Tech

Bastet, or “Bastard Tetris”, is pure evil, written in ncurses. (Daniel, I put this bag of hell in my bin directory on Pale, btw.) Go get it and play it when you’re stressed. Then shoot something.

Alex King has a really nice selection of WordPress 1.5 Themes. You can select each one and see it “live” on his page.

Does AppRocket suck? Is it “good enough” to act as a Quicksilver for Windows?

We’ll see.

Google has a neat little homage to OS X.

Mouse over the icons to see what the fuss is about.

All bets are off: I got it today.

Laura got a T-Mobile Blackberry 7100t today, so the betting pool on when I’ll have one is officially open.

Here’s some frenzied Crackberry links:

• MobileWhack has quite a bit of info.
• Jason O’Grady has a 3-part series on his move to a Blackberry, and most of it is OSX-related: I, II, and III.

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):

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.

Skype has been out for a while, but I’ve only just started playing with it. So far, I’m very impressed.

Skype is a free voice-over-Internet client. It lets you make phone-quality voice ‘calls’ to other Skype users, for free. The ‘free’ thing is a big seller, for me. Skype does have a for-pay option of calling land-line, regular numbers, but I haven’t tried that yet.

The application install and setup was very easy, and the sound quality is suprisingly good. I’m using it with my iBook, which has an integrated microphone. If you use it with your PC, you may need to attach an external mike.

I truly loathe comment-spammers, as they’re following what has to be the stupidest marketing idea ever.

Check out Trencaspammer, which forces commenters to enter in a security code before accepting comments. It should be a nice stopgap measure against comment spam, at least until WordPress 1.3 is released.

Oh yeah, the site is in Spanish, but the installation instructions are in English, and it’s not that hard to install. Edit your wp-comment-* files, and add the plugin, and you’re done.