The crime: The culprit: Sigh. Luckily, I have a surplus of USB-C cords for just such an occasion. (Not that anyone asked, but my favorite brand for such items is Anker. I have several of their bluetooth speakers, their bluetooth earbuds, two of their portable chargers, and a whole bunch of their cords.) Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
You know how Germans always have the best words? The nice long words that they seem to make up on the spot, words specifically tailored to capture a hyper-specific feeling? I wonder if they have one yet for “That feeling I get when I encounter something that everybody thinks is brilliant but which I think is full of shit.” Case in point: comedian Louis C.K.’s almost instantly-legendary rant against smartphones. This thing lit up the Internet over the weekend; everybody was linking it, and one person I know cited that in her epiphanic decision to downgrade from an iPhone toDown the rabbit hole….
Roger wrote a post the other day about technology stuff, in which he name-checked me: I don’t know what kind of typist Jaquandor is, but I’m sure that he is appreciating editing the text of his book or two, including Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), on a word processor, rather than retyping every draft. In his post, he is addressing the question of what technology he finds the most indispensable, and which he wishes would go away for good. Those are interesting questions, but his citing of me as an example of what’s cool about the development ofDown the rabbit hole….
I’ve been resisting the whole e-reader thing for quite some time, but I have now weakened. My resistance started faltering last summer when The Daughter used some collected birthday money to buy her very own Nook, which she loves. I thought it seemed pretty cool, and I knew that the trend toward e-books was gathering steam. Then, for Christmas, I bought The Wife a Kindle Fire, which she still uses every single day. It’s a great gadget, and I knew that the writing was on the wall. I decided finally that I wanted some kind of similar gizmo; the onlyDown the rabbit hole….
A business meeting if run by Internet commenters. (LOTS of coarse language here, folks.) Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
I’ve been a subscriber to WIRED for years — I know I started in the late 90s, at least. I’ve always been a big fan of the magazine. As a subscriber back in 1999 or thereabouts, I got a little package in the mail one day. It contained one of these: This is a gizmo that they called a “CueCat”. It wasn’t invented by WIRED, but they distributed them. You plugged it into your computer, and the CueCat (get it? A ‘cat’ to go with your ‘mouse’?) is then a barcode scanner. The idea was that you’d be reading aDown the rabbit hole….
My mother just stopped by with her Mac laptop to ask my help with something, and after an hour or so of futzing around and Googling, I couldn’t figure out the solution. Maybe one of you can offer some guidance! The problem: there is a webcam from Hawaii that she likes to have up when she’s online. (Specifically, this one — apparently that’s the beach she and my father stayed on when they vacationed there last.) At some point recently, though, the webcam has stopped working. No image loads, no nothing. (The webcam does work on my computer, though, whichDown the rabbit hole….
On the way home from work today I was listening to the local Sports Talk radio station, and they were doing a brief bit with former Buffalo Sabre Rob Ray, who talks on the station on days when the Buffalo Sabres play. At one point, the conversation turns to athletes and their use of Twitter, and one of the hosts asked Ray if he had any plans to start a Twitter account. Ray’s response was along the line of this: “No way, man! My phone is ancient and you can barely text with it! How am I gonna do Twitter?”Down the rabbit hole….
Well, the Tech Gods decided to suck up as much of my time as they could muster this weekend. Damn you, Tech Gods! It began with the arrival of a trojan on the Main Computer here at Casa Jaquandor. (If my laptop is a tricorder, the Main Computer is the one that speaks to me in the dulcet tones of Majel Barrett.) This damnable thing — called “Security Tool” — is one of those trojans that takes the form of a fake security program, so it all of a sudden started popping up all over the place, giving me falseDown the rabbit hole….
I’ve just discovered a cool feature in Chrome: if you do a “Find Text” search on a web page (using Ctrl-F), as you type the search text into the box, Chrome puts little markers in the scroll bar to indicate all the spots in the page where that text occurs. That’s neat! Thanks, Chrome! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….