Free Kindle?

Okay, no one is apparently suggesting it would be truly free as in you go put it in your shopping cart for $0.00 and have it show up at your door a couple of days later. There is the possibility floated that you could get a free Kindle as part of an Amazon Prime subscription, which could make sense.  I still think it's more likely you'll get a very cheap Kindle with Amazon Prime. The problem with giving away physical goods for free hoping to make the money back with subscriptions or ads or book purchases or whatever is that people might take the physical good just because it's free and/or repurpose it. That's what happens with alternative newspapers, and they have built their business model around that, hoping that something will catch your eye from the bottom of the birdcage. I doubt that could work for the Kindle.

The idea of a free Kindle with the purchase of a bundle of books is an intriguing idea. Having to buy a whole bunch of books would prevent abuse by repurposers and it would aid in getting Kindle everywhere. Short of stuff like that, though, I don't see Kindle for less than $99 to non-Prime subscribers anytime soon. That seems like the magic price-point that they're looking for.

I had just moved to Chrome when...

I found the (mostly) stable version of Firefox 4 available for Ubuntu (excepting the official version with its hideous text display). Phew. Chrome's awesome-fast, but the bookmark interface sucks. And when I say sucks, I mean it is horrible. Netscape Communicator 4.06, released in August 1998, has an infinitely better interface (I have it running under Wine right now). Chrome a) won't let you drag the page your on onto the bookmark bar folder and open said folder to drop it anywhere you want in the folder. This is something I do all the time, as I like to have new Notable bookmarks at the top rather than the bottom. More than that, there is no way to make a bookmark below the top level (which includes all top-level bookmark bar folders, to be fair) without deleting any copies of said bookmark that might be hanging around. This means that if I want more than one copy of a bookmark, I have to open the damned bookmark manager. There's no keyboard shortcut to do that, which there was in Netscape 4.06 in 1998 and ever since, and the bookmark manager doesn't even support drag and drop copying. You have to copy and paste.

If you want Firefox 4 for Ubuntu...

forget about the Daily Builds PPA. Go with the Mozilla Team Firefox Next PPA. That will give you a much more stable beta. Plus you won't have to fool around with pinning Thunderbird in Synaptic to prevent it from updating to a daily build too.

What a travesty

84,000 websites were not only taken off the Internet by mistake, but redirected to a page that suggested that the sites contained child pornography. Incredible. I'm tempted to regret that a class action lawsuit for defamation or libel can't be brought against the feds over this. In lieu of that, Congress should hold hearings on this. Someone needs to get fired.

Things like this make me fear the future of American democracy

"Fifty one per cent of Republican primary voters said they endorsed the controversial "birther" theory that Mr Obama was not born in Hawaii." What's really terrifying is that whoever these conspiracy theorists nominate could be president if things don't go well in the next two years. I take solace, though, in the fact that the GOP primary process is so predictable it might as well be rigged (the nomination in an open year invariably goes to the runner-up in the last open year - 2000 being the sole exception post-1968, and that was because Pat Buchanan a) had gone way off the reservation, b) was utterly unqualified having never been in elected office of any kind, and c) had already left the GOP before the first primary). Still, with Romney and Huckabee splitting the claim to be runner-up (Romney get the second most popular votes and Huckabee the second most delegates) and Romney being weighed down by RomneyCare in Massachusetts, who knows?

Pet Peeve: Email Forms that don't send you a copy

Personally, I like to have a record of what I sent to people. With the traditional email link, a copy is saved automatically by your email program or webmail provider (of course). With web forms, once you press send it's gone forever, at least as far as you're concerned. Those forms really need an option to mail the return address too.

Dell would be nuts to buy AMD

This rumor is pretty silly. Dell sells too many Intel-based systems to alienate Intel, as the article points out. The benefits for them of owning AMD are dwarfed by the downside of losing Intel-seeking customers to other PC manufacturers (e.g., because a newly Intel-unfriendly Dell can't sell Intel machines as cheaply, doesn't get the latest chips quite as fast, etc.).

Shifting the minimize, maximize, and close buttons in Ubuntu

As an added extra, here's an article on how to make the aforementioned buttons appear on the right, like in Windows, rather than the left. Note: make sure to run gconf-editor using your own user. If you run it as root using sudo or gksudo, it will affect where root's buttons are displayed, not yours. I learned that one the hard way.

Getting back the old Ubuntu 10.04 theme in 10.10

It caused me some consternation that I wasn't able to easily "downgrade" from the new Ubuntu desktop theme, which I loath, to the old one. Fortunately I finally figured it out. First download these two packaged. Then manually install them with "dpkg -i". Then open Synaptic and select the lock command from the menus on both of them to prevent them from "updating" to the new theme. Voila, problem solved.

Windows Vista Sucks Horribly

I am currently deleting a bunch of files on my mother's Vista laptop. In Ubuntu it would have taken a minute or two (there are a lot of files). In Vista it's taken an hour already and shows no sign of ending soon. If that weren't bad enough, it periodically prompts me for interaction. Ugh.

Google Voice, Dial-to-Call, and Contacts

What Google Voice really needs is a way to access your contacts from within Google Voice's dial-to-call interface (you know when you dial in and press 2 to make a call out). That would be awesome. As it is, you have to manually enter the number when you dial out with Google Voice on a non-smart phone or a landline. Manual dialing went out with the 20th century.

This would really be where Google's voice recognition technology would really be valuable. Imagine being able to say the name of the person you wanted to call. That would likely work better than the mediocre (at best) automated transcription because it just needs to match what you say to a name already on file in your contacts.

WordPress Themes Lacking

WordPress needs a better system for bringing aesthetically high-quality themes to the top. Last night I spent quite some time wading through a huge ocean of stylistic catastrophes finding nothing that I liked.

I guess part of the problem is that WordPress lacks any kind of WYSIWYG theme editing (aside from placing widgets). If you're not proficient with CSS, you're screwed. I guess I'll have to load that CSS book onto my Kindle and brush up.

Update: Okay, there is a theme editor in the works, but it explicitly states that it's not ready for prime time yet. Unfortunately, it seems that development is currently stalled with the last updates being last Spring. There is always this really old webapp, but it seems very limited in the sort of themes it can generate.

Wifi 802.11ac - Is the IEEE staffed by morons?

Really? With all the letters in the alphabet, did they have to use 1) two letters and 2) have the first letter be the same as an established Wifi protocol (i.e., 802.11a). I would hate to be in tech support and get all the calls asking me to explain why 802.11ac routers are awesome and 802.11a/g routers suck horribly.

I've found a serious flaw in 7zip

There is no way to enter a password on the command line automatically when decompressing. The -p flag doesn't work. Sooo, if you have a large number of files with the same password, you're screwed.

I recently found that out the hard way when I decided to mirror my online backups, or some of them, that I keep on SkyDrive on Dreamhost's backup server. The solution I came up with was to set up a temporary local telnet server and use a MUD client to automatically send the password on a periodic basis. I tried setting a trigger to send it when prompted, but the client--the free 16 bit version of Zmud running under Wine--choked on the prompt, something to due with parentheses I think. I first tried setting it to just a colon, which worked but had the tendency to create unending loops under certain conditions, and settled on the periodic sending. I really wish normal terminals had a trigger features (the ability to automatically send a command when a certain string of text is displayed) like MUD clients do. Actually, it was that thought that gave me my idea.

I'm not surprised that the Saudi's have been lying

It turns out that they padded their oil reserve estimates by about 40%. I'm actually pleasantly surprised that their exaggeration is as modest as it is. Thank you Wikileaks (formerly Wikileaks.org).

BTW, I highly recommend keeping a Google News search feed for mentions of Wikileaks. All sorts of interesting things pop up in it.

How much difference this will make I don't know. All the ways the government could deal with this, namely taxes, regulation, and increasing public transportation at the expense of cars, are unpopular in this country and verbotten to one of our two parties. I fear we're going to do nothing and go through this transition in the most painful way.

Mozilla apparently embraces stupid versioning

Four, count 'em four, new 1.0 releases slated for this year. Why not just rebrand Firefox 4 as Firefox 10 and keep the sane versioning system they have right now? Then they'd "beat" Google and not drive people (or rather, me) nuts.

Linux Autorun Vulnerability

As far as I can tell, this is still only theoretical. It has not shown up in the wild. If it ends up being exploited, it just goes to show that being security-conscious is still necessary even if you're in a Linux environment.

Yahoo, nostalgia's murderer

I finally remembered my ridiculously weak five-digit all-number RocketMail password. I was very excited at the prospect of getting back an account I made in 1998. What do I find? "We do not support reactivation of RocketMail accounts." Arrgh!

Oh well. My Hotmail account also goes back to 1998 and it's still good.