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.

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.

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.

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.

You may not have noticed but, on and off, a lot of computers have not been getting the time from the internet ever since the change in Daylight Savings Time. There’s a lot of speculation that something in Microsoft’s patch did it. See FYI To Microsoft: Windows Time Synchronization Completely Broken (Vista, 2003, XP are all broken) if you want one of the discussions.

I had been having the problem and only noticed it because I occasionally look at the Event Log to see if any errors have happened. I kept trying to reconfigure my firewall, thinking that was the issue. But, at least for me, changing the time server to ntp-uw.usno.navy.mil fixed it. Both time.windows.com and time.nist.gov no longer worked after the DST change. Here is a list of some available servers:

• ntp-uw.usno.navy.mil
• north-america.pool.ntp.org
• nist1.aol-va.truetime.com … DC/Virginia
• utcnist.colorado.edu …….. Colorado
• nist1.aol-ca.truetime.com … California
• nist1.columbiacountyga.gov .. Georgia
• nist1.symmetricom.com ……. California
• nist1-ny.WiTime.net ……… NYC
• nist1-sj.WiTime.net ……… California
• nist.expertsmi.com ………. Michigan
• nist1-dc.WiTime.net ……… DC/Virginia

Just do a copy and paste of the server you want to use into your time server selection. You can get there by double-clicking on the time display in Window’s taskbar Notification Area (probably the bottom right corner of your screen). MSFT has more info if you need it.

Microsoft has a brief article about time servers that includes a list of some that are available at article kb262680.

Since 1993 Project Censored has published an annual trade paperback review of the “Top 25 Censored Stories of the Year.” Their website has the top 25 for this year on their home page, and a few of the previous year in their archive.

According to Walter Cronkite, who wrote the introduction to the 1996 version of the book, “Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism.”

It seemed like a good idea: grab one of the old items I keep on hand for later blog fodder. It should only take a couple of minutes to add some text and post it. Instead I got a reminder of just how transitory the web really is.

Often I’ll make a snip of part of an article, including key links, and save it for later when I can write something around it. The snip has just enough to show what the original article was about. It’s saved, instead of only saving a link to the article, to cover those cases where the original article goes away so I might be able to find it or something like it. I can write and post the subject at my leisure without being concerned with losing the information.

The snippet in question had two links. One of them was incomplete. That was my fault for being lazy and not looking at the link when I saved it, because it was only a relative link (no www.wherever.com portion). Easy enough: Google the subject and find the new link. It almost worked because the website was still there but the page names had changed. Still, that fixed it. Upon finding and re-reading it, it was just a reference to a Rolling Stone article.

The RS article was gone, too. I knew the subject, and Googled again to find the new location for the 100 “greatest” guitarists of all time

That link was only intended as a backup from the original story, which I finally found: 50 “Worst” Guitar Solos Of All Time. What I was interested in was the article it talks about; really it was just another snip. Unfortunately, the story is all that remains because the article it talks about, originally at http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/top/solos/, has been deleted. (Remember, that’s why I saved the snippet in the first place — so I could find it again.)

Task finally completed thanks to Google and the Wayback Machine, because I finally found the Worst Solo article there.

Rates for “First Class” postage went up again today. Didn’t this just happen? I looked back a little and found that postal rates for a one ounce letter have been fairly consistent since 1970, going up about one cent per year.

Was there some computer help in putting this video together? There’s lots of discussion about it, but it’s a good one-minute watch either way. It’s work-friendly, in spite of what the title might suggest to some of you, and you know who you are.

There are two links because commercial videos seem to go away after a while, probably due to copyright issues.

• http://www.etre.com/blog/2007/02/what_hands_can_do/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zIODJsnqXE

Thanks, Becky

vPipes. The “Last Generation Electronic Bagpipe”. There’s even a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcR9Kp6UEvQ

Need I say more?

An addictive game with no instructions. How good is that? Even the music isn’t obnoxious. I only wasted about 45 minutes, but I’ll be back.

Play Boomshine

There was a big overhaul on the blog today. Most of it you won’t see, but support was added for RSS feeds, some display issues that changed with Firefox 2.x were fixed. The RSS feed made me change the way I do the post titles, in an attempt to get the feeds to look better. We’ll see.

When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. But a N.Y. Times article gives a summary probably isn’t quite as technical.

Pete Townshend (of The Who) announced an Internet-based software program that will help compose personalized music at the click of a button. Users will be able to compose instrumental tracks that they can email or post on their Web sites.

There will be free access to the Web site, http://www.lifehouse-method.com (it’s not alive yet), for three months starting May 1. After that it will become a subscription-based service.

I recently received a “how-to” email from a friend about how to email. It gave good advise about how not to make the mistakes that lots of people make, for instance replying “okay” without including what they are replying to. I like good advise, but ignore the parts I consider bad advise.

“The Effective Emailer” also gives mostly good advise. A bit of it is business oriented (“to help you become a more effective emailer”), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also apply to personal emails.

Ignore the parts that don’t work for you. Rules are made to be broken, but first you have to know the rules.

GetHuman lists the way to get through to a real, live girl person for a lot of companies. Sometimes, just pressing zero doesn’t get it done.

“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” was named winner of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for oddest book title. The book’s website, www.strayshoppingcart.com/, can help you identify your cart of interest.

I had heard of 800-FREE411, but forgot about it because I rarely use 411. Today I got a call from Harbor Light Entertainment that was raving about how great 800-GOOG-411 is. It’s another free 411 service, but it can text details to your cell by SMS so you don’t have to write it down. They do say that it’s “still in its experimental stage” and may not be available in all areas or at all times.

This is lifted from BoingBoing; see the permalink for the original location. I love the wording of the letter. Since the RIAA keeps doing this stuff, it’s nice to have a starting point for a response on record.

Green flashes are optical phenomena that occur shortly after sunset or before sunrise, when a green spot is visible for a short period of time above the sun. I haven’t seen it, but a group of my friends have. I just figured it was an after image or something, but apparently it’s well documented.

There’s an article at Wikipedia.