Sidenote

When I have wanted to write myself an not, I have been using Stickies or writing the text into a shell window.  This isn't ideal, since I normally don't keep Stickies running all of the time, and typing into a shell doesn't really work, especially if it is a multi-line note.

I just found Sidenote yesterday.  It is a little program that puts a drawer on the side of your screen.  When you move the mouse over to that side of the screen, the drawer opens up.  Then you can type or paste your text into a note.

Converting Mac to unix line endings

I lost the script that I used to use to convert mac line endings (returns) to unix line endings (new lines), so I did a search on the web to see what scripts I could find.

There are a lot of implementations of this script. Some using perl, shell script or the flip program. The one that I like to use is an alias in my .bashrc. I found this at macosxhints.

alias mac2unix="perl -pi -e 's/rn?/n/g' "

Software demos

A while ago, I looked into Desktop Managers for my laptop.  I tried a few of the Desktop Manager in their demo modes, but I didn't find any that I really liked, and then deleted the demos.

Yesterday, I got an email from You Software, announcing their You Control: Desktop software.  I figured that they just came out with a new version, so I wanted to check it out.  After I downloaded the demo, and tried to launch it, it claimed that my demo period had expired, even though I just installed this new version.

I seems that they use the date that I checked out the old version as the start date of my demo period for the new version.  Maybe this was unintentional, but I am really unlikely to purchase this software, especially if I don't know if it will work for me.

Another trackback spam filter

I have modified the validatetrackback plugin, that I wrote earlier, to include an option to hook into the Bayesian spam filter that plog has built into it.  Now, when enabled, this plugin has two options.

1. Check the url that is included in the trackback itself, and see if it points at a html page that has a trackback url.  If it doesn't then throw away the trackback.


2. Tokenize the trackback, and pass it through the bayesian spam filter that plog has built in.  If the spam score is higher than the user specified threshold, then toss the trackback.

Podcasts

For the past month or so, I have been listening to podcasts.  I have found that they are great to listen to at work.  The ones that I enjoy the most are Geek News Central and Coverville.

Here is the opml file with all of my subscriptions.

NIN song

The Nine Inch Nails have released one of their songs from their album "With Teeth" that is due out on May 3rd.  They released "The Hand That Feeds" as a 70MB GarageBand 2.0 file.  This allows you to modify the song, or create your own remix.

I wonder if other artists will start to do this.  This would make it easier to come up with remixes.

[via Boing Boing]

Harmony 688 Remote

We just got a Harmony 688 remote to replace our Harmony 659 remote (2 year olds can kill electronics very quickly).  I think that the Harmony line of remotes are the best remotes around.  I also tried the Philips Pronto, and the Harmony remotes are better.

The Harmony 688 is just like the Harmony 659, except they claim that it is meant for use with DVRs like TiVo.  The 688 includes some addition hard buttons that the 659 did not have.  I have set up a pair of these buttons to be Thumbs Up/Down, one to be "instant replay" and one for "skip ahead"