Recent Entries
Tips For Your Vehicle Gas
I recently received one of those “chain letter” type emails, this one purporting to be from someone working in the gas/oil industry and giving some tips on how to get the most out of your gas. (It also, of course, encouraged me to email it on to ten friends to “get the word out”, but that sure ain’t happening!) I typically don’t much care for those sorts of emails, but this one actually had some pretty decent sounding advice. So, I figured I might as well look into it to see how legit the advice was.
Not surprisingly, snopes.com has an article dealing with these very tips. The consensus point is that following the tips certainly shouldn’t hurt you (aside from possibly taking extra time), but that for the most part the gain you’ll see in practical terms is pretty modest. Anyway, I figured it might be worth passing this info along to anyone else interested.
Posted Friday May 9, 2008 in Real Life by Chris Curtis
VeriSign’s at it Again
Well, it looks like VeriSign (aka Network Solutions) is at it yet again: being one of the scum of the internet. This time, they’re proactively squatting on domains that people are looking up. Check that link for details, but the short, short version is that if you do a who-is search that uses a VeriSign/Network Solutions service and the domain wasn’t previously registered, VeriSign puts a hold/lock on it that means you can only purchase it from them and not other registrars. I’ve mentioned VeriSign multiple times before. Clearly, they’re not one of my favorite companies.
Posted Saturday January 12, 2008 in Computers & Software, Rants by Chris Curtis
Still More 24 Ways
For the third year in a row, Drew McLellan is serving up another 24 helpings of web design/development goodness. I’ve mentioned the other two years previously, but the annual 24 Ways site is always great.
So far, the day one Transparent PNG article, the trick for warning about CAPSLOCK, and the table of available fonts look particularly good. However, just about everyone should be able to find something useful in this batch of wonderfulness.
Posted Tuesday December 18, 2007 in (X)HTML and CSS, Web Development by Chris Curtis
Leopard’s Blue Screen of Death
Most Windows users are at least aware of the existence of the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” (BSoD) that can occur when a particularly bad error surfaces. Rarely do Mac OS X users encounter the same sort of thing, but apparently that isn’t the case for some people upgrading to the newly released OS X 10.5 Leopard. According to most reports, the BSoD is caused by old versions of Unsanity’s Application Enhancer (APE) being present on the system.
Everything I’ve read about APE makes it sound pretty shady and it definitely isn’t something I’d install myself, so I figured that I’d be pretty safe once I get around to upgrading my own system. Well, Daring Fireball reveals that APE actually gets installed behind the scenes when the Logitech Control Center (LCC) is installed. Want to guess what I have installed? Yup, you got it.
So, before I even think about upgrading to Leopard, I’m going to have to figure out how to uninstall (and never reinstall; curse you, Logitech!) the LCC as well as make sure all remnants of APE are gone. So much fun.
Posted Tuesday October 30, 2007 in Computers & Software by Chris Curtis