frankschmitt.org:

In some industries, it’s best to be less than completely forthright about what your product does:

My guess is some poor sap with a Chinese-English dictionary printed up a few tens of thousands of these, only to have mainstream pet retailers reject them. The ended up at a dollar store in Calgary.

The new emacs included with OpenSuSE 10.3 includes a “feature” that displays this irritating little splash screen when you’re trying to edit a file. It’s almost irritating enough to switch to vi.Fortunately, there’s an easy way to disable it. Create or edit the file called .emacs in your home directory:

$ vi ~/.emacs

and add the following line:

(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)

and voila, it’s gone for good.

Dear anonymous webmaster: If you have a download link that ends in, say, .bz2, it should not lead to an HTML page, even if the purpose of said HTML page is to beg me for a donation. No, if the URL ends in .bz2, accessing it should provide me with a bz2 file.

Better yet, don’t ask me for a donation just yet. At this point in our relationship, I haven’t even decided if I like what you’ve done. I’m not going to make a donation on the basis of a screencast. And while we’re on the topic of screencasts, can you please get someone that can a) type and b) speak to do the screencast next time?

Furthermore, not everyone browses the web from the goddamned server on which they might want to install your product. Especially when your product primarily runs on UNIX servers that very often don’t  have a GUI installed.

So no, I’m not going to donate to your sodding open source project. Not after you wasted ten minutes of my valuable time wgetting half a dozen files before I finally get one whose file type matches its extension.

Oh, wait, never mind, it still doesn’t match. The bz2 file I eventually downloaded is called “donation=complete”. Complete, my ass!

What’s the fascination with taking either a recycled police car, or worse still a garden-variety Crown Vic or Caprice, and making it look as much as possible like an actual cop car?

I can think of three reasons why you might want to do this:

• You’re a Walter Mitty type who wishes (s)he were a cop.
• “This was the largest auto I could afford.”
• Deterring criminals when it’s parked in front of your home or business.

I can’t say any of these are particularly bad reasons, but driving an ersatz cop car also a couple of major downsides:

• When you get pulled over by an actual cop, (s)he’ll probably find it obnoxious and be more likely to give you a ticket.
• Any time you come up behind someone, they’ll immediately slow to 5 miles an hour under the speed limit, ensuring that it’ll take longer to get where you’re going. 

So what’s the deal, dear readers?

Sometime back in 1997 — while I was extricating myself from my Porsche 914 after grabbing my car stereo face plate, Palm Pilot Professional, and big, honking Nextel phone — I distinctly remember thinking that it sure would be nice if all three of them could fit into one small device, preferably one that didn’t double as digital birth control.

Not quite ten years later, as I lay in bed sick from some godawful cold, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and I literally pissed my pants with excitement¹. Here was a device that was scarcely bigger than a deck of cards, sexy as an Abercrombie model, that could play music, make phone calls, and keep my contacts and appointments organized, while syncing seamlessly with my other Apple products.

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As time drained away, he gawped at the screen like a medieval serf trying to comprehend helicopter controls, confounded by one simple question after another - questions such as where he was going, and how many of him there were. I ground my teeth to chalkdust as his hand hovered over the touch screen, afraid to choose, like a man deciding whether to stroke a sleeping wolf.

Finally the prick was done, and once I had waited for him to collect his tickets and his bloody receipt, it was my turn. Having no change, I opted to pay by card. But just as my hand moved toward the keypad to enter my pin, a voice in my head whispered: “You don’t know what it is.” And it was right.

Link

Safari has this handy feature where you can select a word and right click to bring up a contextual menu, one of whose options is “Search in Google.” Trouble is, you lose whatever page you were browsing to the new Google search.

Well, the engineers at Apple thought of that, and if you have tabbed browsing enabled, just hold down the Command key when selecting this item, and your Google search will happen in a new tab behind the current tab.

This is how I spend so much of my life it’s not even funny. 

In the style of Merlin Mann’s 5ives, I present you with: Five excellent names for musical acts that (I) don’t (think) exist:

1. Canadarm
2. Charismatic Megafauna
3. sudo
4. Awkward Turtle
5. The Housecats