Hippo, birdie, two ewes,...

...to khaosworks!! Have a good one!

Retro gadget meets USB.

The Device, Patented Process Indicating Apparatus - Gizmodo

Billed as "possibly with world's first hand-crafted luxury computer peripheral" - The Device is a status-indicator for virtually anything your computer monitors. Connecting via USB, packaged software can customize what The Device tracks. Examples include CPU usage, Counterstrike frags, Ebay auction status and radioactive decay rates.

The Device displays information through 3 methods. The first and most obvious is the pair of analog dials. The "Ethereal Glowing Tube" is filled with an Agar-based gel that can glow at 5 intensities. And the "Red Incandescent Lamp" (a.k.a. party light) can either be set to glow or blink "in extreme circumstances".

(Product web site.)
( gadget pr0n pic )

Friendly lemmings

( Top 25 users that aren't my friends but possibly should be. )

As near as I can tell, they're all filkers or maybe people who hang around with filkers. No surprise there.

Email test post

I decided to go for a PIN instead of setting up a GPG key; this way I
can write cron jobs and shell scripts to post for me, if I'm
crazy enough to want that. (I can see it if, for example, I have some
other blog that I want to gateway over to LJ.) Can always upload a key
later if it looks useful.

More about email posting.

The standard for email is, and has always been, lines of no more than 72 characters separated by hard newlines. That means that you have to use the <lj-raw> tag to tell LJ's formatter not to insert stupid line breaks where they don't belong. The lj-userpic: tag sets the userpic.

Other than that, it works. It looks like a potentially useful tool, if only because I can pipe stuff into mail and ship it off to LJ. Hmm.

Assorted

Months after spraining something in my foot, I still can't go more than two days wearing ordinary shoes (as opposed to hiking boots) without being in pain by the end of the day. At least it's up to two days; two weeks ago it was one. Progress is being made, but slowly.

I need to go out and get screwed some screws -- specifically 1.5" wood screws with 1/4" heads. I don't seem to have any in the house. I need them for mounting a power squid on a drywall-covered stud. That, or use something other than the squid. But it wouldn't be as cool-looking.

Short (half-hour or so) walks the last couple of days. Grump.

The house is amazingly clean. No telling how long the kids' bedrooms will stay that way; we'll be getting regular visits from the cleaning folks for the kitchen and living room. It makes a difference.