NASA World Wind is a truly excellent Open Source, free 3-D world viewer, incorporating multiple layers of satellite imagery and topo data, as well as place names, boundaries, and geographic features. The mouse-driven interface lets you zoom, tilt, and pan the globe, giving the user a ‘fly-through’ effect from the 3-D-mapped ortho-rectified imagery. It’s a pretty big download at 256MB, and it does auto-download more content if you request it to, but it’s well worth it.
I’ve removed mt-comments.cgi entirely, because MT eats shit.
Comment-spammers using a distributed denial-of-service technique effectively took down the server today.
I’ll be switching to WordPress this weekend.
If you use MoveableType, I seriously recommend removing it today.
I’m really impressed with the latest version of Firefox.
One of the neater additions is Live Bookmarks.
Live Bookmarks let you bookmark an RSS feed, which will appear as a bookmark folder that contains all of the headlines in the feed.
On certain sites, you’ll see an orange RSS icon in the bottom right corner of the Firefox browser window. If you click it, it’ll give you an option to subscribe to the site’s feed.
Laura got me a really nice Magellan Sportrak GPS receiver for my birthday, because she’s the best.
Unfortunately, I made the critical mistake of purchasing Magellan Mapsend Streets and Destinations — and actually trying to use it.
Here’s the resulting love letter I sent to Magellan:
Wow. I am utterly amazed that your corporate headquarters isn’t a squatter camp in lower Bangladesh, although I’m sure it will soon be.
Only a nest of leper-rotting unskilled nomadic vagrants could produce software of such putrid quality. I cannot — absolutely cannot– believe that I was suckered into buying such an absolute pile of curdled feces.
In the future, you’ll be able to use your Gameboy Advance to tune your engine.
We’re living in the future, folks.
Through the magic of the Interweb, Kevin Fox discovered a photo of Google, circa 1960.
Mairix is super-fast mail-indexing app that might convince me to use Mutt instead of my beloved Pine.
Mairix adds vFolders to Mutt, which is the only reason I use the Evolution email client. [14,307 emails –and counting — means for a messy inbox.]
If Mutt had a learning curve that was anything less than 90°, I’d be using it now.
I picked up a EZFlash Advance kit from MyBayside.com, for about $100. I’ll only be using it to pursue my career in Gameboy game development, of course.
My first USB cable was broken on arrival, but the guy[s] at MyBayside.com were very responsive and got me a replacement cable within a week.
The kit includes a USB-to-GBA cable and a 256Mbit flash card, which will store about 4 modern-sized GBA roms. This is a handy way to keep your precious GBA games safe: connect the GBA to your computer via the cable, launch the included client software, and back up your GBA game to a file on your computer.
Every so often I’m reminded that I’m living in the future.
And the future is stupid.
