• The Most Remote Place on Earth
• Bud and Dick: 1915
• Penny-Pitchers: 1912
• Saturday Noon: 1910
• The Two Okinawan Diet Rules (or How I’m Getting Leaner During the Holidays)
• Bon-bons, s'il vous plaît
• The Cinnamon Bear: An Old-Time Radio Christmas Tradition
• Worms in love
• Teacher must still surrender license in bizarre ‘exposure to porn’ suit
• Big 4 Candy: 1926
• Saddest. Fetch. Ever.
• Bullet Proof Wife
• Well, This Sucks
• Buuuuuuuuuurp!
• The Empress: 1915
• Still in the Game: 1919
• Head rest
• Simply Explained - Part 26
• Want to Save the World? I’ll Tell You How
• Nikon’s portable viewing surprise package: the Media Port UP

(c) Raoul Pop

Condensed Knowledge - December 1, 2008

Clouds form unusual shapes at dusk. Taken in North Bethesda, MD, USA.

(c) Raoul Pop

Days like these

• Boxee Releases Fix For Apple TV Update
• Turkey Dinner for Turkeys
• Fine & Dandy: 1912
• One Year In A IT Project - Day 24
• Your Grocer’s Dairy Case
• Pretty on the inside doggy
• How to Modify Your Pet’s Behavior
• Humongous Tunnel Boring Machines
• Who Can’t Swim?
• BNP Database Leaked
• The Naturalist: 1915
• Half-Terabyte 2.5-inch HDD from Toshiba
• SeaGen tidal energy system enters final stage of testing
• WTD 614
• Dell Finds Small Tweaks Bring Gigantic Savings
• GET OFFA MY PROPERTEH! (part deux)
• When Sky Marshals Do Bad Things
• You Could be Getting Clickjacked
• Rim Liquor in Payson, Arizona
• #463; In which the Future is Saved

(c) Raoul Pop

Condensed Knowledge - November 24, 2008

If I am to be accurate, I should say it’s not the first snowfall of the season, but the second. It is, however, the first I managed to capture on video. We had another brief snowfall earlier in the week, which, much like this one, melted upon contact and didn’t even wet the ground.

First snowfall of 2008

I see that others are getting much more snow [via], but given what they have to go through, I’ll take my little snowfall over this dangerous winter morning any day:

(c) Raoul Pop

First snowfall of 2008

Shortly after upgrading to Adobe’s new Flash Player, version 10, I noticed I could no longer upload photos to my blogs. And I also noticed that FriendFeed’s image uploader didn’t work the same way. I didn’t relate that to the Flash Player upgrade at first, and tried to rule out problems on my own machine. Then I did a bit of research and discovered that others were in the same boat.

Quoting from this thread on the WP forums:

“The new Flash version 10 is incompatible. The latest version 9 of Flash is what you want. There will be a workaround (ugly hack) for this in WordPress 2.7. But since the problem is actually with Flash 10 itself, stick with Flash 9 for the time being. Hopefully, WordPress 2.8 will get rid of the Flash altogether, since Adobe has made it clear that they consider this problem to be a security fix.”

On FriendFeed (FF), people complained about image uploader issues as well. In that same FF thread, I found out that Adobe archives their old versions of the Flash Player, something which is not readily apparent on their site, nor easy to find. I also found that I need to uninstall Flash Player before downgrading — should I decide to do it — using Adobe’s Flash uninstaller.

Now, we’re faced with an issue: stay with Flash 10 and a non-working image uploader on WP sites, or downgrade to Flash 9? I’ll let each of you decide what to do about that. Since there appears to be a security issue in Flash 9, it’s not something you should take lightly, but at least you’ll have options.

You may think I’m joking in my post title when I say that the new Flash Player broke the internet. Not necessarily. When you consider that there are about 3.8 million blogs at WordPress.com, and at least a few hundred thousand self-hosted WP installs from WordPress.org, that makes over 4 million websites whose WP Image Uploader broke when Flash 10 was released. I’m not sure how many FriendFeed (FF) users there are, but there should be 100,000 or more by now.

The FF developers came up with an alternate image uploader fairly quickly when they discovered the problem with Flash Player 10. WP is going to release a workaround in WP 2.7, then possibly do away with Flash for the Image Uploader in WP 2.8. WP also has an alternate way to upload photos, through the old, form-based browser uploader, where you can only do one photo at a time. That’s what I’ve been using while I wait for the new version of WP to come out.

Still, when you consider that over 4 million internet users were negatively impacted by this new version of the Flash Player, that’s not a number to take lightly. I do wish Adobe had worked with WordPress ahead of time to make the transition smoother or to offer them some sort of workaround. I found out about this the hard way, and my guess is you did, too. That’s not the ideal way to do business when you’ve got Silverlight nipping at your heels.

(c) Raoul Pop

Flash Player 10 breaks teh internets

On 10/30/08, WD introduced Firewire 800 connections and new capacities (400GB and 500GB) for these wonderful little drives. The base capacity was upgraded to 320GB, and the 250GB size was phased out. These latest drives feature triple interfaces (USB 2.0/Firewire 400/Firewire 800), which is something one normally sees only on external desktop hard drives (the 3.5″ size).

Technology moves fast, doesn’t it? Just a few months ago, the My Passport Studio models featured USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 connections. The top capacity was 320GB. I myself have a 1st generation My Passport drive, a 160GB model with a USB 2.0 connection. I bought it in February of 2007, and it’s worked great ever since.

The more recent models from the My Passport line have something that my 1st gen My Passport drive doesn’t have: an external capacity gauge. I think it’s neat to see how much space is used up on the drive at a glance. These latest drives also have something I haven’t seen before: turbo drivers for faster data transfers. The drivers are available for Mac computers only. I haven’t used the drive yet, but when I get it, I’ll be sure to test out data transfers with and without the drivers, to see if there’s an improvement between the two modes. I hope the drivers are well-developed and won’t introduce any sort of OS stability issues. I’ll also test data transfers between USB, FW400 and FW800.

I’m really looking forward to getting a 500GB Studio drive, because of its unbelievable capacity. It is double the size of my MBP’s hard drive, which is 250GB. I’m going to be able to store lots of photos and videos on it when I’m traveling, and use it to back up important files from my MBP and my iMac. I also think the My Passport line of drives are some of the best-designed portable hard drives on the market.

I can’t find the 500GB model in any online stores yet. Newegg still lists the Firewire 400 models, albeit at reduced prices, and Amazon only has the 400GB model. B&H Photo also only lists sizes up to the 400GB model. I don’t think I need to worry, since it’s very likely that by the end of November or sooner, the 500GB model will be available in most stores.

Photos used courtesy of Western Digital Corporation.

(c) Raoul Pop

Hardware review: WD My Passport Studio

A few days ago, Google launched something that a lot of people had wanted for some time: the ability to do a video chat, right from Gmail. Everyone got really excited, and for good reason. I was very happy too, until I discovered that PowerPC Macs were out of the picture. Why?

Here’s what I get when I access the Google Video Chat site from my Intel MBP:

And here’s what my wife gets when she accesses that very same site:

So while she gets to see this when I’m away from home:

I’ll still only get to see this, which makes me sad:

Why, Google, why?

(c) Raoul Pop

Google launches video chat, ignores PowerPC Macs