My XBox 360 broke near the end of December. I was playing EA Sports NCAA Football 10 at around 3 o’clock in the morning — with the Gators leading 45 – 10 against an unbeaten #2 TCU late in the 3rd quarter of the 2014 BCS Championship Game — when the screen suddenly went black…. Read more »
Posts Categorized: technology
Google Hates Me
For some mysterious reason the Google PageRank™ of this website dropped to zero about a year and a half ago. I really have no idea why. It didn’t coincide with any major design changes and I didn’t do anything black hat here (or even white hat) that would have caused that. Every few months I… Read more »
Absurd Directory Structures
As soon as I saw the story about giant jellyfish sinking a Japanese trawler posted on MetaFilter, I sent the link to my friend Ryan via instant messenger. (Ryan, I know, is fascinated by tales from the Japanese fishing industry.) He said, “[the] story would’ve been perfect if the jellyfish had actually eaten the crew,”… Read more »
Star Wars Design Flaws
Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can’t get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room. from John Scalzi’s Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design
The Google Segway
Remember the Segway? It was supposed to revolutionize human transportation. Remember the hype? It was everywhere. It was amazing. And now years later it’s nowhere. The day we all finally got to see a Segway I felt just about exactly the same way I felt when I finally got to see Google Wave: It’s nifty,… Read more »
Friday Five: Feeds to Follow
Five great development blogs to which you should subscribe: DevTips (subscribe) ProBlogDesign (subscribe) David Walsh Blog (subscribe) NETTUTS (subscribe) Raymond Selda (subscribe)
iTunes Tuesday: Simple Tutorials
If you’re just getting started with iTunes, the hands-down best place to learn how it all works is the Apple website. The “Find Out How” section offers dozens of video and text tutorials which will get you up and running quickly. You can learn how to import music from your CD collection, edit your music… Read more »
iTunes Tuesday: How to Organize Playlists
If you’ve been creating new playlists left and right, eventually you are going to have a long and cluttered list of them running down the left side of your iTunes window. You do know you can group them into folders, right? Just click File and then New Playlist Folder. Now you can drag and drop… Read more »
iTunes Tuesday: Create Playlists Quickly
In the previous episode of iTunes Tuesday I explained the difference between Smart Playlists and user-created playlists. Basically the key difference is that Smart Playlists are ones that iTunes creates for you based on criteria you define and user-created playlists are ones you make by picking and choosing songs. Today I’ll show you a couple… Read more »
WordPress Wednesday: Safe Function Calls
If you’re editing a WordPress theme template file by adding a call to a plugin’s function, you need to be careful. In six months or a year you’re going to deactivate or delete that plugin, and you’re going to get a big ugly fatal PHP error on your blog. You can avoid it, though, by… Read more »
How to Delete a Recurring iCal Event
I have finally resolved an issue with my Mac OS X 10.5.7 iCal calendar that has been annoying me since I converted from PC to Mac almost exactly one year ago. For some reason I could not delete my birthday! Because I’m now using Address Book birthdays — instead of having unique iCal “events” for… Read more »
The Dexia Rack Laptop Stand
My mom got me a Dexia Rack a few years ago as a gift. I had seen one at a bookstore on the University of Florida campus while visiting Gainesville and said that it looked pretty cool. So of course my mom noted that and got me one for Christmas or my birthday months later…. Read more »