StickyC.com

Since I’ve not posted in 4 months, I figure it’s OK to break the “geek news” theme of the site and post something more or less completely irrelevant.

A short writeup of cooking bacon on the George Foreman grill… Steps? What steps? Put bacon on grill, cook ~5 minutes, flip, cook ~3 more minutes. I’ve heard of folks who put the entirely slab of bacon on the grill at once, I’d love to hear how that turned out. Okay, you probably do want to make sure you’ve got enough dripping trays handy ahead of time (see below). Wins: It’s tasty bacon. In the grand scheme of things, I’d rank it #2. For reference, my taste preference in order is Pan/griddle, George Foreman, Fast Baking (high heat for 8-12 mins), and finally microwaving (only to be used when totally desperate and nobody can see you). I’ve yet to try slow baking or grilling on the BBQ, but I hear they’re both tasty options. Cleanup is much easier than pan/griddle cooking. While the GF is still hot, attack viciously with paper towels and toss the dripping trays in the dishwasher. Losses: Unless you’ve got the uber George Foreman, you can only do 3-4 slices at a time. I personally dont have (or want) the self control to just eat 3 slices of bacon, so it’s at least 13 minutes of baconizing. The average pack of bacon produces enough drippings to fill two of the little drip trays. The good news is, newer grills come with two trays. The bad news is, you’ll probably need to swap trays mid-cooking, which can be a delicate operation. I highly recommend having the 2nd tray (and bacon dripping jar if you’re into saving such things) at the ready before starting cooking.

The end result was some very tasty bacon - much less greasy than pan fried, but just as flavorful.

This Is Mind Candy: Frivolity : PrakBot

Okay, so it’s just Hitchhikers’ Guide right now, the key is that these guys have wired a Z-Machine (thats the interpreter) engine to a Jabber front end, so in theory, you could play all the old Infocom text games.

I thought I’d blogged this before, but couldn’t find it in the archives…

Chris Ilias’ Blog » Keeping threaded view in Thunderbird Users of Mozilla Thunderbird, may have noticed that if you are viewing messages in threaded view, clicking on a column name (other than the thread column) will turn off threaded view.

What if you want to keep threaded view on? Go to Tools–>Options–>Advanced–>General, and click on “Config Editor“. In the Config Editor, search for the preference mailnews.threadpanecolumn_unthreads. Double-click on it, which should change the value to false.

Full-on credit to Chris Ilias for posting this. Go visit his blog. It’s way better than mine (and certainly more frequently posted to.

Did you know that you can add multiple destination addresses in Google Maps to create a route? And did you know that you could drag addresses up and down on the left pane to re-arrange the route? How cool is that?

Today is March 6th, 2007. Check out the email that I got a few minutes ago…

Your rebate submission for “Fry’s 10/6/06 - 11/2/06 54G & MIMO Router MIRs” has been processed and your check will be mailed shortly. Please allow 2 weeks for completion.

The Green Button - S3 Standby - Hardware & Software solution

How to set up your PC so the fans go to sleep when you put it on standby.

Sling TV offering comes to Palm phones - Yahoo! News AWESOME! Slingbox was one of those “gee, this Slingbox thing might be cool” purchases that has paid off in spades (much the same as “gee, this TiVo thing might be cool” has). I end up using the Slingbox all the time to watch TV while playing Warcraft or while on the road (hint - Bend, Oregon does not get Fox Sports Bay Area). It’d sure be nice to not have to fire up the laptop to catch some local news or watch a bit of the game.

Thank you for polluting my search results, Knowledgestorm and Bitpipe. Thank you so very much for taking up 54 of the first 100 hits for “Mail archive software” with your meta-search results. It’s bad enough you’ve cloned your page to a dozen or so server aliases on your own domains, but you’ve managed to convince some other what-I-once-thought-were-reputable sites to include your advertising scripts as well (are you listening Businessweek, WashingtonTechnology, and LinuxInsider?). Your front page almost looks like a legitimate business, but your search-engine spam gives you away. You guys are so off my Christmas list.

I managed to badger my roomie into picking up the external HD-DVD drive for his Xbox 360 - I think it was the Army of Darkness HD-DVD that did it (alas, not Dune in HD).

Quick Notes - Wow! The picture is awesome. I used to think DirecTV’s HD feeds kinda sucked, now I know they completely suck arse. Only the occasional football game comes close to the level of detail. The pay HD feeds (HBO, etc) are absolutely miserable in comparison. The drive comes with the HD version of King Kong and it’s sooo beautiful. We were in the middle of a Sharks game and had only planned on watching a few minutes of it to see the action, but ended up watching almost half the movie.

The Remote is excellent as well. Nicely weighted with big buttons, much better than I expected for an add on. The bonus is that it replaces the miserable-for-DVD-control XBox wireless controller.

The only negative so far is the audio mix (on at least King Kong) is very quiet and not nearly as powerful as the standard-definition counterparts. From what I’ve read on the net, this is a known issue and Microsoft is working on a fix.

From what I’ve read, almost all of the HD-DVD playback process is handled in source code (somewhere there was a post that there’s more lines in the HD-DVD drivers than all of Win95). The great thing about this is that it makes fixing playback issues just a matter of software updates (of course, the flipside is that as Microsoft’s DRM grip tightens, locking down the player even more is also just a patch away).

Overall -two way big thumbs up. For an extra $200, if you’ve got an HD-capable set and a 360, this is a no-brainer. Even better purchase than Gears of War.

Peter Miller - Magnetic Yellow Card Peter Miller’s come up with an elegant solution to a problem I’ve been wrestling with as a while - how to let cagers know they’re driving like jackasses without actually calling them jackasses (which usually ends up in escalating hostility). Magnetic Yellow Cards that can be thrown to stick to the vehicle with a kindly message explaining (in this case) the driver got too close to the rider. They wont stick to windows so they can’t obscure the driver’s vision and wont damage the paint. I’m thinking they also wont stick to Saturns. Too bad, I’ve found a disproportionate number of Saturn drivers who’ve forgotten fundamental driving skills. The best part? It’s open source! Now to order 10,000 “Please use your turn signal” cards…

IntelliAdmin.com: New Remote Desktop client released by Microsoft Microsoft has released a new version of the Remote Desktop Client that is compatible with some of the new features of Vista. It is available for Windows XP, and 2003. Some of the new features: · Network Level Authentication · Server Authentication · Plug and Play redirection · TS Gateway support · Monitor Spanning · 32-bit color and font smoothing

As a long time VNC user, I’ve come to see the light that is Windows’ excellent Remote Desktop client. I’ve found it beats VNC is pretty much every way except allowing file transfers (and even that’s not in all versions of VNC) and only viewing Windows hosts (there are RD clients for OS-X and linux).

USAA bank now allows you to deposit checks by scanning the front and (signed) back and uploading the scans via their web-based Java applet. You then void and toss the original check. Usually, funds are available immediately.

Gotta love technology!

Apparently, Google has seen the light that there’s a big mobile webmail sandbox and only a few of the major players playing in it. They’ve now released a client-side GMail application for mobile devices that support Java (the list is huge, including the Treo) that’s much faster and easier than accessing email via mobile web browser. No, it’s not as good as any of the PalmOS-specific mail apps and it is a bit buggy and the installation isn’t for n00bs (although most of that is Palm’s JVM implementation’s fault), but it does a good job of bringing a lot of GMail functionality to the small screen without sacrificing as much usability as one would think. I’m tempted to go charge my Sony/Ericsson z600 (flip version of the venerable t610 series) to see what it looks like on the really small screen. To install, point your mobile web browser to http://gmail.com/app. Treo users must get the Java Virtual Machine from the Palm Website first.

Just when I’m about to throw in the towel on my Treo (affectionately named “dammit!”) and start looking for a different smart phone where the ‘phone’ is actually as good as the ’smart’, Google comes out with a mobile version Google Maps for the PalmOS. It’s a full-on client-side application, not just a web page and kicks butt.

Finally, it might be faster to get directions on the Palm than finding a gas station.

Dave Winer started it by repackaging RSS news feeds from the BBC and NYTimes into uber-minimalist text pages suitable for viewing even on a mobile phone screen. Since then, Digg’s picked it up and I’m betting there’s others out there…

Digg River

NYTimes River

BBC River

Home Theater: 1080i v. 1080p Here’s a fairly well written article about why 1080p isn’t a must have feature in an HDTV.

The Road to Know Where: Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft A pretty extensive list of cool tools free from MS for Windows XP. Some, I’ve already documented (all of the PowerTools are here), but others are new to me and sound like they’re worth checking out.

I’ve upgraded StickyC.com to Wordpress 2.04, and applied a nice looking theme and fixed the comments. Since the vast majority of you are reading this via RSS, you probably wont even notice. Note that I did change the permalink structure, so if your RSS reader is using a stale cache of the feed and you click on a particular article, it might not come up. Just refresh the feed and you should be fine, or click on this article’s link and you can use the powers of the internets to surf the site directly.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had problems with WMV files playing under Firefox - maybe 80% of the time, when attempting to load a page with embedded video, the browser would just ‘go away’. No error dialog, no bleep, nothing.

Turns out, this is a conflict with the excellent VideoLanClient player’s WMV plugin for Firefox. The fix is quick & painless - Locate your Mozilla Firefox plugins folder (usually C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Plugins) and remove the file npvlc.dll (or just drag it somewhere else for safe keeping).

So far, I haven’t found any detrimental effects and now VMW files play just fine all the time.

More info from the Firefox FAQ here.

Going Adobe-Free for PDFs - Cantoni.org File under “now why didn’t I think of that”. I’ve long been sick of the Acrobat bloat, I didn’t even know there were alternatives for viewing (on the PC - Mac’s got quick & easy PDF viewing built into the freakin’ OS).