Win XP: Places Bar

I customized it once, then couldn’t remember the name of it to figure out how to do it again. It took an hour to figure the name out. What is the Places Bar, you ask?

When you save or open a file in an application that uses Windows XP’s common dialog box, chances are that you use the Places bar on the left side of the dialog box to speed up your navigation. It shows up to five places, such as “My Documents” or “My Computer”, that you can to quickly go by clicking on them.

As explained in this mvps.org article, you can customize the Places bar three ways: by editing the local group policy with the Group Policy Editor, by editing the registry entry “HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ comdlg32 \ Placesbar”, or by using TweakUI. The easiest and best way is to use the MS Powertoys program TweakUI. Go to its Common Dialogs, select custom places bar and change at will.

TweakUI is a must-have with so many features that I sometimes forget they exist, as in this case. If you don’t have it, go to Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP and get it. The “ClearType Tuner” available on the same page is also a nice addition, especially on LCD displays.

Internet Radio Day Of Silence

Internet Radio Stations around the country are protesting a proposed increases of over 300% to royalty rates on streaming audio broadcasts by partaking in the Internet Radio Day of Silence. Read about it more in either the LATimes article or Washington Post. (LA times articles are available at no cost for only one week.)

There is a lot more information at SaveNetRadio.org. The short story is that many of them say that the fees are higher than their revenue and they will have to shut down; they want the same fees as satellite radio.

Lake-ity Split

A five-acre glacial lake disappeared between March and May. It is now a 100 foot deep crater in Chile’s southern Andes. There have been no earthquakes in the area that could have caused cracks in lake bottom.

Missing Lake

Technorati tags: ,

IceRocket tags: ,

del.icio.us tags: ,

Update 7/28/07

The CNN link went away, so try these. (Reminder: AP news stories are no longer available 15 days after posting.)

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19353905/
www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3300709

and a slightly different one:
www.patagoniatimes.cl/content/view/117/24/

Art and Music Tidbits

I’ve got nothing, so here’s some stuff that’s isn’t deserving of its own post.

Trivia: Named after the British “Unemployment Benefits, Form 40”, pop-reggae band UB40 was formed in a welfare line in 1978.

Brian Eno has an new “DVD/Art Software Package” named “77 Million Paintings“. It consists of an interview DVD, a 52 page illustrated book, and a software disk, which is really what the package is about. The software creates a constantly evolving painting on your screen, and creates music to go along with it.

Gizmodo loves Frankie Flood’s pizza cutters. Me too. Their article doesn’t have, but here is, the link to his exhibit at the University of Illinois School of Art and Design’s MFA Thesis Exhbition 2004

Brian Eno and David Byrne are offering for download all the multitracks from two of the songs on their album “Bush of Ghosts”. The 24-track session of the songs, “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody”, are available in MP3 and wav formats, with all tracks available individually or with all tracks from the song in a single zip file. You are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like.

Art and Music Tidbits

Technorati tags: , , ,

IceRocket tags: , , ,

del.icio.us tags: , , ,

xFolk Tagging App

SEO | XFN | SOIC | xFolk | RSS | RDF | XML | PHP | XSL | xPath | XMLT | OWL | WDSL | UDDI.
Social Engines | Joomla | semantic mark up | Web 2.0 | keyword density | Atom feed | folksonomy | Tag Cloud | Feedburner | Technorati | Pingerati | digg | de.licio.us.

And many more.

So many TLAs and ETLAs*. So many people and websites creating and propagating terminology. Far too many acronyms and concepts for me to bother worrying about knowing them all, especially since this is just one little corner of the knowledge.

I’m getting to know more of it than I planned on by helping out on a project. If you know what half of the above jargon is about, you might be interested in my xFolk Cloud and Tag Generator. The page it’s on might move later, so get there by the Tech Projects page.

* TLA — Three Letter Acronym
ETLA — Extended Three Letter Acronym

Top Disposable Email Sites

I mentioned disposable email a long time ago. I don’t use the service I wrote about then very often any more; it wasn’t working for a while, so I found a different one: SpamGourmet.

Sizlopedia‘s list of the Top 20 Temporary and Disposable Email Services doesn’t include SpamGourmet. Disposable addresses really are useful to keep the spam away, and you should have one for when you need to provide an email to sign up for something, but want to avoid another mailing list.

Disposable Email

Technorati tags: ,

IceRocket tags: ,

del.icio.us tags: ,

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

Here’s the way the story starts:

WANTS PAWN TERM DARE WORSTED LADLE GULL HOE LIFT wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry Putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

Wan moaning Ladle Rat Rotten Hut’s murder colder inset.

“Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainersi”

There are a lot more stories written by Howard L. Chace at Kevin Rice’s ANGUISH LANGUISH PAGE. If you’re confused by what what’s quoted above, start with THE ANGUISH LANGUISH.

I discovered Chace because of an design book that used the text from Ladle Rat Rotten Hut in its examples. It took a while to find out who actually wrote it. Rice’s site is the only place I found any more writings than LRRH.

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

Technorati tags: , ,

IceRocket tags: , ,

del.icio.us tags: , ,

Calling All Leopards

Forest guards in western India are using cell phones with ringtones of cows mooing, goats bleating and roosters crowing to lure curious leopards that are looking for an easy meal into a cage. I’m sure the live goats they used to use as bait heartily approve.

Calling All Leopards

technorati tags: , ,

IceRocket tags: , ,

del.icio.us tags: , ,

Horrible New Addiction

I just discovered Pentago at ThinkGeek. Not wanting to just buy it without at least trying it, I looked around for one to play online. I haven’t found an English version, but this Swedish version, which lets you play against a computer, will do just fine.

The rules are simple: Place a ball on the board, rotate one of the four nine-hole squares. The first one to get five in a row wins.

Pentago

technorati tags: ,

IceRocket tags: ,

del.icio.us tags: ,

An Old Perspective

I’ve been drawing for years and have a pretty good understanding of perspective. I had a hard time finding the answer questions like: when is it really a cube instead of having one side longer than the other. Sure, I could eyeball it fairly well and that’s usually good enough. But sometimes I really wanted it to look right.

The answer finally came in a Project Gutenberg eBook named “The Theory and Practice of Perspective”, by George Adolphus Storey, which was originally written in 1910. It’s free to download and seems to have the answer to all perspective questions. Get it at www.gutenberg.org/files/20165/20165-h/20165-h.htm.

An Old Perspective

technorati tags: ,

IceRocket tags: ,

del.icio.us tags: ,

Old Browsers

Most of you won’t need access to an old, obsolete browser. Sometimes people still want them supported on their web sites. Doing that is a pain, and hardly worth the effort since so few people still use them. For quite a while, I didn’t know where to find any of the older stuff.

Evolt.org has a browser page with more browsers than I’ve ever heard of. I must admit, I’m scared to install them because of incompatibilities, but if you need them they’re still available.

Old Browsers

technorati tags: ,

IceRocket tags: ,

del.icio.us tags: ,

Favorite Intermissions

Christopher DeLaurenti has been recording the intermissions at orchestral concerts for seven years. He now has a CD, titled “Favorite Intermissions: Music Before and Between Beethoven, Stravinsky, Holst”.

There’s an article at the NY Times. More on the CD can be found at GD Stereo, including where to buy it.