Obsidian

I find it astounding that anyone in this age of easily accessible information can be so completely ignorant and distorted on such basic facts and knowledge of the very topic that they marched across the country to protest against. This is nothing more than a mob devoid of all reason and powered only by fear and misinformation. I'm not sure when or how things have degraded to this point of insanity, but it's sad and disheartening to see.

True to their word, id Software has updated Quake Live to support Mac and Linux users so those left out can now frag their Windows brethren. That said, there still seems to be some kinks to work out, seems like the plugin will only install for Safari on Mac but not on Firefox. It also seems to have trouble downloading the game content. Regardless, this is a great move in the right direction.

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 update, pushed through the Windows Update service to all recent editions of Windows in February 2009, installs the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant Firefox extension without asking your permission.

This update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for websites to easily and quietly install software on your PC. Since this design flaw is one of the reasons you may have originally chosen to abandon IE in favor of a safer browser like Firefox, you may wish to remove this extension with all due haste.

In addition to all that, it's not compatible with Firefox 3.5 so it's been disabled and they haven't bothered doing an update. Even worse, the extension has prevented users from uninstalling it so it just sits there looking stupid. It's possible to uninstall this junk after some lengthy registry editing, instructions here. I don't understand how any company, be it Microsoft or Apple or anyone else, to think it's okay to install junk on your computer without asking and then make it a nightmare to get rid of it by manually editing the system.

I thought I should upgrade my disc burning software, so I tried to install Nero 9. Nero used to be the de facto disc burning software. Oh my, how it has fallen.

It's full of useless bloat which I thankfully chose not to install (I unselected about everything in a list of about 15 check marks in the installer, leaving just the the single disc burning feature). I need an optical disc burning software, not web browser toolbars, or multimedia software, or dvd playback software or other junk. Just burn a CD thank-you-very-much. But the sad part is, it won't even do that. Nero 9 causes my computer to BSoD EVERY TIME I put a disc in my computer.

Worst part of all, the uninstaller doesn't even work. It tells you it uninstalled, but then gives you a message saying that it wasn't uninstalled after all. You can't remove the stupid program from your computer, you have to go onto Nero's website and download a General Clean Tool just to get the piece of junk off of your computer.

WORST PIECE OF SOFTWARE EVER!

I'm using ImgBurn and CDBurnerXP instead from now on... both are free too. Sorry for ranting.

I'm a little tired of headphones breaking. With daily use and sitting in pockets, the constant cable flexing and reaction with skin oils, it all attributes to broken cables. I owned a pair of Shure E2C headphones which broke sometime last year due to constant flexing, and my upgraded Shure SE310's broke just before the beginning of the new year as the rubber housing stiffened and cracked. That's just how headphones go, they break, but thank goodness for Shure's excellent warranty program as I received my replacement headphones in a week.

Tired of shipping them in, I decided on a little mod that will hopefully prolong the life of this current pair. The goal is to prevent cable crinkling and also to avoid contact with skin oils. For this, we need braided cable sleeves, heat shrink tubing, heat source (heatgun or lighter).

There are a million and one CMS packages out there, but I decided to test out some of the more well known and open source ones. This brings down the list to a (hopefully) manageable four platforms which I've installed and am currently testing:

• Movable Type
• Drupal
• Typo3
• Textpattern
  

Problem is, learning to use each of these interfaces isn't a walk in the park. Learning how to customize each with a specific theme will probably take even longer. I'm not liking the learning curve involved.

Set up Synergy for some cross platform Keyboard/Mouse sharing so I have the iMac sitting next to my two other panels.

I don't know how I ever survived without Evernote, I used to dump a bunch of files to my desktop, random stuff gathered mostly from the Internet, not knowing exactly where to file all this stuff. Now, I simply dump it all into Evernote and let its auto-indexing do the work so when I'm looking for something, all I need to do is search and it will find as I type. It'll even use OCR to search text within photographs and images so I can snap a photo of a receipt and find it later by the contents of the photo!

New hangout coming to Toronto soon. Boulderz Climbing Centre opening sometime this month. Ceilings don't look as high as Rock Oasis, but should be a nice alternative for something different.

CrankJam.com is in public beta, it's a rock climber's social website (what that means exactly, I'm not really sure). It's probably a community driven resource website to talk about climbing routes, techniques and gear.