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Clever uses of your digicam
I thought some of these tips for non-obvious uses of a digital camera were clever. (Among them the relatively well-known strategy of taking a picture of where you parked.) -
Web ad blockers, continued
If you thought my post about the ethics of ad blockers for web browsers was interesting at all, please check out this comment in which I re-summarize my thoughts on the topic after some discussion in the comments ( Read more... ) -
Laptop power modes
Laptops have power savings modes to be used when the computer is operating on the battery; generally the conservation strategy is to turn part of the machine off when they're ot getting much use: spin down the hard drive, lower the performance of the processor, first dim and then darken the display ( Read more... ) -
Auto bailout non-vote
OK, so the auto bailout didn't make it through a vote to end debate, so it never got a vote on the actual bill. Not meaning to discuss the merits of the bailout here, just noticing a few things about the vote to end debate ( Read more... ) -
Bike ride incentives
When I go for a road ride, I tend to pick one of the same few routes over and over again: out to Seward Park and back; out to Mercer Island and around; around the lake, etc. I've been trying to think of a way to break out of the repetition and give myself an incentive to ride more and see more of the city by setting some kooky target ( Read more... ) -
Firefox default window size
I want my browser windows to always be created the same size, a bit taller than wide, like a portrait-orientation page.
Firefox tries to remember the last window size, and in practice almost never gives me what I want.
I just realized I could switch my start page from about:blank to:javascript:window.resizeTo(850,950);
and get a blank window in a ( Read more... ) -
Moving houses.
If you read the subject of this post and thought it was about moving a household from one residence to another, think again. This is about moving houses: picking up the whole structure, and plopping it down somewhere else. Homes that need a new home ( Read more... ) -
Thanksgiving: time to support food banks
Since January of this year, we have seen an 81% increase in demand in our program alone.
--Emergency Feeding Program of Seattle and King County, in their Fall 2008 newsletter.
The same message comes through in this King 5 story: demand is up, shelves at food banks are emptying. It's not surprising that things are stressed: the economy is lousy, ( Read more... ) -
Bittman on farmed and wild fish
It's worth reading Mark Bittman's column on the state of fish production. Industrially farmed fish is often fed fish meal, needing several pounds of feed to raise one pound of people-food, something that's awefully reminiscent of the many pounds of corn/soy/etc needed to raise one pound of beef in a feed lot. The fish meal feed is made from less ( Read more... ) -
The cost of labor at auto companies
We hear repeated claims that GM's workers enjoy salaries that are rather high, substantially higher than people working for foreign manufacturers in U.S. plants. Mitt Romney refers to this in his NYTimes op-ed; I think somewhere else I saw a claim that salaries for comparable positions are on average 20% higher for the Big 3 than for Toyota ( Read more... )