I’m revoking my previous statement about how wonderful and cool NewsFire is.

As it turns out, NewsFire’s developer, Dave Watanabe, has decided to start charging $20 for it. My problems with this are many:

NewsFire really isn’t worth $20. It’s an RSS reader. My toilet has an RSS reader, these days. It might be worth $5.

There was never any indication that NewsFire was going to be shareware. There was just a prompt to upgrade, and a minor mention of a “registration” system in the release notes.

There’s no real improvement over the existing, working 0.62 version.

NetNewsWire Lite does the same thing, and is free.

I’m not sure which drugs Mr. Watanabe is on. Gone are the days where a developer can give a marginally-better-than-the-competition application away for free, then arbitrarily decide to start charging for the next version. Particularly when Tiger’s version of Safari will support RSS feeds natively within a few months.

Because I always forget, and end up having to scour Google:

Standard Break Key Sequence Combinations During Password Recovery for Cisco Routers.

The most important bit here, for me, is “How to Simulate a Break Key Sequence”:

This is useful if your terminal emulator doesn’t support the break key, or if a bug prevents it from sending the correct signal (the hyperterminal under Windows NT used to suffer from this behavior):

1. Connect to the router with the following terminal settings:
1200 baud rate
No parity
8 data bits
1 stop bit
No flow control

You no longer see any output on your screen. This is normal.

2. Power cycle (switch off and then on) the router and THEN press the spacebar for 10-15 seconds. This generates a signal similar to the break sequence. [Here it helps to count to 2 after powering on before hitting the space bar].
3. Disconnect your terminal and reconnect with a 9600 baud rate. You should now be in ROM Monitor mode.

This is important for me because the very wonderful (but abandonware?) ZTerm terminal emulator for OSX does not seem to pass the correct break sequence to a Cisco router.

And the next most important link, Cisco Password Recovery Procedures.

Pokemassacre: high comedy, World of Warcraft style.

Hooray for TLAs.

The Mac OSX DVD Player User Operations Prohibition patch allows the user to perform actions that a DVD may regard as ‘prohibited’, such as skipping the ten thousand advertisements for whatever mindless drivel is being pumped out by Disney this month.

I haven’t tried it, so if you do, let me know if it melts your Mac.

Here’s some instructions for setting up your own fake .Mac, on your own server, using WebDAV.

I wouldn’t set this up on an externally-reachable server, of course, but it would be nice to have on an internal corporate LAN. Shared calendars using either iCal or Mozilla’s Calendar would be a nice thing to have.

Confused about what a mochalottacrappafrappacino is? School yourself with this handy Lexicon of Starbuck’s Lingo.