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 June 19, 2005

June 25, 2005

Cracking the Flag-Burning Amendment

The frustrating time-wasting of our government, illustrated.

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June 24, 2005

BBC NEWS | Fry in talks to write Doctor Who

Oh, *please* let this be true. The recent Dr Who series has been brilliantly written, but the creator of Suckmaster Burstingfoam needs to be let loose on it.

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Vote for Juanzo

B3tans continue to hack local newspaper competitions.

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June 22, 2005

eclectech : the very model of a modern labour minister : a tribute to charles clarke and his id cards

“a hint of politics and opinion, a dapper dog singing and the cutest puppy pianist on the planet”

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Filterset.G @ pierceive.com

The AdBlock ruleset “Filterset.G” has a new home, after some unauthorized plugins knocked out the old Geocities site.

Segway ‘Walking Tour’

Segway ‘Walking Tour’

Spotted practically following us around San Francisco. We particularly appreciated that riding around on Segways didn't make you look enough of a dork, so they fitted you out with reflective yellow jackets and helmets. Seeing them glide across the landscape was like a slowed-down Benny Hill chase, but without the buxom lasses or Yakkity Sax.

June 21, 2005

I left my U+2665…

It’s approximately 26 hours since I touched down for my first ever trip to San Francisco. I leave in another 12.

How can it be that in this brief, brief time—just barely enough to wander around the Fisherman’s Wharf area, attend a meeting in a funky loftspace office, be driven up and down steep, steep hills, enjoy a couple of delicious expensed dinners and take a stroll down towards the Golden Gate—I’ve decided that I definitely want to live here some time before I die? (Or after. I’m not picky.)

It’s hit a chord with me in almost precisely the same way that Boston and Washington DC did, and New York and Chicago most certainly did not. The long-term goal is to some day escape to Alaska and telecommute, but SanFran is now edging out Seattle as the city I want us to move to in the next five-to-ten years.

If only they had an American League baseball team so we could still see the Sox play!

Palace of Fine Arts

Palace of Fine Arts

They don't build 'em like this anymore.

San Francisco at dusk

San Francisco at dusk

Filed under : : :

Everything but the Kitchen, Sync!

One of my favourite Firefox extensions is Bookmarks Synchronizer, a tool to sync up my bookmarks across my myriad of machines. I can spot something cool at work, bookmark it, then read it in my leisure time at home. (And never the other way around. I never spend my work hours mindlessly surfing, and you’d be a fool to think so).

Its main problem is its requirement for either a FTP site or a WebDAV folder to save your bookmarks to. I hastily and hackily enabled mod_dav on my Linux server, but was never terribly happy with that setup—It felt like an extra unattended door to my server.

Enter the new (and relatively unheralded) WebDAV autoversioning feature in Subversion 1.2. With just a minor tweak to your Subversion config, Bookmark Synchronizer can now write directly to your Subversion repository—Keeping a full history as it goes.

Over HTTPS and with mod_auth_pam(mod_auth_pam.c, pluggable authentication (PAM) for Apache), it’s about as secure as your bookmarks will ever need to be.

June 20, 2005

The Rock

The Rock

Upon seeing this, my colleagues asked for my Sean Connery impression. It'sh every Shcotshman's birthright to do a pish-poor Shean Connery impreshion. Yesh, indeed.

Some bridge or other

Some bridge or other

Round the corner, fudge is made

Round the corner, fudge is made

The Ghiradelli factory sign, San Francisco. Not an Oompa-Loompa in sight.

Amnesty Widget Browser

Move your Dashboard widgets onto your desktop. Another nail in Konfabulator’s coffin.


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.