I just installed Chip Marshall’s excellent lj-crosspost tool. This neat little Movable Type plugin now allows me to crosspost my blog entries here at mememiner.com to my LiveJournal blog.
Why would I want to do this? Mostly, to tap into LiveJournal’s excellent user community, something my little blog’s comment section can’t compete with. Also, because it’s a really geeky and fun thing to do.
Because of the way it crossposts, and the way I’ve set it up in my MT templates, it wound up archiving all of my mememiner blogs onto my LiveJournal site, with the same dates and times that they originally appeared in mememiner. I also had to delete 4 old posts from the mememiner archives because the XML-RPC mechanism used to update the LJ site kept barfing on some of the posts, but c’est la vie.
There’s a few things that don’t work quite right; you can’t change a post’s status from “Publish” to “Draft” in Movable Type and expect the LiveJournal post to reflect this (I think this is because LJ has no corresponding “draft” functionality), and I don’t think deleting a post on Movable Type will also delete the post on LJ. I’m also not quite sure how to use mtkeyvalues with lj-crosspost to set the mood, music and picture LJ attributes such that those things show up in my LiveJournal post, but not my MT post (where they wouldn’t make much sense, frankly).
Still though, it works pretty damn well. Now to figure out how to build a photoblog with MT.
BTW, if you’ve subbed to the mememiner feed on LiveJournal, you might want to unsub so you don’t see duplicate posts.
In my never-ending quest to be as narcissistically geeky as possible, I've added a link to my latest OPML file, aka my personal RSS subscriptions, to the front page of mememiner. If you're interested in what I read every day, or just need a solid list of RSS feeds to start out with, grab that file and import it into your newsreader. I'll upload a new version of this file every time my subscription list changes.
For what it's worth, I use NetNewsWire on the Powerbook and FeedDemon on the Dell desktop.
So for the last year or so, I've been using a combination of the programs Win2VNC and OSXvnc to integrate keyboard and mouse control between my Powerbook and Dell desktop. I fire up OSXvnc, then fire up Win2VNC on the PC, scroll my mouse pointer to the left side of the PC screen, and it reappears on the right-hand side of the Powerbook screen. While it's over there, input from the keyboard is sent as well. Move it back east and it re-appears on the west side of the PC monitor. I can even cut and paste text from one machine to the other.
This is an unbelievably convenient way of working, and going back to typing on the Powerbook after years of using an ergonomic keyboard cuts my typing accuracy and speed by about 30% (BTW, what happened to these things? It seems manufacturers aren't really interested in them anymore -- i.e. I have yet to see an ergonomic bluetooth keyboard.).
One major problem I always had though was that there was no mouse wheel support on the remote machine (Powerbook) and certain key combos (such as Alt-Tab or Ctrl-Esc) would lock Win2VNC, necessitating a Ctrl-Alt-Del on the Dell, pulling up the task manager and manually killing the Win2VNC process. Given that the Alt-Tab combo is a very common keyboard combo for me, I find this extremely frustrating when it inevitably happens 2 or 3 times a day.
I couldn't find a new version on the Win2VNC homepage, but I did find a link to a hacking/support blog of sorts, wherein the topic of mouse wheel support came up. After reading through some posts, I came across a kick-ass modification of Win2VNC. I guess I could have just have dug a few entries deeper in the Google results and would have discovered this modification available via SourceForge, but honestly, I thought the original version was on SourceForge and it was a redundant link.
Feico de Boer's version of Win2VNC hacks in mouse wheel support and, by using the Scroll Lock key for the first time EVER (for this user, at least), allows one to not only use key combos on the host machine without locking it, but also send them to the remote machine!
Now I know that this doesn't sound like much -- but please understand that I use this VNC combo every day, for 10 hours/day, and these little enhancements make this way of working not just functional and convenient, but now, for the first time ever, SWEET.
If you've got two machines you want to control from one keyboard/mouse combo, I suggest giving this version of Win2VNC a whirl.
I read today on BoingBoing that the new beta of Google Groups features the ability to subscribe to Atom feeds of newsgroups. They also suggested a newsreader called Shrook (which has support for Atom feeds), but I think I'll stick with the beta of NetNewsWire, which has support for Atom, although I had to Google for this info, as the Atom beta isn't listed on the NNW beta page.
Of course, the really sad part is that while this is certainly one of the coolest things to happen to Usenet in a while, as a medium of discussion it is pretty much an irredeemable cesspool. I've subbed to the feeds of boulder.general, rec.music.ambient and alt.music.techno nonetheless.
Well, it was a noble goal, but one I'm unfortunately incapable of fulfilling. Planning our wedding and a sinus infection are the main culprits, and I knew you would understand.
"I think that if the people answering these pollster's questions were just to come out and tell the truth, it would be a disaster for the Democrat party".
OK, Rush. Been bustin' any 40-ought Oh-Cees lately, big guy?
Added one of those sitemeter traffic thingees, so I can be underwhelmed at the extremely low traffic that hits the site (for now).
It's on the right.
One of my favorite blogs without an RSS feed, Digby is all over the moral observations of recent events in the Iraq tragedy. Today he writes:
I'm once again struck by the moral surety of these religious Republicans who don't seem to be upset by the deviant behavior graphically shown in these pictures and who don't seem worried in the least about how they are going to explain it to their children. It seems like only yesterday that every other word from their mouths was "deplorable," "reprehensible," "despicable," "disgusting," and " "revolting," as they relayed their shock and horror at the stunning news of a 50 year old man having an affair with a young woman in his office. If I recall correctly, this was considered to be an act of such depravity that they didn't know how the nation could survive if the perpetrator wasn't removed from office.
Amazing stuff here, folks. This follows up an astute observation about what story the pictures are telling us here:
Bush and his band of faux moralists were in part chosen by the Republican establishment precisely because of their reputations for sexual rectitude. They knew they could get away with almost anything as long as they didn't expose themselves to accusations of sex -- of any kind. (The closest they came to slipping was Bush's Top Gun flight of fancy, but that faded soon enough.) The press and the public are attuned to the tiniest hint of sexual impropriety, both loving it and pretending to be shocked by it, and the GOP knows this because they virtually created the environment of sexual hypocricy our culture slavishly embraces.
I concur.
Music blogs I've been reading lately: blissblog (Simon Reynold's blog -- pretty decent, except for that one moment when he blogged a totally incorrect correlation between Winter Music Conference and the death of dance music (TM).), Fluxblog; gabba - POD (not actually a blog about gabber, interesting design); new(ish); Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again (with a blog named this, how can you go wrong?); Mystical Beast; The Tofu Hut and finally, Tyrone Shoelaces.
Happy reading.
(note: none of the above-mentioned blogs are necessarily electronic music-oriented; all are by bona-fide music lovers)
Let's see -- trip to Wondervu, trip to Boulder, trip to Nederland -- all in all, about 3.5 hours spent in the car today, and I didn't even make the trek down to Englewood.
Our vehicles, once nice, are breaking down. The Explorer needs an alignment pretty badly. It's also got this problem with the brakes -- they squeak and the emergency brake seems to not be so effective, again.
The Subaru makes a really bad rattling noise that I'm told I can do nothing about. It also only gets about 20 MPG now, probably due to the 145,000 miles on it.
Both of them are really dirty, with multiple stains and interior blemishes that are driving me crazy.
Have I mentioned we spent $273 on gas for both our vehicles for the month of March? That's $68.25 a week. Insurance was $214. I'm starting to think this driving thing is a crock.
I've got a new goal -- try and post something to this blog at least once per day for the next 6 months, nonwithstanding days that I don't have access to the net.
Let's recap the weekend:
Nate and Lena helped me throw a suprise birthday party for Missy on Friday that was a COMPLETE suprise. Of course, I had to make several wrong turns on the way, as when we were about 5 minutes away from Nate and Lena's house, I figured out that the car in front of us had 4 of the friends we had invited to be part of the suprise inside it. This definitely was pissing off Missy, but all that melted away when she walked into the kitchen, and 18 or so of our friends yelled "SUPRISE!" to a very unexpecting Melissa. Lena made an excellent cake, much good food was eaten and I helped myself to several Negro Modelos and Bohemias (I had had exactly three beers in the previous two weeks).
It was a fine party, we all went out to the Dark Horse afterwards where I spun Missy an old-skool jungle set, and I bought myself a ticket out of the birthday doghouse I had been living in the last few years.
Saturday found me signing a 6-month contract extension with c74 (hurray! they like me, they REALLY like me!), and then getting the gear together for a set at Happy Times ranch, which really was a classic party. Ovni, and Nate and Dave threw down on the jamz. I spun a decent Basic Channel, etc. set which seemed to go over well. Again, excellent party that achieved classic status instantly.
Sunday was spent sleeping and trying to do a little bit of work. I spent a suprisingly small amount of time obsessing over political news.
I also found out my father will be getting disability, finally. He's been unable to work for the last few years because of a nervous system disorder that manifests itself as a severe palsy (he can barely hold a glass of water, much less a hammer). He's been really scraping by and I'm very happy and relieved that this has happened.