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Website Updates

I updated the blog to WordPress 2.1 last night, which has a lots of little updates. The upgrade went perfectly, and my theme and plugins seem to work without any errors.

I finally found the option in WordPress to update the feed to full posts instead of the summaries, which makes the blog much more friendly to RSS readers. A bonus effect is that it fixes the Daily Links post to post in bullet summaries in feedreaders instead of mashing the post in to one paragraph.

In addition, I switched feed management to Feedburner last month, so there should be one clean feed for everyone who subscribes, and gives me some nice statistics on who’s reading.

If anything appears out of the ordinary, let me know!

  • in Humor
  • 1 min read

Fantasy leagues for women

Bill Simmons at ESPN.com might be on to something: fantasy leagues for females.

Let’s be honest: most women don’t understand males’ fascination with all things fantasy, from baseball to football. But what if they had their own? Base it on Us Weekly, spend dollars against celebrities, and let the fantasy league be played!

Here’s the beauty of my new league. Let’s say you took a $5 flier on Denise Richards a while back, hoping she and Charlie Sheen would patch things up. But when, out of nowhere, she lands in a love triangle with Richie Sambora and Heather Locklear, she suddenly becomes Chris Shelton or Jonny Gomes, a bona fide sleeper! On the downside, I could easily see someone overpaying for Nicole Richie, thinking she might start to date Diddy or seek help for an eating disorder, and when she doesn’t, you’re playing catch-up for five months. See? The possibilities are endless.

Check out the article, Mr. Simmons is on to something.

The Must Have Game of 2006

The must have game of 2006 for me is Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. With the Strogg invading Earth, the two sides do battle with unique classes, weapons and vehicles.

The Enemy Territory website has been updated from the placeholder it used to be.

And even better, Gametrailers has the two and half minute trailer in high definition. Watch it in your browser, or click on the link on the right and download the Windows Media or Quicktime HD versions.

Stunning – I don’t see myself ever playing Battlefield2 after this comes out, and with the already announced Linux support, I”ll be in heaven.

Dear Lazy Web: I love you

I love the inter-webnet thing. Ok, seriously, I do.

I love Web 2.0. The applications that are being built are making my life easier.

Over on the right of this blog, I’ve had my del.icio.us bookmarks listed for sometime. As I’ve come across a new link I find interesting, I use the del.icio.us Firefox plugin to capture it. You can see the links on the right or just visit my del.icio.us userpage and see all my links.

I only use my Firefox bookmarks for stuff I visit everyday. The good news is that del.icio.us’ importer is finally working, so last night I imported all my Firefox bookmarks in to it, and can use del.icio.us to manage all my bookmarks. I have to make them visible, check their tags and sort them, and I’ll be good to go.

The other thing I did this week was something I should have done a long time ago. I forwarded my two @silwenae.com email address to my Gmail account. Gmail’s spam filters are just so superior to anything else I’ve tried, that no spam gets through. I created my labels (which I still think of as tags) in Gmail, set up my filters, and away we go.

I subscribe to a lot of different mailing lists – (Twin Cities Linux User Group, Pho, and Banshee to name just a few. Gmail is the best at viewing mailing lists. The way it shows threads is superior to anything I’ve seen in Outlook, Thunderbird or Evolution.

And I can access it all from my mobile phone. (Not that I ever really need to, but still). And I’m looking forward to adding my picture / avatar for Gmail & Google Talk. (Now if I could just get my friends to drop MSN Messenger for Gtalk, I’d be set!)

Ubuntu Dapper + Banshee

Are you a fan of Banshee and using Ubuntu Dapper but frustrated because you can’t use all of the latest and greatest plugins that are available in CVS?

Well, Josiah has put up a webpage that includes a .deb file for Dapper, and the plugins to download, with instructions so you can use the latest and greatest version of Banshee. Included on the page are:

  • The MiniMode Plugin

  • The Podcast Plugin

  • The Radio Plugin

  • The Recommendation Plugin

  • Banshee-daap plugin

  • Banshee CVS

  • Everything above

Hit the link to get ’em. I decided to be daring, and installed the plugins in my .gnome2/banshee/plugins directory, but only the Recommendation plugin worked. Trying to use the Podcast or MiniMode Plugin would crash the default Dapper Banshee – so make sure you download the Banshee CVS deb!

Thanks Josiah! One of these days I should spend some time and take this the next step – compile CVS weekly and set up an apt repository for Dapper users.

The Angry Liberal Club

Via BoingBoing, C.B. Shapiro has written an amazing piece of work, titled “Hark, the Angry Liberal Sings“. I’ll let his words explain, he does a much better job than I ever could, and I couldn’t agree with him more:

There’s been some ink spilled lately denigrating so called ‘angry liberals,’ that is, people who have allegedly lost their right to be taken seriously because they are ‘angry.’ And they are ‘liberal.’

Well, I hereby declare myself a charter member in the ALC (Angry Liberal Club).

Sure, at first I felt guilty — what right do I have as a patriotic American to be angry? Or liberal? Oh, I tried to repress the ‘angry thing,’ I tried — if I was asked, I claimed I was a ‘peeved moderate.’ Or a ‘mildly upset centrist.’ But after much work through ‘BIT’ (Blog Immersion Therapy), I stopped feeling the shame. I’m coming out of the closet to announce I am an Angry Liberal Guy. And I am pissed.

You might be saying “Man, what are you so angry about, Angry Liberal Guy?â€?

I’ve compiled a short (and by no means complete) list just so I could see it all in one place:

I’m angry about the shredding of the constitution…illegal wiretaps…falsified intelligence…secret prisons… use of torture as an accepted means of interrogation…Terry Schiavo…the war on science…denial of Global Warming…the fascistic secrecy of our elected officials… presidential signings that declare the President above the law…the breakdown of the wall between church and state…the outing of a clandestine CIA agent for purely partisan political gain…the corrupting influence of K Street… the total sell-out of the legislative process to corporate interests… appointments of unqualified cronies at every level of government…Harriet Miers…Brownie…Abu Ghraib… Scooter …the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the lies about the complete mismanagement of the war in Iraq…the grotesque budget deficits… the pathetic response to Katrina… a civil rights division dedicated to undermining civil rights…an environmental protection agency that refuses to protect the environment… (Take a breath, Angry Liberal Guy.)

And I’m angry about a smug, simple-minded, incompetent, unqualified President, and a press that denies the obvious fact that we have a smug, simple-minded, incompetent unqualified President.

If these things don’t make you angry, I have to ask — what the hell is the matter with you?

And what would it take to make you angry? — C.B. Shapiro

Sony's Playstation3 Unveiled

Sony unveiled the Playstation3 at a launch event at E3 last night.

Quick facts:

US Launch: Nov 17th

2 Versions (Comparison Chart Here):

$599: 60GB Hard Drive, HDMI, Wireless, Memory Card Reader

$499: 20GB HD, none of the above

2 million to ship at launch, 2 million more by end of the year, worldwide.

The combination of Blu-Ray built in, as well as the previously announced Linux operating system make this the console player for me. But only the $599 one – HDMI is a must-have!

Toshiba's HD-DVD player: Just a HTPC?

Could Toshiba’s just released HD-DVD player, the HD-A1, really just be a home theater PC disguised as a normal DVD player?

Sure enough, as seen on this blog and in the video, Toshiba’s HD-DVD player contains an IDE HD-DVD drive, P4 2.5 ghz, 1 gig of RAM, and a flash disk running Red Hat’s linux operating system.

As The Digital Bits noted, no wonder it takes the thing a minute to boot up.

Like the blog author above, I’m waiting for Blu-Ray – sure, it’s Sony’s technology, and their track record isn’t the best, but the compression and size opportunities (for the discs) are better with Blu-Ray than HD-DVD.