Brontesaurus Blog
A foo walks into a bar
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When I found Magic Prefs which is a Magic Mouse
I have had my Magic Mouse for a couple weeks now and my biggest pet peeve with is was the physical click. It’s not like other mice where its easy to press down on left and right click, the Magic Mouse is very noticeably harder and you really tend to notice it after couple hours of use. With each click I seem to be more and more conscious of my physical ability to left and right click. Lucky for me with Magic Prefs you can configure tap left and right tap clicks just like the multi-touch pad on the Macbook Pro. It’s a very little and simple feature, but has made me a much happier Magic Mouse user.
I highly suggest checking out Magic Prefs if you own a Magic Mouse.
S3 is Amazon web service’s cloud storage solution offering very cheap price-per-gb storage and bandwidth which makes this a very cost effective backup solution. Currently I use JungleDisk for mounting S3 buckets as drives and to schedule backups, and s3sync to backup my files in various unix enviroments but I dont have anything in between to where I can easily manage my S3 files. That is where Cloudberry Explorer for Amazon S3 comes in. I have been using this for the past couple of hours or so and to say the least I am impressed.
Here is what I’ve noticed while using Cloudberry. 
- First off, this software is completely free. That is a huge plus because what I was using before, CrossFTP, you had to pay 25$ for the pro version to get S3 support and I had a whole slew of gripes about it.
- The UI is very clean and responsive.
- Tabbed! Everything is better with tabs, especially if you are dealing with multiple uploads and/or multiple S3 accounts
- Very easy to upload and manage files with the intent of serving them on the web
- Cloudfront integration
- The ability to bill the requestor for a file for the S3 usage. I messed around with this for a bit and I think its just a flag that is set on the file? Not sure how to implement it.
- Plugins to Microsoft Powershell
Though through using this there are a couple things that could be added that would be nice.
- In the “MyComputer” pane, shortcuts to Desktop, My Documents, etc would be nice.
- Also labels for each of the drives I have. I have so many drive labels I often forget which one is a HDD, network drive, or DVD drive.
- Refresh the S3 pane after I copy a file to a bucket so I can see that file there after it is finished copying.
Overall, this is a pretty solid S3 client and I plan to keep on using it.
I listen to internet radio stations a lot, Digitally Imported to be specific. Its a very convienient way to have a limitless amounts of all kinds of music, but there a few problems with this. I always find myself really like a song, or mix of songs, or a remix of song, but I have no way of saving this, nor do I have a way of taking it in the car or on a plane. Luckily with the greatest media player out there you can overcome this obstacle.
1. Open the network stream and enter the url and port and make sure “Stream Output” is checked.
2. Click on “Settings” and the Stream Output settings box will pop up. The main thing to pay attention to is to make sure that the “File” checkbox is checked and you have selected where you want to save the stream to. If you want to listen to the music while you are ripping it you can check “Play Locally” too. Select “Raw” for encapsulation (this is just an audio stream so there is no need for stream encapsulation) and mp3 for the audio codec, or whatever codec you want (I know a lot of people prefer flac). As for the bitrate, its good to try to match the bitrate of the stream, but if you aren’t sure, its better to set a higher bitrate because then the stream will just be filled with null packets and you will retain good sound quality as opposed to setting a too low bitrate and you will get a bad quality rip.
3. click ok and let ‘r rip.
There is also a command line way to do this but I’m not sure if it works or not, but this is what I came up with.
vlc http://209.247.146.98:8000 --sout '#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=96,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=raw,url="test.mp3"}}'
Wordpress 2.7 dubbed “Coltrane” was released today with some major changes incorporated. This is a major version change requiring a database upgrade upon installation of the new version as well as core files needing updating. The 2.7 verison of the very popular open source blogging platform has brought many uses a whole bucket of new features, most of them regarding the administration interface.
The adminstartion interface has 100% been completely re-done top to bottom. Some of the most noteable changes being the dashboard a lot more configurable and navigation through the different admin pages is a lot faster now. Now there is a column on the left with all the differnet administrator pages with all categories being drop downs where the full set of pages can easily be accessed with one click. Where as before you had to navigate away from your current page to see sub pages.
Probably one of the coolest features in 2.7 is plugin installation straight from the web. No more downloading, unzipping, uploading, andsometimes even configuring plugins. The wordpress team added all that straight to the plugin administration page. Simply click on the “Plugins” drop down and click on “Add New” and it will bring you to a new page where you can either search for a plugin through various methods (such as popular tags, featured plugins, popular, newest, recently updated) or you can directly upload a zipped plugin and install it right there.
There is so much new stuff with this update its really hard to put together a comprehensive list so I provided the two links below for further reading.
Except its on a closed source framework… Microsoft recently came out with their own open-source blogging platform called Oxite. Oxite is written on the ASP 2.0 framework and it’s microsofts version of WYSIWYG blogging software. After reading through their promo/information and project sites, the whole emphasis on free and open source is a total joke. If you wanted something to be open and free, then do it on an open and free platform and framework. In Oxite’s current state, it can only be run on window, how convienent is that? To release something to the community that only supports your product. Pulling stupid stunts like this just seems like a lame way for Microsoft to seem “cool” and “hip” and in with current technology trends at an easy attempt to gain markent share. MS doesn’t give two flying fucks about the web or bloggers, or anybody, they just want you to use their product. The more you saturate the interwebs with your shit, the more likely it will be used. Too bad windows isn’t free or else this actually might have some merit. Almost every host on the planet is a linux host, and if they do ofter windows hosting it is always more expensive.
Unless you are a super huge windows fanboy or have some suber uber free windows hosting of doom that you can’t get anywhere else, why go with this blogging solution where are are so many other blogging alternatives? Wordpress, Moveable Type, B2Evolution etc..
Back in the day I never updated my wordpress installation, but now they have this nice little annoying message on the admin panel telling you there is a new version available so I said what the hell, might as well check it out.
Turns out there are some security fixes all regarding an XSS exploit and a couple of other small changes regarding the exploit.
[Source] [Full Changelist] [Download]
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