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 December 3, 2006
➠ December 9, 2006
Techcrunch » Uh Oh, Gmail Just Got Perfect
GMail has integrated Fetchmail, so you can slurp in your other other mail accounts, rather than having to configure them all to forward to GMail.
Liminal Existence: On Twitter
“Having “community” is extremely important; far more so than our productivity.”
Dev House Boston Saturday 12:45 pm 12/9/06 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dev House Boston Saturday 12:45 pm 12/9/06 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dev House Boston Saturday 12:44 pm 12/9/06 Cambridge, Massachusetts
Mac owners attract each other, it seems.
➠ December 8, 2006
The DVD Wars
Tracking the popularity of the competing blue-laser DVD formats by comparing Amazon data. Very smart. HD-DVD is winning at the moment. (Wonder if that’s just because people getting HD TVs are searching for “DVD HD”?) Let’s see how the PS3 affects this.
BBC NEWS | Children 'swap music via phones'
Of course they do. And when I was a kid, we used tape-to-tape decks. Just because this is using shiny new Bluetooth technology doesn’t mean it can/should be stopped. Surprisingly, the BPI take a rather sane approach: “Ultimately the way to grow revenues with mobile will be to offer music fans what they want and encourage them to get their music legally.”
Creating Passionate Users: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve
There are currently four posts on the Twitter public timeline (including one from me) saying “Reading Kathy Sierra’s article on Twitter”. The lower graphic on “flow” is alarmingly true for me.
Pirates crack Vista Activation Server | APC Magazine
MS try to avoid the “Volume License Key” fiasco of XP (if you used FCKGW, or another volume key to install XP, you didn’t have to go through “activation” - ie. phoning into their servers) by not issuing volume keys for Vista. Instead, they created a server that enterprises could run, and installations of Vista would phone into local servers. Someone gets hold of said server, creates a VMWare image, voila! Anyone can install Vista without having to activate! Cat, meet mouse. Mouse, meet cat. Fight!
➠ December 7, 2006
Technical Revenue: The Architecture of Mailinator
Interesting article on the architecture and design decisions behind mailinator.com, your local friendly low-hassle disposable email address site.
BS 1363 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The awesomeness that *is* the British 3-Pin Plug. The article covers most of the beautiful design decisions, such as the longer earth pin (so earth is the first connection made when you plug it in) and the cable being attached to the bottom, so you’re less tempted to pull the plug by yanking the cord. Well done British Standards chaps!
Fritalian (Dunkin' Donuts commercial)
Another series of Dunkin Donuts commercials featuring music by They Might Be Giants has started hitting the air. This is my current favourite.
FoxTrot waltzes its way into early retirement
FoxTrot strip is going Sundays-only after the end of this year. This makes me sad, as it is one of the few genuinely funny comic strips in syndication today (Doonesbury being my other favourite).
A Screenshot of God's Inbox (from Time Magazine) [PDF]
God uses a Mac, apparently. A funny list, made funnier by details like “Jesus Baby Pictures” on the desktop.
Retirement Funds over Time
I was working on retirement-planning stuff this evening: checking my 401(k) investments, finally setting up a Roth IRA for myself, that sort of thing.
I plotted this graph in Microsoft Money showing Joy's and my retirement funds since I started working. The numbers are wiped out in the name of modesty, but the way the graph's trending? Makes me happy.
(The different colours are different investment accounts. See if you can spot the three year period where I was working for startups which didn't offer retirement benefits.)
➠ December 6, 2006
Literally, A Web Log
“An English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word literally”. Because that drives me hopping mad. Literally.
Ideas For Dozens: Why "I'm A PC" Works
That feeling you get from the “I’m a Mac” adverts that you like the PC more than the Mac? That’s what Apple want you to feel.
➠ December 5, 2006
A magnetic ode to our dogs
Joy got a "Dog Lovers" Magnetic Poetry set for her birthday. This is her first work on our fridge.
A baseball player answers his fan mail 15 years later - Slate Magazine
Former baseball player finds a box of fan mail from 1991 while cleaning his garage, and replies to them!
➠ December 4, 2006
Firebug Lite
Wonderful! A lightweight implementation of the Firefox-only Firebug javascript debugger which you can embed into your pages for cross-browser debugging.
➠ December 3, 2006
CrunchGear » Do You Love or Hate Bose? Tell Us Why and Win a Prize!
Set-up for what certainly seems to be a hatchet-job on Bose, but it does include the superb introduction “Bose is sort of the Hillary Clinton of tech — you either love them or hate them, and they’ve got lots of cash.”
Snap Preview Anywhere
Thumbnail image of the target website appears when you hover over a link. Installing this on groovymother.com out of curiousity.
Publishing with BitTorrent
BitTorrent.com will host torrents for any file on the web you point them to. I didn’t realise that you could use HTTP to seed torrents — that’s a pretty cool way of bootstrapping.
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.