Posts tagged ‘internet’
Hotel wifi help
December 29th, 2011 at 6:57 pm by Dr. Drang
Let me start by apologizing for the title of this post. If you were searching for help with balky hotel wifi and wound up here through some horrible SEO failure, I can assure you you won’t find anything useful in what follows. It’s more a post about the lack of hotel wifi help. Last night…
Best product review
December 22nd, 2011 at 9:20 am by Dr. Drang
Much talk on Mac blogs this week about product reviews, strong opinions, and the journalists/blogger/fanboy division. I was reminded of that when this popped up in my Twitter stream just a few minutes ago. It is, I believe, the best product review I’ve ever seen. Have acquired and used @LeapCard. Worked smoothly, totally hassle-free so…
Craft
December 2nd, 2011 at 4:35 pm by Dr. Drang
Generally speaking, I’m in favor of celebrating the spirit of amateurism; that we should make and do things for ourselves rather than always relying professionals and retailers. Even if our results aren’t perfect, the skills we develop in doing for ourselves are important in making us well-rounded humans. I’m no fan of Robert Heinlein’s politics,…
Savior of the Universe
November 9th, 2011 at 9:13 pm by Dr. Drang
Following a link from Michael Tsai (who’s been my go-to blogger recently on the OS X sandboxing controversy), I read this post by Jeff LaMarche on Adobe’s announcement of the end of mobile Flash. The key passage is this: I missed a huge factor in the demise of Flash. I assumed the performance issues they…
Google Maps printing oddity
June 3rd, 2011 at 10:29 pm by Dr. Drang
While the Google Maps scroll/zoom confusion I blogged about last week has been around for years, the printing problem I ran into today seems new. It’s a case of Google doing things right initially and then screwing it up later. I have a packed schedule on Monday. A meeting in Joliet in the morning and…
Pinboard problems
February 4th, 2011 at 8:34 am by Dr. Drang
I’ve been collecting small complaints about Pinboard since I switched over from Delicious back in December. Some I’ve already reported to Pinboard, some I haven’t. I figured I’d throw them all into one crotchety post and send a link to Pinboard support. All my complaints are related to Pinboard’s Twitter features. For me, one of…
Writing well is hard
February 1st, 2011 at 8:14 am by Dr. Drang
You may have seen this article by Jeff Yang at SFGate. He makes the case that Apple’s success since Jobs’ return is due as much to what it doesn’t do as to what it does. It’s been linked on several Apple-centric sites and rightly so: it’s well argued, well sourced, and—with one exception—well written. The…
Email rejections
June 2nd, 2010 at 10:30 am by Dr. Drang
The bulk email I mentioned in this earlier post didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. The cut-and-pasted encoded PDF attachment—the main topic of the post—was fine, but several of the messages were rejected. The problem was Sendmail and spam. I’d forgotten that when you send an email directly from your own computer using…
Scientific American screws up Martin Gardner’s last article
May 30th, 2010 at 12:40 am by Dr. Drang
Scientific American has republished on its web site Martin Gardner’s last article for the magazine. It’s from 1998, well after Gardner stopped his long-running “Mathematical Games” column. Unfortunately, SA screwed up the article’s HTML, making part of it incomprehensible. Here’s the section that’s messed up: Let me propose to teachers the followingexperiment. Ask each group…
Webfonts for the 18th century
May 20th, 2010 at 9:28 pm by Dr. Drang
This morning, in a burst of pure genius, Dan Sandler (@dsandler) tweeted this: Attention all 17th–18th century blogger-scholars: Your font needs have now been met. http://code.google.com/webfonts/list?family=IM+Fell Sure enough, if you follow that link you’ll be taken to the preview page for IM Fell, an old-looking family of fonts, now available as webfonts through the auspices…
