End of American manned presence in space…
The last shuttle mission has flown and, with nothing to replace it, the U.S. manned presence in space has ended with it. The shuttle astronauts in the picture below are the last ones we will ever see.
Hooking Facebook into my Blog
I’ve been using Facebook (or “Bookface”, as my nephew Shane calls it) fairly regularly lately. Today I decided to see what could be done to integrate my blog and Facebook a bit. I read the “how to” guide by Thiemo Fetzer, and now I have Yet Another WordPress Widget in the left nav of my site.
Nothing has changed for “normal” users of my site. For folks who regularly use Facebook, however, you now have an option. You can click on the “Login using Facebook” option, and your authentication will be handled via Facebook (i.e.: you log in using your Facebook credentials). KellysWorldBlog will be added to your application list once you’ve logged in once. Assuming I understand the application correctly, you won’t automatically receive anything from my site simply by using your Facebook login. I (or any visitor) can, however, click the “facebook share” icon to share individual blog posts on my wall.
What benefits does this give? Well, I guess you don’t need to remember your ID on my blog any more, and your Facebook icon will now appear next to the comments you post. But the main thing this does is allow for easy sharing of my blog posts with your friends.
My friend Bilbo
Last weekend we made the decision to have our cat Bilbo euthanized. I’m still dealing with it, and probably will be for several weeks if not months. He was, after all, my friend for the last eighteen years.
Mad skillz…
I watched this video today, and am once again amazed at what "ordinary" humans can do if they put their minds to it: I particularly liked the "open the Pringles…
Network attached storage- ReadyNAS NV+ and NVX
Years ago, shortly before the turn of the century, I had a pretty good backup solution. I had a 20 Gigabyte tape drive that I used to back up all of my storage.
That was a decade ago. Somewhere along the line, the combined increases in total storage I had to back up plus the slowness/cost/general hassle of maintaining tapes mean that my backup strategy broke down. I tried various things in the interim, including network attached storage in 2006, and the Time Capsule for backing up my Macintoshes. The Time Capsule works great, but even with a terabyte of disk storage I am rapidly running out of room- and it does nothing to back up my Windows or Linux machines.
I needed something expandable, multi-platform, fast, and inexpensive. Well, three out of four isn’t bad, I guess…
Problems with my blog… blank gallery (photo) pages
I was doing some work on my server today and noticed some errors in my logs of the following form: Feb 23 16:04:45 kgadams httpd: PHP Fatal error: Call to…
Robots may be fast, but humans still amaze me
I was watching a demonstration video of a robotic vibraphone today on Gizmodo. It plays "Flight of the Bumblebee", which is already a pretty fast piece, but does it a…
I will be buying an iPad… but why?
Apple ended months (for some people years) of speculation today by finally announcing the upcoming release of a tablet computer, the iPad. Like pretty much everything Apple releases, there is an overwhelming amount of hype surrounding the device, and many “true believers” are disappointed by what the device offers.
Even so, I plan on buying one when it becomes available. I thought it would be appropriate to explain my rational on the theory that my friends and family may doubt my sanity more than usual as a result.
Exercise: some motivation required… lots of motivation, actually
I own the following T-shirt from Shirt.Woot!:
It accurately describes one major aspect of why I don’t regularly exercise. Lack of motivation… and there is an unfortunate dearth of gigantic prehistoric predators around to provide such motivation.
My “new” old clock- circa 1850’s Chauncey Jerome 8 day ogee
My most recent clock family member arrived on Thursday. It is one that I plan on keeping: a mid-19th century (sometime before 1853) “ogee” style clock made by the Chauncey Jerome factory in New Haven, Connecticut:
