Greenflame

Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand

  • The Firefox Explosion

    firefoxArticle from latest Wired on the development of the Firefox web browser: The Firefox Explosion

    I use Firefox under OSX and WinXP. On the Mac it chugs a bit on the G3 from time-to-time but it doesn’t have any of the problems with the upstream cache that Safari has (how they [Apple] could release a browser that doesn’t have a “Refresh-or-else” capability is just nuts). On the P4 Wintel box it just works and I don’t have to worry about IE unless I need to go to a specific bit of Microsoft’s site.

    I like Firefox (& Safari’s) tabbed browsing – I have various blog tab sets to load my favourite blogs at the start of a day. The RSS feed option is useful, as is the ability to add extensions. I’ve made a several search plug-ins that link into various web sites to help along the way.

    But the thing that might drive me from using Firefox on the Mac is that it’s overly sensitive to the context-menu (Ctrl-click or right-click or click and hold). It’s always popping up context menus, leaving them open and I have to manually exit them. It’s like it needs a parameter to set somewhere to desensitise it but I don’t know where that is. Just a little thing that makes the browsing experience painful from time-to-time.

    Hoping that the 1.1 release gets it fixed.

  • Printer-friendly blog entries

    One of the things that annoys me about blogging systems is that they tend to be printer unfriendly. By the time a header/title and side bars have been added typical of most templates the content becomes squashed into a narrow column. Good for reading online – bad for printing out. So you end up with a first page with sidebars etc. and then many other pages with a narrow strip of text down the middle. I’ve been printing blog pages out recently while referring to things like the Virtual Theology Colloquium and its really been getting my goat.

    (The font color also affects things – a medium grey on a white background is easy on the eyes on screen but doesn’t print that well – especially if you’re compressing two pages per A4 like I do to save paper.)

    So I thought, on the off-chance that people print stuff off my blog, I’d fix it here first before working out how to fix it when printing other blogs. So there are now “printer-friendly” links at the bottom of each post that generates a nice, plain page in black and white for printing.

    There is an outstanding tutorial by Elise Bauer – Printer-Friendly Pages – at her essential Learning Movable Type that showed me how to get started. Together with the Movable Type manual it’s the one site that everyone who’s using MT should look at.

  • New children’s TV stuff

    Saw that last week TVNZ’s channel One started afternoon children’s television with a whole lot of new programmes (at least to us). They look way better than the animated commercials that seemed to populate the other channels for the past few years with drama and documentary-type programmes aimed at children. (What a radical idea – seems to be what I grew up with). Is this the effect of the mysterious Charter that TVNZ is meant to run under?

    You can find the line up here: ZONE (after school) | TV ONE

    As an aside, I’ve noticed that kids don’t cope so well with movies or TV dramas with real actors in stressful situations. But if the same situation occurs, say in an animated movie, then they aren’t affected so much by it. Is the generation brought up on animated fare somehow now unable to cope with the idea, the impact, of real people in dangerous or stressful situations? Have they lost the ability to deal with it, connect it to fiction and real life, and learn to engage with it? How does that affect the way they interact with other people – especially via mediated communication technologies?

  • Make peace with your biology

    From the technology section of Adbusters The Big Ideas 2005 comes the article Adbusters : Make peace with your biology. Lots of interesting quotes like,

    What do you lose when your life becomes more valuable than any other life in history? When your death is something you can’t accept? When pain makes you cower in fear? You lose what every human before you aspired to: the selfless desire to sacrifice for a future generation.

    Which is a good point. How much of what we do, the placing of a protective layer of technology between ourselves and the world, is motivated out of fear of suffering, fear of death, fear of discomfort that paralyses us from taking up our cross each day?

    Thanks to Jonny Baker for the link to the Adbusters issue.

  • Bibliotherapy

    Interesting article in this week’s Listener (Chicken Soup of the Wallet by Noel O’Hare) which comments on doctors in the UK sending people to libraries to read “self-help” books rather than prescribe anti-depressants. The main thrust of the argument seems to be that patients get to be proactively about their situation as well as also reducing costs on the health system.

    I like the comment at the end of the article that argues that if you’re reading ‘self-help’ books you should also be reading a range of fiction to enter into the (simulated) experiences of others and to learn from them. It ends with a quote from Chomsky.

    “It is quite possible,” Noam Chomsky has said, “that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.”

  • Creation, Crisis and Conservation Conference

    CCC Picked up a flyer yesterday for Creation, Crisis and Conservation : A Christian response to a suffering planet, a conference here in Auckland in two weeks time (18-20 Feb). I probably won’t be able to go to it but here’s the link if you want to find out more.

    www.creationcare.org.nz

    The web site isn’t great (they are piggybacking off VisionNet) and the conference brochure is in Word format rather than PDF (which meant I had to do some font munging to get it to display right as I didn’t have the fonts installed on my computer) but all the information is there if you hunt around.

  • Video/DVD Cataloging

    Back in Greenflame: Book catalogue started I said that Booxter couldn’t handle DVD and VHS information/lookups. In fact today I found that there is a switch that allows you, as in Books, to use an Amazon ASIN as an ISBN and so you can look up DVDs and VHS tapes and pull down the catalogue information along with the cover of the tape.

    Excellent. With the borrowed bar code scanner we should be up to date in no time.

  • Ecto and offline blogging

    Finally bit the bullet and bought Ecto so I could write posts off line and edit them more easily than in a web browser. I found that Safari wouldn’t refresh edits properly due to the upstream cache and Firefox (under Mac OS X 10.2) didn’t render the edit boxes properly. I would have preferred to go with MarsEdit but when I went there I couldn’t find a version that ran under 10.2. Ecto is available for both 10.2 and 10.3 which means that I can use it while I wait to upgrade (I’m holding off because I think it will break EndNote which is more critical to thesis writing than 10.3).

    Also bought the Windows version which I’m writing this with (I’m a sucker for a half-price sale) which is now installed on the Acer. Then if Kim or the kids need to blog then we’re ready to go.

    So far so good. Just need to configure it so it hums along nicely.

    I used to have a copy of Kung-Log (ecto’s predecessor) which was free but deleted it before I switched to Movable Type. Now I can’t seem to find a copy anywhere on the net. Not as nice as Ecto but useful if you’re running 10.1.

  • ISP-In-A-Box

    Nerd Vittles has some really helpful articles on cheap web & mail hosting using a Mac Mini (as well as some other stuff). While it’s slanted toward the Mini that same thing could be done with any OSX box.

    Whether or not you could get cheap net access here to make it worthwhile is another question though.

    See: ISP-In-A-Box

  • Hokey Cokey

    Just had to find out whether it is “Hokey Cokey/Tokey/Pokey”. Here are a couple of variant orgins:

    The Christchurch Ballroom Dancing Club : Cokey Cokey.

    Telegraph : Doing hokey cokey ‘mimics Latin Mass’