Clocky - a Tiny Title Bar Clock in Linux

I am a compulsive screen maximizer. Start menu bars are set to auto-vanish on my screen, and the app rules the day. If you think I ever see my desktop, I have to disappoint you. Plasma widgets are useless on my computer, and frankly I don’t understand how anyone ends up having enough screen real estate to see the background picture they chose, unless there is a sudden crash of an application.

Fillable PDF Forms For Free

You know when you get a form to fill out, but you need to print it and fill out by hand (or worse, try to fill it with your printer). Wouldn’t you rather be able to generate a PDF form out of it and then fill it out on your computer? Even better, have the form filled out automatically (as far as possible) with your usual data?

Well, I decided that’s something I wanted to do. In this particular case, I gave cash to two friends and wanted them to sign an IOU note. I found a PDF form online, but it required me to fill out their and my names twice and I balked at the duplication. (You can find the form by searching for “free iou form template”.)

YHIHF: Bach's Double Violin Concerto BWV 1043 is Really Vivaldi's

Every culture loves its heros. To Italians, the Poet is Dante – to Germans it’s Goethe, to English-speakers it’s Shakespeare. This is nearly universal. What is not universal is that some of the greats disappear or fade because the culture they belong to does.

It is infernal how many “minor” cultures have brought forth amazing artists and scientists that don’t register for all their worth simply because we are not used to their culture producing genius of universal proportions. We simply make fun of people that come from those cultures for always trying to show how everything was done there.

Le Grand Docu-Soap [Army of Lovers] (CD)

It was the Year of the Lord 1992, in the month of January, on the 22^nd day, and I was in Heaven. I had left the continent of Europe for the first time and landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in Honolulu. As the doors of the aircraft opened, instead of the smell of kerosene and city, tropical flower scents greeted me.

I stepped off the plane. When I hit the tarmac (how unromantic), a jolt of energy raced through me. “Welcome home,” it said, “this is where you belong.” I later learned that Hawaiians call that energy, mana.

Review: Stainless Steel Waterproof Watch Mobile Phone W818 Black with Silver

I’ve always wanted a watch phone. Why? Because it’s an incredibly practical concept.

My use case may be slightly different than most people’s, but in my case a watch phone would be perfect:

• I constantly forget my phone everywhere, but I won’t leave a watch phone behind
• If the phone is on the wrist, looking at the caller ID is the same as looking at your watch; no need to find the phone or get it out of the holster
• In almost all cases, I don’t need the bulk of a phone; I rarely dial a phone number, and even then I’d rather do so on the computer and have Google Voice route the call
• I don’t like using a smartphone for voice calls; actually, like a lot of people, I don’t like voice calls at all
• I am on the move a lot and it would be good to have some sort of paging mechanism to warn me of impending doom

A watch phone is the perfect solution for all those things, plus it can easily work as a bluetooth MP3 player. You get a bluetooth headset anyway (or did you think you’d have to talk to the phone like some crazy hobo spy?); might as well use it to listen to music, no?

Teahupoo. How Do You Say That? What Does It Mean?

In case you have never seen the awesome wave of Teahupoo, here is a video.

The amazing Laird Hamilton rides the famous giant wave of Tahiti. Immediately, people started calling it “the greatest/largest/highest/biggest wave ever ridden!” in a quest for view count spectacular.

Fact is, the wave at Teahupoo is amazing in many respects. Still, it’s not the biggest wave by far, not even the biggest surf-friendly wave, nor the biggest wave surfed. But it has certain qualities that endear it to the camera (more than to the surfer).

Withings WiFi Scale

If you have been following this blog for a while, you know that I track my weight. Ever since the days of the fat teenager, I wanted to keep it under control. I’ve had my ups and downs, but in the past 20 years, I have never moved more than 10 pounds from my standard weight of 174.

I wrote software to track my weight on a variety of platforms. It became the default thing for me to do with every new programming language and UI environment: create a widget that allows you to enter weight (and later bodyfat) data and display it in a meaningful way.

A proud moment

Without much further ado, here two YouTube videos that illustrates the progress you can make in just a few weeks of surfing. First a video shot at the end of February (uploaded on the 27th):

Then this latest video, from mid-April (uploaded on the 13th):

Notice the differences:

YHIHF: Microsoft is Going to Buy Nokia

Nokia is not doing well. The once juggernaut of the mobile space is still a ubiquitous household name in most of the world, but its name is increasingly associated with “low-tech,” cheap phones. In particular, Apple is eating its lunch in the lucrative smartphone space, where Nokia once ruled the roost.

After ruling out a refresh of its aging Symbian OS, Nokia was trying out various variants of Linux. We first had a tablet, the Nokia N770, refreshed a few times. Then we had a phone, the N900. Another phone, the N9 followed. And then, nothing.

Why this site changed name, and why you should be cautious about GoDaddy.com

You may have noticed the change: this site used to be hosted on the domain gawd.at. Now it is on mrgazz.com. Why?

Let’s start from the beginning: what was that with the gawd.at domain in the first place? Well, if you go and look at your old feature phone, you’ll see that the letters that form the name are all first letters on the keypad. G is 4, A is 2, W is 9, D is 3, T is 8. The domain name was meant to be typed quickly on an old-style phone. That’s it. No reference to gawd intended. Dawg.at was taken.