google maps and its remixes (or mashups, whatever). Here is a blog about different gmaps sites. And, best of all, how to make your own mashup.

And if you don’t like technology at all and want to stay completely organic, Consumer Reports has a guide for what you should buy organic and what you shouldn’t.

making it work for you

After Hamachi didn’t work for us to network a printer, we were disappointed and a bit downtrodden. Though we still have the network up at home, it doesn’t function like a regular network (least as far as we can tell). But regardless, we are still trying other things.

One thing that looks promising is Bonjour. Now, Bonjour is something that popped up under Processes in our Task Manager and ZoneAlarm a while ago, and we could never quite figure out what the heck it does or who put it there. We believe it is attached to iTunes in some way. And we did figure out that crippling it crippled our access to the Internets. Which saddened us greatly. And lifehacker says an actual download of Bonjour (different from say its embedded cousin in Itunes, perhaps?) can help us set up networked printers. Joy! Ask Metafilter also has some interesting lines on how to share information across computers in-house.

Edit: Yes, iTunes 5.0 and beyond installs Bonjour without your knowing it. Both Bonjour and iTunes talk to the Internets separately, as evidenced by their separate ZoneAlarm calls.

Also on the networking tip, lifehacker has a handy slice of info about how to set up subdomains on a server.

It would be passe to say now that GoogleMaps (Double True!) is a killer app. But we’d say it anyway. One of the things we love about it is being able to link it into our web pages. Exploration Age has a nice tutorial about how to add Google Maps to any web page.

It would also be passe to gush over Firefox. But we just came across yet another extension that makes us squeee like little girls. X-Ray for Firefox. With a simple right click you can see the markup of a page. Shazam. For little hackers like us who learn by watching, this is amazing. Kids these days have it so fucking easy. Back in my day we had to view source if we wanted to check markup!

And, if you can’t make it work, if you can’t get it done yourself, you can always ask a favor of someone. Favorville is a neat web community that allows people to ask and offer favors. Rock.

poems for kids, diamonds for no one

We have had the Children’s Poetry Archive on our screens for longer than we can remember. Find poems by name, by poet, or even by subject. What a great way to sing or play with your children through language.

Meanwhile. fguide (”the ultimate guide to the US Economy”) gives 10 reasons why to avoid diamonds altogether. We are not big fans of diamonds, we admit. They are cultureal products that have been beaten into the hearts and minds of consumers to equate love with outrageous spending. How else can you measure who wins at love if you don’t keep score? And what better way than by the size of or amount spent on a diamond? They’re a girl’s best friend, you know. Chief among the reasons (for us, regarding economics, anyway) to avoid diamonds is that their resale value is for shit. If they were truly worth something, then resale value would be much higher. As it stands, the only value in diamonds is from jeweler to consumer.

Actually, we do admit that the pricing structures of jewelery in general baffle us. How, for instance, can a site like say, xaxe.com, where we recently purchased a beautiful pearl and coral necklace, sell items so much lower than other sites? (is it just that they are in Beijing? Yeah, we got a package from Beijing; that was interesting.) Often, similar items are sold on one site quite inexpensively, where on others it is through the roof? Do a search on Froogle for Freshwater Pearl, for instance, and see that the same items are priced with outrageous price differences. (There’s a $130 diff. between the low and high prices on this double-strand of black pearls.) What gives?

Now, say, media? We know media has no intrinsic value. Take the movies. The only value there is what “people” are willing to pay for them. Some will buy, some will rent, some will only watch on cable. Take Blockbuster Video. They were once the unstoppable juggernaut of video rental. And then Netflix killed their bread-and-butter, the late fee, and now Blockbuster is on the outs. We say, good riddance. (Are we still bitter about them not hiring us in our teen years? Maybe. But do we not like their cleaned up video policies? Most definitely!)

And speaking of movies, the new teaser trailer for Clerks II is online. And BigSleep666 turned us on to a great little Chinese commercial for Coca-Cola. Is it always sex that sells? Not if you have 3 ass-kicking ninja girls.

handy tools

Work Happy (via lifehacker) offers up a nice toolbar tool called foobar from Matrix Software. It’s a handy collection of tools that life down in the toolbar zone. The thing we really like about it is the time tracker.

But, oh! We fawn and we drool for FolderSize, which grants us a long-desired ability to see the size of a folder without hopping down into the folder properties. Swoon!

We have been on the lookout for tools and apps for our new/old Mac. Todayt, the mighty lifehacker gave us a collection of apps, some free some not. Some, then, we shall use and some we shan’t. Essential OS X Applications from MacSpecialist.

A site called Flagrant Disregard offers up a bunch of flickr “toys” which look interesting. Essentially, they are tools to mess with pictures on flickr. Nice.

And lastly today, we have a bunch of parenting hacks from parent hacks.  No, it’s not a site of parents who are hacks, but you know, hacks for, like, your kids… if you were Mr. Smith and your kids were Neo. Or something. Anyway, we like them.