East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Amazon just let me know they’re getting an early start with their Black Friday sales. Thought I’d let you know.

A pretty cute holiday specific theme for the Koi Pond iPhone app! I didn’t see it coming because I don’t typically check back the iTMS pages for the apps I have on the phone and then a week ago I batch-installed two dozen updates for various apps without checking what was included in them, so when I ran the app over the weekend I got a very nice surprise.

Some thoughts on the new iTunes Genius feature:

• If there are tracks that the Genius feature is never going to select, I’d like to know.
• I’ve got tracks that I’d like to avoid in certain company but there is no way to limit the tracks it selects from.
• Similarly it would be nice to not select tracks I played within the last hour/day/week/month or so.
• I’ve worked around that by creating a smart list that uses the Genius playlist and limits it, but that’s far from optimal.
• Does it select from (music) podcasts?
• I wouldn’t mind creating lists of more than 100, since 100 tracks is typically under 8 hours (100 tracks of 4 minutes on average gives you 6.7 hours) and being able to refresh the list in the morning and not worry about it for the rest of the day would be quite nice.
• I don’t see any way to control it through AppleScript.
• When you delete a track from the list you created it doesn’t automatically fill it back up to 100.
• I can live with it if some of these things can be done through hidden preferences.

That was so completely worth it. After nearly two years of putting up with an overly warm/hot laptop even after using the Fan Control software that lets the fans kick in faster/earlier than Apple would do by default, I gave in and bought what Belkin calls a CushTop.

During the cooler months when I wear jeans it’s less of a problem but during the warmer summer months when it makes sense to wander around the house in shorts made of thinner fabric, skin would often feel like it was sunburned. No longer!

And now we’re back. Unpacked. And resting. More later, or at least that’s my intention.

The last time I visited the Netherlands was when I went back to clean out my apartment, cancelled the rent, and stuffed all the important things like clothes, CDs, books and computers into a few suitcases to take with me to the US. So that would’ve been, oh, Fall of 2002.

Ouch.

In the years since then my parents have visited us here twice but because I kept postponing a visit back home because I really wanted to do that with all 4 of us. That wasn’t as easy as it could be, with no time of the year really being very convenient to go except the summer, and several summers in a row other events took the time needed either because they were more important or were planned before there was a chance to do otherwise.

This year my parents celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and for the past 12 months we’ve basically been telling everybody, friends and family, not to try and plan anything for us or the boys until we bloody well had our tickets and we would know when we would leave and return.

That seems to have worked, although now the summer vacation feels extra double packed with activities for the boys and we’ll have to fight to make sure they get some down-time in it as well.

So tomorrow we drive to a hotel near the airport, Saturday we fly, with only one layover (I thought the extra money was worth it) to Amsterdam where we’ll arrive on Sunday morning. Three and a half weeks later we do the same in reverse order, so to speak.

I’ve made myself a promise not to wait another (almost) 6 years until the next return visit, even if that means that (for financial or practical reasons) I’ll be making that visit by myself or only with M.

Wish us luck, we’re going to need it.

• Google announces Project Virgle. Be sure to walk through the entire thing, answer the 15 questions, etc.
• LiveJournal announces a new team member.
• TUAW passes on that iPhone Dev Team canceled pwnage and instead sold their IP to an unnamed third party.
• TechCrunch tells us they are suing Facebook for $25 million in damages because of a context-ad.
• Google Australia launched gDay, allowing you to search tomorrow’s web, today.
• GMail added a new feature called Custom Time.
• Google Calendar introduces theWake Up Kit
• The Register reports that Jimmy Wales resigned from Wikipedia.
• They also report that wireless technologies are significantly more hazardous than previously reported.
• Due to changes in Swedish copyright laws The Pirate Bay was forced to move to Egypt.
• A patent has been granted regarding shielding customer support from customers?
• Another rename for thedailywtf.com?
• Times Online reveals a new Facebook tool.

Adding more as I run into them. Certainly The Register has enough today, more than I’m going to link.
Updated: Added entries for GMail, Google Calendar, The Register, The Pirate Bay, The Daily WTF/WTH and Times Online.

I couldn’t resist. The more people see this, the better.

When upgrading the kernel to a newer or different version, be sure to also get the appropriate version of the ivtv kernel modules, otherwise MythTV will cheerfully start up and pretend nothing is wrong, but meanwhile it’ll be running with 0 capture cards and no recordings will be scheduled!

I’m glad ABC will repeat tonight’s Lost episode, otherwise I would’ve missed that and would have had to resort to bittorrents or something, and that’s just a PITA.