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I just found out I could get a full wireless signal with my macbook on my deck. Bring on more sun!

trying it out, gettin all fancy with the rounded corners, oh yeah.

the picture in the header was taken by one of us while we were up at the ass crack of dawn watching the sun rise over the rio negro river in the amazon. awesome to see, maybe even once in a lifetime, but it was still the ass crack of dawn.

I’ve been listening to online radio for as long as I can remember. Commercial/corporate radio has only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older, and I get tired of listening to the same shit, over and over and over again. This is why internet radio is so awesome - there are thousands of stations, all over the world, willing to play anything and everything your heart desires. There’s music for falling asleep to, there’s anime music, country, oldies, 80’s, top 40, latin, pop, you name it. I love internet music because it allows me to hear the exact kind of music I am craving, right now. And, it also gives me better access to album and band information, and some stations give you recommendations for “if you like this try —”.

The key thing to remember about internet radio is that the majority of it is put out by individuals and small organizations that just love music and want to share theirs with you. These aren’t multi-million dollar operations selling ads to Pepsi and playing 15 minutes of music per hour. The larger internet radio stations are non-profit outfits, that mostly (or only) survive on the donations of their listeners.

Recent changes have been made to the way internet radio stations pay to license their songs from the copyright holders. From SaveNetRadio.org:

The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). If the increased rates remain unchanged, the majority of webcasters will go bankrupt and silent on this date.

This is pure corporate greed at its finest. Please help stop the RIAA from further bullying people into conforming to its arcane and ridiculous ideals. Donate to SaveNetRadio.org or call your congressman.

So I’ve been putting off upgrading to the new FF because I didn’t want all my extensions and themes to break. Tonight I figured I had waited long enough for everyone to get their add-ons fixed, and went ahead and downloaded the newest version. Well…. an hour later I finally got it working

I searched google forever to find someone with a fix for my bug. Turns out the bug was a combination of Firefox’s handling of tooltips, plus the theme settings I have on my desktop (running WinXP).

Problem:

• Whenever I hovered over any place where there would be a tooltip, the tip would pop up with blank or empty text. The tool tip was completely empty, but it was shaped like there was supposed to be text there. When your tooltips don’t work, you suddenly realize you use them for everything. Most notably, many extensions use tooltips to communicate with you. For example, Gmail Manager gives you the low down on your mail through tool tips.

Solutions:

1. I never even noticed, but at some point, I must have set my Windows settings to have dark blue tooltips with white text. On FF 1.5, it was never a problem, and the tooltips were displayed from my system settings. However, after upgrading to FF2.0, the tooltip background was now white not the default yellow-ish color. Now my white tooltip text was being displayed over a white tooltip background, not so helpful when trying to read it.

   To change the system setting in WinXP:

   
Display Properties > Appearance Tab > Advanced Button > Select 'Tooltips' from the drop down

 

2. Soooo…. Somehow Firefox is using their own default background color (white) but my system setting (white) for the text. To force FF to use my background system setting, I had to modify the userChrome.css file. You need to add this to your custom css:

   tooltip {
     -moz-appearance: none !important;
   }
   

This CSS hack was found on cheeaunblog. Oddly enough, this blog entry says it was written in 2004. I’m not sure if this is a new tooltip bug related to Firefox2.0 or what. In any case, I’m happy I have my tooltips now

Creative Product Page

I got it at Fry’s Electronics in Renton a couple weeks ago. So far, it makes me really happy to have a nice sound card. The bulit in soundcard on my motherboard was sounding pretty crappy, and I decided it would be worth my money to upgrade. $99 (pre-tax) PLUS it included 5 games:

• Farcry
• Thief Deadly Shadows
• Call of Duty
• Halo
• Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow

I don’t know why a soundcard came with five computer games, but whatever. I haven’t even opened any of them yet.

I noticed that last night that the Seattle Public Library offers free access to Safari Tech Books Online, which has a searchable database of tech books, including the O’Reilly ones.

All you need is a free library card.

http://www.spl.org/default.asp?pageID=collection_digibooks

Scroll down to login with your library card and PIN and then it redirects you to the book site.

I already knew the Seattle Public Library was awesome, but this just makes it even better.