Lots to love about Chrome, but there's always a BUT.... Today it's the hoops we have to jump through to copy a legacy Chrome extension from one computer to another. And by "legacy" I mean "used to be in the Chrome store but has since been removed". And by that, I specifically refer to v1.2 of a "Facebook Share" extension, from a developer called "one click". "But, my dear old bean", you say, "Facebook Share button extensions for Chrome are a dime a dozen. Why trouble yourself over this one particular zombi... (...more)

Dreamed long dreams where I was lodging (not sure if I was renting or hotelling or what exactly) with Dad and Pam and cousins all occupying other units, until the landlord woke me knocking at minutes to 10AM. Paid TWO whole weeks rent so there's no awkwardness when I'm away at D.-'s next month. (edit: the landlord called looking for rent daily until he physically showed up and I reminded him I'd paid ahead already... twit) Ironed out a number of issues with the new-to-me Lenovo lappy, and tweaked the Wi... (...more)

I've been using apachefriends.org's XAMPP on Windows for dev servers for years now. A default install isn't secured for a production environment, but securing it is fairly easy, and it spares me the headaches of piecing together Apache, MySQL and PHP. On my previous lappy, I ran with XAMPP 1.7.3 (~2009-12-23, Apache 2.2.14, OpenSSL 0.9.8l, MySQL 5.1.41, PHP 5.3.1, phpMyAdmin 3.2.4). In the interim, phpMyAdmin in particular suffered some abysmal cosmetic fluffery, so outside my dev environment I several ... (...more)

1. "unable to connect network drive" task tray balloon tips. With WinXP, if you had a network drive persistently mapped in your office network environment, Windows didn't deem it necessary to pop up a warning message that it was unable to connect the network drive every time you started the computer outside the office. 2. 64-bit Internet Explorer explicitly refuses to be the default browser. What's the effing point of making a 64-bit port of your integral browser, and then saying "oh but anything that i... (...more)

Google "stop cats bringing animals" and you'll find a lot of near-miss articles. We KNOW basically "why" cats bring their catches home. People have a handful of overly anthropocentric theories, e.g. the cat thinks you're unable to provide for yourself, or the cat is showing "appreciation", "respect" or "affection". Nonsense. Felis domesticus simply is an instinctively social species, and fetching live prey back to the pride home territory is a prime example of the survival advantage of social animal behavi... (...more)