So this post has kinda been sitting in the wings since like… a month ago.
More than, actually.
Basically this is a quick shakedown of items that have been upgraded over the weeks/months since this summer, when I embarked on the mission of upgrading the blog a little bit. Thus I present, with little-to-no-fanfare, becuase it’s not really new to me: Schrödinger’s Blog Version 2.5.
New Buttons (Or Lack Thereof)
This idea got scrapped pretty early on when I remembered that… oh yeah! I suck at graphic design stuff, and will never get any better at it. Party. Also, I asked Ethan his opinion, and he said he liked it the way it was. So it’s too my advantage to not spend a lot of time on something that will suck anyways? Awesome.
Pages (’Contact’, ‘About’, etc.)
Right now these are done in the old-timey style; that is, they’re just HTML documents sitting on my webserver. When I want to edit them, I pull open the ol’ notepad, tweak the code, save, and upload. This was getting a little annoying, especially around the new year when I need to rollover the faux-copyright date at the bottom. Editing the same 8 pages like that can get sortof tedious. I had other reasons too, though they now escape me.
Anyways. This has all been migrated and integrated into the blogging software, so it’s all a little more cohesive.
YouTube Compendium
I’ve been promising this for a long, long time. It’s finally reached fruition! You can find it under the Rooftop section for videos, or just go straight there. It’s a collection of all my favorite YouTube videos in a convenient, easy-to-use interface.
aside:
Speaking of YouTube, I have developed this weird, weird thing for YouTube chicks with guitars. That whole female singer-songwriter-personal-hygine-only-slightly-improved-over-Bob-Dylan kindof thing really does it for me. Why? Can’t exactly say.
Another - Actually Enjoy the Music, But Also Have a Thing For the Girl
M30 Prod. Videos On the ‘Tube
While I was noodling in YouTubeVille, I also posted a few of the shorter-length M30 Productions Videos onto my account. The rest are still available where they’ve always been.
Radio Site
I also managed to get a new blog-within-a-blog set up for my radio program. Finally settled on an official name for it too: [defcon5]. Check it out! There you can find archives, track listings, as well as news about upcoming shows! Plus, if you’re an iTunes person, you can download the podcasts straight to your iPod/Phone/Thing and listen at your convenience (IE: long car rides).
New Banners
The old ones were… like, more than a year old. They were getting a tad bit stale. I realize now how silly they are, because half of them nobody understands, so they just look a little pretentious. Whatever. I like ‘em, and last time I checked, I’m the only one who pays the bills for this outfit, so.
Up-To-Date About Page
Also tucked in a little summary about this version update there, so we stay current with our history!
So that’s version 2.5! It’s taken FOREVER to get it off the ground fully, and even now there’s a lot of things that got left behind, but I did do some work on the site this summer, and I thought I’d let everyone know about that.
So I’m not really huge on the internet, or internet-related tests and whatnot, but this made me pretty happy, as I am a huge fan of the ol’ Achewood.
Your result for The Achewood Character Personality Test…
Roast Beef
You’re Roast Beef! You’re brilliantly smart but cripplingly anxious and/or depressed, depending on the day, and as such, you’re the level head of your circle of friends, the one whose reservations keep people from trying to catch ninja stars with their teeth and whatnot. You can be prevailed upon to cut loose from time to time, at which times you enjoy dressing up like historical figures and freestyling about their characteristics. You’re a sharp, talented cat, and your recent successes getting out from under the thumb of your domineering grandmother and proposing to your significant other are admirable, but let’s face it — no dude who has a Nervousness Blanket to throw up under is gonna make it that far without some serious pharmaceuticals, am I right?
As mentioned on the previous entry, I’m hard at work getting the 2.5 version of Schrodinger’s Blog put together. A lot of cool features coming up, and also just some book-keeping/housework type of things too. It’s still a ways off though.
However, part of the process I did feel like sharing with everyone. I mentioned a while back getting prepared for a visual overhaul of the site. I even went so far as to prepare some material for that:
The plan for the overhaul was to simulate the look of a nuclear launch console. I based my design roughly off of this picture. However, the barrier I keep running into is my Adobe PS skills are only what they are. I’m no whizz at the thing, and I don’t really have any training/talent in artsy things.
You can see different manifestations I played with; the leftmost button is “pushed”, and lit up red. The second one I tried for a more realistic backlight, with a textured surface and a washed out yellow light color. The second two have a different orientation of the text, and are “unlit” or “unpushed” buttons. So. That was the first idea.
I showed this to Ethan though, and his comment was that he liked what I had now. And so I thought to myself, ‘I should just polish up the current design.’ What better to make something look fancy than adding brushed aluminum.
You can see my stab and making an aluminum textured surface on which to place the buttons. The leftmost is “pushed” with a red ring around the edge. This and the aluminum were attempts to make the style similar to a real elevator, which the design is patterned off of. In the end though, I dunno. I really like what I have now, and to change it just for the sake of seems silly.
Brak Blog had one major visual overhaul in its day, but that was when we went from Blogger to LandingClouds, and so it was out of necessity. This would just be “’cause,” and I’m not confident it would be a change for the better. (Though I do like the aluminum!)
So ultimately, I scrapped the idea to do any major graphics work, but I thought I’d share some of the failed drafts with you guys.
Not a whole lot else to mention, besides my thoughts on Thunderbird as an RSS reader. Long story short? It’s not bad. It’s way better than my current method, which was to use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks utility:
This is pretty useful to follow like, maybe one or two blogs or webcomics. The problem, at least for me, was that I started to want to keep track of too much stuff. That bar is only as wide as the browser, and then things trail off into side menus, and it’s not nearly as convenient.
Running it through Thunderbird isn’t bad though. Postings to an RSS feed are basically handled like an e-mail. Everyone does it differently, so a lot of times they look a little rough before you get to the content you need, but it works more or less like basic e-mail:
The one thing that helps is an add-on called ThunderBrowse. This allows the message pane (where the little dog is in the above picture) to function like an internet browser. So when your feeds come into the program, they look like little e-mails with links in them; ThunderBrowse allows you to click that link, and visit the page inside the e-mail client itself! Which is pretty cool.
I know maybe that sounds a little complicated, but the alternative is visiting the sites you see in the panel at left constantly, multiple times a day to see if they’ve updated, which had started to become a problem for me. Now, I just open up my e-mail, and it tells me exactly how many times each site has updated. However, if using Thunderbird seems to daunting (and I’ll be frank, the add-on is a little difficult to install), try Google Reader. Ethan uses that to sift through hundreds of updates daily, and he really likes it. Plus, it’s web-based so you can always read it, and it’s pretty simple to set up.
Regardless of which you pick, there’s a whole world of RSS out there. If you haven’t really made an effort to put some of it to use, I really recommend it. It makes your internet time a lot more efficient, even if that just means getting to your weekly webcomics that much quicker. If anyone’s got questions, I’d be happy to field them. I’m a huge RSS fan, and would love to get other people into it too. (In fact, one such planned update to the site is an index of everything that I get RSSed to my Thunderbird, as a sortof “next gen” version of the old concept of a “Recommended Links” page!)
Today I downloaded and installed Firefox 3.0.
It’s very exciting! Once again, the good folks at Mozilla have beat the pants off of Microsoft’s latest offering: IE 8 (still in Beta testing). Firefox 3 was released on… Tuesday, I believe. I downloaded it just a few days ago and I’m pretty impressed with it.
The design was polished up a little bit, and it runs a lot faster than it has in the past, which is nice. It probably runs even better on people with cutting-edge machines, but even on my little ol’ 2.8 ghz Pentium 4, it’s not terribly shabby. However, I had a few gripes that I wanted to tweak with it:
1.) Minimize to Tray Didn’t Work-
OK, so maybe I’m crazy. In fact, I’m fairly positive I’m nuts in my love (need?) of this tiny little extension. All it does is when you click the [X] box to close the window, instead of quitting the program, it goes to live in the little system tray with the clock!
See it there? Now it’s out of the task bar (the bit in the middle where minimized things go), but it isn’t off. My biggest gripe about Firefox is that it takes a while to load up, and this fixes that becuase I never have to shut it off, but I can get it out of the way! As you can see, I have the same extension installed for Thunderbird, and there’s even similar functionality built into iTunes!
The problem is, this little tool doesn’t work with Firefox 3 becuase for whatever reason, the developers haven’t updated it. In truth, it still works, as in functions, but the application won’t let you install it, because there’s a built-in limit to the highest version it could be installed on! This is put there so that they can maintain control over which versions you use it with, so that people don’t install it in unsupported versions and whine when it doesn’t function like it should.
However, that’s exactly what I wanted to do! Since this extension has such a small, simple function, I’m not really worried about it breaking, so the only problem was to remove the version limitation. This is amazingly easy.
Downlaod the .XPI file for Minimize to Tray. If you try to use Firefox to do this, it will not work, becuase Firefox recognizes the file type. It either tries to install it right away (on a compatible version) or will not give you access (on a non-compatible version). So guess what? Crack open IE7, and go to the add-on’s page, listed above. View->Page Source. Search that document for ‘,xpi’ to find the correct link location to the .XPI file. Feed that into the address bar of IE7, and it will ask you what to do then, becuase it doesn’t understand what the hell an .XPI file is! Tell it to save the file to your desktop.
Open the .xpi file with WinRar.
Edit the ‘instal.rdf’ file so that the 2.0.0.* line of code actually reads 3.0.0.*. Or you could be a little silly, like me, and have yours be compatible up through version 14 of Firefox. It doesn’t matter, so long as you feed it a number larger or equal to the version you want to install!
I usually only need this hack for Minimize to Tray, but theoretically you can use this for anything. However, do so at your own risk, becuase on more sophisticated add-ons you are less likely to be able to get away with using an antiquated program with newer version.
2.) Tab Mix Plus Didn’t Work-
One of the most popular add-ons for Firefox, somehow, didn’t get updated for the version switch. You can download a developer build from their website which works just fine. No clue as to why this isn’t the version available in the add-on repository…
3.) I Don’t Like That Stupid Star-
Supposedly the little star makes it easier to bookmark things. Personally, I’m not really huge on bookmarks any more. I use them not for things I frequently visit, but for sites I infrequently visit, but don’t want to forget about. Thus, having that little star in the bar all the time is a little irritating to me. It’s pretty easy to get rid of though, so that’s good.
Find your ‘chrome’ folder. If you just search your computer for the word ‘chrome’, eventually you’ll find it, as I can’t imagine anybody has too many things with such a name. It’s located in your root directory (the one with WINDOWS, Desktop, Documents and Settings; that junk). From there it’s: \UserName\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\crazy-alphanumberic-combo\chrome. Though that’s just where it is on mine; for more help, check out the Mozilla article on profiles. Suffice to say, that’s where your ‘chrome’ folder lives.
Open up the chrome folder. Right-click userChrome-example.css and open it with Notepad. Once you’re in there, paste the following:
When you’ve restarted Firefox, that stupid little button should be gone! Hooray!
4.) Secure Websites Aren’t Yellow Anymore-
I actually stumbled across this while researching something for this entry: they changed the code from FF2 that made the address bar yellow for a secure (encrypted) website. I actually kindof liked that, thinking back on it, and so I went ahead with the fix. As above, it’s just a simple edit to your Chrome file. Paste the following into your userChrome.css file:
5.) The Smart Location Bar Irritates Me-
I don’t like it. It’s big, and it’s ugly, and it uses a creepy algorithm that finds websites I looked at like… years ago… and slaps them up in this giant green nasty font. I’m sure it’s cool for some people, but if I want to search, I use Google. It’s my homepage. Done. I don’t use the browser itself to execute a search function. Thus, when I type in the address bar, I know exactly where I’m going, and these gigantic green suggestions do not help me in the slightest.
There’s two options for fixing this:
Edit the config file. Detailed instructions are available, but I just didn’t feel like it today. You can, if you’re ambitious and computer-savvy.
I opted to just download an extension that makes it function like the Firefox 2 bar did. Easy, clean, and more similar to what I know.
I’ve said it time and time again: “I’m like an elderly person. I like things they way I like them.” My browser is no exception; in fact it is the quintessential embodiment of this principal. So yeah, I spent the past two days whipping my browser back into shape, and at the end of it all, I’m really pleased about it.
A new feature I’m using is the “search for text when I type” feature. I don’t honestly know if it’s knew or not, but it is to me: Options->Advanced->General is where you can find this. On any given page full of text, if you’re not clicked inside a form (box for typing) and you start typing, it activates a tiny little QuickSearch bar to find what you typed. Click the page, and it disappears! I thought this was so cool, since I’d been using the old ‘CTRL+F’ shortcut to bring up the ‘Find’ toolbar for years now.
But that’s basically what I’ve got to say about Firefox 3. It’s open source and amazing. The browser I’ve come to love and take great, great pride in these past few years continues to improve and get better. The real beauty of it is that you can hack it to pieces and build it back up to make it JUST the way you want it, and I couldn’t be more pleased!
At the bottom here, a few more updates:
Sadly, there’ll be no radio show this summer! The equipment is all deconstructed and in the process of being moved, so I won’t be back on the air until August! Oh well. Maybe this give me time to finally get the archives up-to-date, and work on that much-lauded podcast. We shall see.
I will probably be working that into what I’m temporarily dubbing our 2.5 version.
Features, as mentioned before:
-Smaller-bandwidth navigation images (plus I need to get rid of the border that appears around them when clicked… thanks for that, Firefox 3)
-New banner set
-Feeds that display the date
-Radio page will have podcast capabilities (hopefully iTunes compatible)
-SnapShots? I still can’t decide on these things. I make up my mind to hate them, and then I come across some website where they’re really useful. Probably not, but maybe.
That should be about it. My other tech-related endeavor is getting Thunderbird set up as an RSS reader, a la Google Reader, which Ethan continually lauds. I want to see if open-source can compete with similar functionality. News on that later though.
[One final thing, becuase this just made me laugh so hard... Have you ever heard of the 'uncanny valley'?]
So I’ve been sitting on some pretty crazy stuff since I last blogged.
In truth, it’s just a bunch of random (pretty funny) things that have happened in the past few days, with actual news at the bottom. So here we go:
I’m a big fan of the Nintendo DS platform… or at least as much as I can be without actually owning one. Lizz has one, and on it she has one of the ‘Nintendogs’ games. These are pretty fun, becuase you kinda take care of stuff and so if you’re into nurturing or whatever, it’s a game for that.
There’ve been several spin-offs for horses, cats, whatever.
But this just crosses the line (CAUTION: The noises on that site are really loud; I had headphones on and nearly went deaf).
But for real: how messed up is that? Virtual Child-Rearing? From the looks of it, you feed them, wash them, change them, dress them, and so on. I just don’t see the market for such a game. Also: The babies all have E.T. faces.
You also seem them naked at one point, only to find that they are simply anatomically incorrect, described by this IGN review as akin to a naked Barbie Doll.
So yeah. All kinds of strange.
Speaking of strange, I’m going to drop the quote of the week on you guys:
The application is called Spark, and its with the Social Profile thing. Actually I think this random girl from high school was number two [...]. Facebook wants me to play for the other team, how embarrassing! Anyway.
First: ‘Play for the other team’ is the BEST euphemism for being gay I have ever heard.
Second: This ’spark’ application intrigued me, so I gave it a spin on the ol’ Facebook.
It is TERRIBLE.
The statistical run down says it all:
“Would you date Tom?”
YES 2 votes 28%
NO 5 votes 71%
Total 7 votes
You are more desirable
than 76.16% of people
Another 189,423 people are at your level
Your global desirability ranking is 14,445 out of 26,401,177 people
Last week: You were viewed 2 times and no people expressed interested in you
Wow. That has to be one of the more disgusting ideas I’ve ever come across. An application custom tailored to make you feel better/worse about yourself based entirely on how many clicks you get from these (pardon me if I’m talking about you…) sick people who have nothing better to do than to sit around and think to themselves, “I would/would not hit that!” and click the corresponding link.
That’s just… wow. Also, the numbers are staggering to look at. With 28% positive, I am more desirable than 76% of the other people? That’s insane. Especially when you consider the fact that people see THIS:
I mean… wow.
What a world we live in.
Speaking of Facebook, in an effort to get more people over here reading the ol’ blog, I’ve installed a little application called Wordbook on both Facebook and Wordpress. This just syndicates all blog posts here on my Facebook page, and hopefully people see it in the news feed as well.
I’m not really into Facebook or whatever, but a lot of people are super-into it, and on it all the time, so I figured I’d take a little stab at publicity and see if we can’t get more people stopping by the blog. This new syndication outlet is part of what you could call a small ‘Point Release’ of Schödinger’s Blog. Version 2.1 includes now not only this Wordbook outlet, but I also upgraded to the brand-spanking-new WordPress 2.5. It’s pretty fancy. They overhauled the interface, added a lot of new media features (which I used to insert the images in this post; I’m not sure if I’ll use it for everything from now on or not though), and made it more secure.
I also decided that Schödinger’s Blog is probably due for a major upgrade in the coming months. I’m shooting for this summer (before or around our two-year mark in August) as a good time to make some changes for what I’m tentatively calling Version 2.5. Feature list right now is short, but like I said, I’m still in the formative stages:
Fixing the Feeds-
They still don’t show the date like they used to, and I’m pretty sure I can fix that.
New Design-
I have some cool ideas for how to update the button console, but it’s going to mean exporting this job. I’ve finally come to grips with my graphic-deisgn incapability, so I’m probably going to come up with a concept, and have a real art-person put together some templates for me that I can tinker with, but are still way better than anything I could’ve thrown together on my own. That’s the plan anyways.
Rooftop Update-
I haven’t been keeping this that current, and so it could probably use some work. Additionally, I want to get the videos that are there uploaded to YouTube, and condense that down to fewer pages for people to view more easily.
So those are the ideas I have right now.
We’ll see how well they pan out in the next few months.
On a final computer/upgrade note I downloaded the fourth beat release of Firefox 3. It was pretty cool. They’ve tinkered with the interface a bit, and made it quite a bit faster. However, none of my extensions worked that well with it, and I use those a lot more than I thought I did, so I downgraded back to 2.0.0.13. While I was doing that though, I got some new extensions, which I can recommend:
-FireFTP, which lets you run FTP from a plain old tab
-Download Status Bar, which gets that pesky download manager condensed into a little progress bar at the bottom of the screen
I dunno. I’m into webrowsers.
What can I say.
There’s actually more things to talk about, but I figured, why not leave them for next week.
It’ll give the illusion that I’m posting more consistently.
On one final note, I had some time tonight, and so I also posted our second radio show.
If you missed parts or all of either, please check out radio.schrodingersblog.com and get caught up!
[The show still lacks a name. I need to get on that!]
Hope everyone’s lives have been going well. Mine’s been OK.
I actually had a pretty cool Leap Day. I always wanted to make sure and do something special on Leap Day, because it only comes around every four years… I feel like I should make the most of it. This year, I was inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma, the physics honor society. Since I’ll probably be a member of that for some time to come, I thought it was slick that my “induction date” was 2.29.2008. Leap Day Mission: Accomplished.
Sunday night Ian and I were up really, really late doing physics work. After he went to bed, I kept at it, and then had some Chemistry to tackle. I was up until 5 AM, which was a first even for me. Luckily, since I’ve been back home, I’m recharging on sleep, which has been terrific.
In other news, I’m getting really frustrated with my coursework. I know the semester is only halfway over, but this has just not been a very engaging one for me. Chemistry is tedious and frustrating, I’m tired of German, Math, as always, is a really brutal struggle, and both physics classes I’m in are really, really abstract. So in addition to being spent… I’m finding it really hard to even think about going back, much less trying to get work done over break.
But that is, in fact, what I’m about to go attempt to do, so wish me luck.
Heute Auf Deutsch:
“Wenn ich ‘USA’ höre, denke ich an Wolkenkratzer und Gettos, an den Grand Canyon und die Rocky mountains und natürlich an Iowa.”
[Translation: "When I hear 'USA', I think of skyscrapers and ghettos, the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains, and Iowa, naturally."]
And how about those primaries?
How about I’m getting really sick of them.
I’d still rather have Hillary win, but I don’t think she can pull it out at this point. I’m getting sick of dreading every single caucus because we know Obama will win them, and I’m also getting tired of holding my breath through every single primary. It’s just old at this point. I’m resigned to ol’ Barrack winning, and I just want to focus on the general election now.
There’s no real good way to differentiate between the two, which makes all this drama over which is better incredibly silly. They’re both terrific, and one of them seems to have a bit more traction, so why fight it?
I dunno. I also have no clue as to why I’ve been sucking it really badly at StarCraft lately. No idea.
My house is being replumbed. It’s loud.
On a final note, my webservice got bumped up to a WAY nicer package for free! We now have what I believe is 350 GB of space… which is 3.5 times larger than my entire harddisk. So! I no longer have any reservations about posting excessive amounts of music and video.
We also may be hosting Paula’s website soon, which will be fun as well!
I like how this went from an entry about nothing to an entry about EVERYTHING.
(Sorry for my lack of coherence, I’m typing this at like… 11 AM, and I’m normally not up that early. At least not in the past few days.)
P.S.: I heard today’s song in a TV commercial the other day. It was kinda surreal.
