I finally got a smartphone on Friday. I took the day off and went and stood around for 20 minutes waiting for the Verizon store to open then got my Droid. Been poking around on it and so far I am impressed.

The most amazing thing is the screen. About the size of an iPhone screen, but with 854x480 resolution. It's quite stunning; I don't believe I've seen anything else with close to that pixel density.

I've got my music and podcasts syncing to it with MediaMonkey, and I've found the right settings for encoding video files for playback there. I did a DVD rip of Brick and it looks quite good and plays back smoothly. The eye-popping resolution helps a lot here.

I've also been trying out some of the cooler stuff like the voice searching. It actually does a surprisingly good job of sorting out contacts versus a normal web search. And I got an app that takes a picture of a barcode and then searches the internet for prices on that product. It's a bit finicky about the capture, but when it gets the capture done it is quite impressive.

The camera is 5MP with flash, but it's not very good at focusing or taking good or fast pictures. I'm hoping a software update will cure it in the future.

Me:
Currently your web method is throwing a 500 when the keyword passed in is only a single space.

What keywords are considered valid for this method?

Response:
Can you provide a sample keyword which is throwing an error.

The Dyson Airblade hand dryer advertises that it uses "purified air". But why is it so important that the air blowing on your hands is more pure than the air that you breathe into your lungs and that surrounds you at every moment?

So back in the day I played Doom 3 when it came out. Decently cool game at the time, but one thing drove me up the wall. At the end of one of the 7 or so footstep noises for the game, there is a very distinctive "click" noise. So whenever you are walking somewhere, you hear the CLICK-CLICK-CLICK ... CLICK CLICK and it drove me crazy enough that I went in to disable it: unpacked one of the game PAKs, copied one of the "good" footstep sounds over the bad one, and re-assembled it.

Some people claimed they did not hear the clicking, and at the time I assumed it was because their install was somehow different and that footstep noise was not played. I assumed that the obnoxious noise would get patched out, or at least be fixed up in the expansion. But after buying the ID super pack from Steam and giving the Doom 3 expansion a whirl, the clicking was back! I couldn't believe it. As I no longer felt like fiddling around with the game PAK files, I uninstalled.

But a month or so ago I took the teenager audio test. I apparently can very clearly hear high pitched noises that normally only teenagers can hear. Looking back on it, I figure the Doom 3 footstep clicking noise was probably out of the hearing range of the developers of the game!

(edit) Here's a clip of someone playing Doom 3. Can you hear the click while the guy is walking around?

The email address used to register for your Bugzilla@Mozdev account will be publically visible.
If you do not wish your email address to be visible, please do not sign up for an account.

Words fail me.

So some people are freaking out over the Win 7 RC expiration. On March 1st, Windows 7 RC will start shutting down every 2 hours. 2 weeks before that, there will be a warning to that effect. On June 1st, it will expire completely.

Apparently it's a low-down money-grubbing nagware feature, and the OS should just lock down completely at some arbitrary date. All these people with their pesky desire to save their critical data, or perhaps their entire life's work, before their OS shuts down? They're just big babies. Being completely unable to access your computer is just so much more user-friendly than having it shut down after a couple hours.

After searching fruitlessly on livejournal's site, I found this Yahoo Pipe that gets posts from all of your friend's journals. You can add the pipe as an RSS feed.

They are most likely going to let him have the seat, that sniveling weasel.

The governor who appointed him was recorded as saying "A senate seat is a fucking valuable thing, you don't just give it away."

I do not want someone stupid or corrupt enough to accept such an appointment in the U.S. senate. I would much rather him fired out of a cannon and into the sun.

(edit) Co-winner of today's sniveling weasel award is Epic Games for saying there will "definitely not" be a PC release of Gears of War 2. Screw you guys!

It was quite fun. I wore my suit for the first time since I got it 3 years ago and I won a couple things:



The L4D superpack. The pieces of paper there have the super-secret key that gives me access to all past and future Valve games on Steam. And the case is really, really nice and signed by like everyone in valve. And I get a tour of Valve's offices. If you want a small or XXL shirt, or a L4D hat just let me know and you can have one. Thankfully the I Hate Vans and I Hate the Woods shirts are in my size! Also let me know if you'd like a copy of L4D or the Orange Box for the 360 or PC.

Also:



I never knew I wanted one until I saw it.

They are for emergencies only!

(yes I put them there)

Update: Someone has no sense of humor and removed them already. :(
Or maybe they just love jam?

I just wrote a Firefox extension, Rehost Image. It gives you the ability to right-click on an image and upload it to your FTP server, then copy the HTTP URL of the uploaded image to your clipboard.

You might find it useful if:

1. You post images you find on the internet to forums/blogs/whatever.


2. You have web hosting with FTP access.

So that means instead of saving the image, logging in to FTP, copying the file, then constructing the URL for it, it's 2 clicks. Then you're hosting the image and you won't accidentally post goatse if the site that it's on checks the referrer.

Right now it's in experimental/sandbox mode, and I haven't nominated it to be public yet. One of the things that helps is a few reviews of it, so I'd appreciate it if you could try it and tell me if you find any bugs and/or write a review.

Anyway, the extension writing process is actually pretty streamlined and easy to get into. The only problem is that the code is in the annoyingly typeless Javascript.

Heavy update is pretty great. The Sandvich is an excellent addition and I think it alone achieves Valve's goal of letting the Heavy be effective without a Medic, without making him even more deadly when he's with one, and without upsetting the class dynamics.

Also TF2 crashes every time I exit, so I was reading up on it and apparently it's a common problem on Vista. I was reading the thread on the Steam forums to see if there was a workaround, and come across this gem:

everytime without fail

windows vista 32

I'm more prepared to blame the anti-christ vista before tf2.

This is because you are a goddamned idiot.

A little while back I finally started using delicious with the Firefox extension Delicious Bookmarks to keep all the interesting crap I find on the intarwebs. I'm a little behind the times but it really is a good way to keep your bookmarks in synch across computers and organize them. Plus you can share them out: you can subscribe to my delicious RSS feed and you will be delighted by original and amusing links.

Anyone else use it?

Update: Since posting they have moved over to delicious v2 and changed from del.icio.us to delicious.com. The interface is pretty slick.

Recently I was prompted to restart after installing the important update KB955020. I looked at the update history to see what it fixed, and was a bit surprised:

In Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008, when you check the spelling of English language text in an application that uses the English dictionary, all the following words cannot be recognized and are flagged as being misspelled:
• Friendster
• Klum
• Nazr
• Obama
• Racicot

At first I thought "why is this marked as an important update, and why am I restarting my computer to add 5 words to my dictionary?" Then I realized what the auto-correct/correction suggestions must be doing to those terms: Obama->Osama, Nazr->Nazi, Racicot->Racist and Klum->Klan. Some people were probably really pissed about this, so it's all politics. Not sure what offensive thing Friendster might be suggesting, possibly they just threw it in there just because they could.

I made a fancy pants new avatar.

Step 1: Play custom brawl in mega mode with only mushrooms
Step 2: Take a screenshot of link with red costime
Step 3: Connect SD card to PC and find screenshots
Step 4: Convert them with the brawl snapshot decrypter
Step 5: Adjust coloring so it looks less pink
Step 6: Remove background, crop and resize
Step 7: Output as png for partial transparency goodness

Note that it won't display properly for IE 6, but really if you're still using that you deserve an ugly internet.

Evidence:

Digg can be a festering hellhole of stupidity and lameness, but a few links shine through with awesomeness. You can subscribe to my Digg RSS feed and skip out on all Ron Paul, "UFOs r 4 realz" and really old pictures that have been posted twice before after showing up on thefunniest.info.

Just remember: never, ever look at the comments. You've been warned.

I have discovered an amazing Outlook rule. It goes as follows:

Apply this rule after the message arrives
from yourself
mark it as read

Then you no longer get a pop-up notification and unread mail every time you send something to a DL you're a member of.

I have something you all need to see.

It is called Kitty Cornershot. You will not be disappointed.

First off, the new Futurama DVD movie Bender's Big Score is now out and it's the funniest movie I've ever seen. Get it and watch it now. It's fun on a bun!

Second, if you care about Team Fortress 2, I made a video tutorial for playing the Heavy class.
HD torrent, x264/mp3 187 MB
Medium quality direct download, xvid/mp3 64 MB
Youtube