I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Entries for November 2005

November 30, 2005

MP3tunes Locker

Michael Robertson’s new site seems to be targeting itself as an “off-site backup” and synchronisation service for your music files, and therefore completely covered by fair-use. RIAA, start your lawyers.

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November 28, 2005

try ruby! (in your browser)

This is an incredibly cool tutorial, and a way of playing with Ruby without downloading a danged thing.

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evhead: Ten Rules for Web Startups

Some interesting, and reasonably common-sense, rules for startups.

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November 27, 2005

Paint.NET

New version of the excellent free^2 Windows image editing software.

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Apple - Trailers - Cars - Teaser 4

The new teaser for Pixar’s next flick, Cars, hints that it may not suck as royally as the original trailer suggested. Thank goodness — I was worried for a moment!

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Emulating W3C ,tools with mod_rewrite

Nifty hack, enabled now on Groovy Mother, that allows you to check your webpages by tweaking the URLs.

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November 26, 2005

Toothpaste for Dinner: The Marketing Department

Currently making me chuckle muchly is the dead-tree version of ‘Toothpaste for Dinner’ — Only ten bucks at Amazon. Here’s my favourite cartoon from the book.

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beedogs

Does exactly what it says on the can. “Beedogs.com is the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes.”

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the Radio Knives

My brother-in-law-in-law’s band. Really rather stonking garage-rawk.

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November 25, 2005

Songbird Media Player

New cross-platform iTunes-a-like being built by some former Nullsoft guys. Interesting to see someone other than the Mozilla foundation building apps in XUL.

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Urban Legends Reference Pages: Food (The Big Sleep)

The tryptophan in turkey is the reason why you feel sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner? Urban legend.

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November 23, 2005

Indieish: Remixing Pop Culture - CC:365

Podcast promising a new CC-licensed indie MP3 tune every day of 2006. I’m really looking forward to this.

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Mario Unleashed - Google Video

This is insane — Video of some kids at a high-school talent show, performing segments of the Super Mario soundtrack on marimba, complete with costumes and props.

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November 22, 2005

Dean Gray presents American Edit

Mash-up album based on Green Day’s “American Idot”.

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NPR : There is No God (Penn Jilette)

Excellent commentary by Penn Jillette on atheism. This is my “belief system” too.

“Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.”

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November 19, 2005

EV1Servers - RapidSSL

This isn’t a bad deal at all: $15 for an SSL certificate recognized as valid by any moderately-recent webbrowser. Perfect for your home-run webmail server.

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November 18, 2005

Boing Boing: iTunes creates a security hole?

*Jawdroppingly* idiotic rant from Cory, trying to draw anti-DRM points from a completely non-DRM-related security flaw in iTunes. Is it my imagination, or is his signal to ranting-clueless-fuckwit ratio dropping of late?

I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me…

I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me…

Any suggestions for what I should write on Joy's head when she's sleeping?

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Bill Hicks: Salvation

I happened upon this last week, and it’s bloody fantastic. A complete unedited 100-minute Bill Hicks act from 1992. Due to his early death, Hicks gets a lot of messianic hyperbole, but listening to this act, it’s a reminder that a) he was a very smart guy getting angry at the same stuff that’s still going on today in America, and b) he is an incredibly talented stand-up, whose skill at reading the audience and winning them back round with dick jokes after losing them to rants on US politics is nothing short of masterful.

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is an ebay fraud seller free? | Ask MetaFilter

This is a long MeFi thread, but worth reading. Summary: Someone posts to mefi asking if it’s possible to catch an ebay scammer. Turns out said questioner *is* an eBay scammer. Collected MeFi masses turn up addresses, bio, photos, etc on scammer. Now in police hands.

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EEG (Opp Ork Ah-ah)

EEG (Opp Ork Ah-ah)

The lovely Joy models this season's designs in noggin-affixed cerebral wiring. Maybe now we'll be able to work out why the hell she married me.

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November 15, 2005

Podtropolis - The iPod Tracker

BitTorrent tracker focused on video content of a suitable resolution for video iPods.

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XM Satellite Radio on DirecTV

You can now get XM stations on DirecTV (replacing the old MusicChoice channels). I particularly recommend “Lucy” (alternative greatest hits) and “Ethel” (current alternative music) on channels 838 and 834.

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November 14, 2005

Weebls Stuff - News - Better pictures of the toys

Weebl’s made plushy toys out of Magical Trevor, BadgerBadgerBadger and Weebl & Bob. Anyone who’s not sure what to get me for my Christmas… HINT!

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Google Analytics

Google continues their quest to consume every nibble of data on the internet — This time, site access logs.

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digg vs dot

Which digest site gets you the new faster?

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November 11, 2005

see shy jo: thread patterns

How to recognize, at a glance, whether it’s worth opening emails on a busy mailing list.

Celestia

Wow. An amazing free space “simulator” for Windows, OSX or Linux. Tip: Select “Demo” from the Help menu to get an idea of what it covers.

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Ambigrams

Interesting collection of word designs that read the same forwards, backwards, upwards, downwards, etc.

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November 10, 2005

CompUSA.com - Terms and Conditions

Wow, this is news to me: CompUSA no longer charges a 15% restocking fee on open-box returns. That fee was the reason I stopped shopping with them.

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November 9, 2005

My Web 2.0 Business Proposal

Last night, at the Boston Web Innovators Meetup, there were two presentations of practically identical new URL-gathering sites, and I had fun muttering heckles from the peanut gallery.

So I propose a new service: You write me a sizable check, go through your presentation, then I and some of my friends mock you mercilessly. Why would I use your site? What’s different from del.icio.us/digg/slashdot? What will happen if trollers and spammers game your site? How do you hope to scale your categories when Yahoo couldn’t manage it ten years ago? Are you aware that company names that end in ‘ient’ and have swoosh logos were considered ridiculous and clueless five years ago? And stop fucking saying “blogosphere”. Seriously. You sound like a tit.

We won’t offer solutions—Just get our rants off our chest, to your face, in private, and at least give you some preparation for what will be said behind your backs next time you present.

Current working names: “Undue Diligence”, “Cantank ‘R’ Us” and “That smartass know-it-all prick. Dot com. Two point oh. On Rails. ient.” Get in touch. Our rates are very reasonable.

oqo

Teensy palmtop Windows XP PCs. Got to poke at one a little today, and it is sweeeet.

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American Laundromat Records: High School Reunion

Indie rock acts covering songs from 80s high school flicks. Purchased!

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Five email tics I’d love for you to lose

Today at work, an email memo about the fact that we’re changing the paper in our copiers to a shiner brand was sent with Outlook’s High Priority flag set. I weep for humanity.

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Root.net

Install a Firefox extension and gather some statistics on where you’re “spending” your “attention”. Has potential to either prove really interesting, or a collosal fucking disaster. Can’t decide which yet.

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November 8, 2005

This is going to seem vocally narcissistic, but…

It would appear that I now have a “thing” for the Scottish accent.

I had to phone up the Bank of Scotland to sort out some stuff with my British bank accounts, and each of the women I spoke to had lovely lilting west-coast Scots accents. They sounded really quite yummy.

I think I may now understand why Joy puts up with me.

Risk via Google Maps

Best use of a mapping API yet.

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November 7, 2005

Greatest Internet Moments

A nostalgic selection of memes and history from the last ten years.

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Visual Studio Express

Microsoft have release the various versions of Visual Studio Express for free. Very smart move on their part — It reduces the cost of Windows programming to essentially zero for those who aren’t willing to pay, and MS can make up the money with their “professional” Team solutions and MSDN subscriptions.

The E-Mail Time Capsule - Forbes.com

Email the yourself of the future. My email to my 49-year-old self ponders on SMTP, spam and the likelihood of me still getting emails at begbie.com.

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November 5, 2005

Warnock's Dilemma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Warnock’s Dilemma”, named for its progenitor Bryan Warnock, points out that a lack of response to a posting on a mailing list, Usenet newsgroup, or Web forum does not necessarily imply that no one is interested in the topic.

mplayerplug-in

The best video plugin for Linux I’ve found. Plays Quicktime, Windows Media and Real Video without complaint, hiccup, or browser crash.

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Off The Telly

Immensely thorough and thoughtful UK TV reviews and history. Quality stuff.

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Tab Sidebar

Interesting twist on tabbed browsing for Firefox 1.5 — Displays screenshots of each tab in the sidebar.

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November 4, 2005

Tags.App

Tags solution for MovableType. I’m taking this for a bit of a roadtest at the moment.

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Amazon Mechanical Turk

Get paid for grunt-work that’s too complex for computers to deal with. Awesome name, and further proof that Amazon is really competing with Google, not buy.com.

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10 Ways to Please Us, the Customers

Excellent list from David Pogue. “We may be the bane of your existence, but we’re also the reason for it; you’re stuck with us. We’ve got our credit cards ready - now show us some love.”

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Television Without Pity > The Apprentice > Recaps & Extras > Season 4 Episode 7

Recaplet of last night’s Apprentice, the boardroom of which was one of the finest, most superbly bizarre and duck-behind-a-cushionly cringemaking bits of television ever.

November 2, 2005

Cool Tool: Poly Business Card Book

Oooh, I fancy one of these, if only for the obsessive-compulsive collector part of me.

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YackPack

Hrmm… Not sure about this one. All the social awkwardness of leaving voicemails, with the technical complexity of trying to get a microphone working on your PC.

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Producing Open Source Software

Free ebook on the hows and wherefores of running an open source project, from someone who’s been round the block a couple of times.

Flight Patterns

Some beautiful visualizations generated from FAA data of all flights over the USA one day in March.

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.