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 week beginning November 12, 2006
➠ November 17, 2006
Wesabe
Marc Hedlund’s start-up launches. Looks like an awesome light-weight social web-based finance manager, for folks for whom Quicken is too much hassle. Whether users will entrust their financial info to Web 2.0 remains to be seen.
➠ November 16, 2006
Cracked it! | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
FFS. Detailed explanation of the how’s and why’s of reading/cloning a UK RFID-chipped passport — which don’t even have the tinfoil protective cover that US passports will. “‘This doesn’t matter,’ says a Home Office spokesman.”
cabel.name: Kettle Chips Beta
$20 for five experimentally-flavoured bags of Kettle Chips. Vote for your faves, and they might appear on shop shelves some day. “Royal Indian Curry” is calling my name.
A second life for your first PlayStation
Audiophiles claim that an original model Playstation, if left on for about three days to “warm up”, is an amazing sounding CD player.
➠ November 15, 2006
➠ November 14, 2006
Red Sox win Matsuzaka bid
The Sox today paid $51.1m for the rights to negotiate exclusively with a (reportedly outstanding) Japanese pitcher. $51.1m to *negotiate*. It will cost them many millions more to actually sign him. Wow. Just… wow.
CNN.com Video: Microsoft's Zune released
Ouch. I’m not sure Microsoft will be happy that their launch-day feature on CNN features incredulent hosts (“Who do they think is going to buy this?”), one of whom ends the segment raving about her new teeny iPod Shuffle.
Dev House Boston
Programmers/Designers! Got an idea of something you want to build, but no time to do it? Got a hankering to build something, but no ideas? In New England? Come along to Dev House Boston on Dec 9th.
Apple Teams Up With Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM & United to Deliver iPod Integration
Wow. What a great move by Apple. Further domination of the iPod-only connector, plus it solves the “iPod batteries only last 4 hours when watching video, that’s too short for a long-haul flight” problem in one foul swoop.
➠ November 13, 2006
shell: revealed - Can't drag quicklaunch toolbar to top of desktop
I’m playing with Vista on my laptop, and this “improvement” from Microsoft was pissing me off. Thankfully there is a “solution”. One that is a usability nightmare waiting to happen (drag a folder too close to the edge of the screen, and it becomes a toolbar that is hard to work out how to close).
Ironic Sans: Interview: Louis Klein, audience member of nearly every episode of Saturday Night Live
Man, I consider it a chore to have to watch SNL on TiVo each week, when I can fast-forward through it. I can’t imagine queuing up each week to go see the show live.
Sqlite Developer - Sqlite3 Database Manager
GUI for managing SQLite databases. Best one I’ve found, although it’s not free. Deals gracefully with the 4Gb database files we use at work.
Apple Matters | Zune Marketplace's Absurd Pricing Scheme
Microsoft’s “you must buy points in $5 increments” makes sense if you consider credit-card transaction costs (I’m sure Apple loses money if you only buy one 99 cent song at a time — that’s why they batch up your transactions), but the user experience of “1.25 cents per point” is ridiculous, and probably going to bite MS.
SNL Transcripts: Alec Baldwin: 11/11/06: Carpool
Best SNL sketch in AGES. Sadly, I can’t find the video on YouTube, so here’s the transcript. “Bobby McFerrin raped my grandmother” has become a wholly-inappropriate running joke between Joy & myself.
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.