My yard is larger than an average suburban yard. I tried a gas powered weed wacker (line trimmer), but it was overkill. I just got the Black & Decker GH1000, and it works quite well, considering it’s one of the most miserable kinds of tools to use. I followed consumer reports’s suggestion, and though CS doesn’t test enough products, this time it worked out for me.

I may have spoken too soon. My neighbor gave me his old GrassHogXP “for spare parts” because he said the electric motor died. He mentioned that this wasn’t his first to die. Two months later, mine died too. According to Amazon, it has a 2-year warranty. I’ll post after I find out how that goes.

I really liked Dvorak’s idea to let everyone know about little known software. I’m recommending Filezilla. It does FTP, but it also does file transfer over SSH which means your file transfers cannot be snooped.

(note: This is the 2nd time Netflix has listened to its customers to reverse a decision, and the FAQ has not yet been updated)

At 16:13 CDT I was pleased to receive this in my email:

We Are Keeping Netflix Profiles

Dear Zakhar,

You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.

We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.

-Your friends at Netflix

Here’s a link to the post on the Neflix blog about keeping profiles (via digg).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistentialism

Resistentialism is a jocular theory in which inanimate objects display hostile desires towards human beings.

Thank goodness I know the word for this now!

• Tiny Laptops For Fresno Grade School Kids — I think that we do need OLPC for US kids
• The White Continent — Beautiful
• The Mainstreaming of Atheism — Sunday School for Atheists — good luck being respected for your beliefs in the US if you’re atheist … Philip Pullman’s trilogy is being banned from public school book fairs as we speak
• Small change in IMAP Protocol could help reduce SPAM — this is one step closer to the setup I’d like to see. IMAP should just be notified that there’s a message in the outbox of someone and it’s for you. Then you’d be able to ignore it or download it to your inbox. If it sat in the sender’s box long enough, then that outbox would fill , and if it was spam, then the account would become useless. It would shift the download burden to the sender. You could set your IMAP client to auto-download from any entities you’d already oked.

I don’t know if the MOZ_NO_REMOTE workaround is still necessary for Firefox 2.0, but I do know I’m at the point where I want to run multiple Firefox profiles at the same time. I kept searching for firefox instances concurrently, but apparently I’m going to run multiple profiles concurrently, not instances. Oh, well.

I used to use IE, Opera, Safari, and more in order to separate out multiple logins to the same site for the different online identities I use (personal, work, anonymous, etc). I can’t live without Adblock Plus, though, so I need to run multiple profiles of Firefox now.

It turns out that there’s a -no-remote option that seems saner than MOZ_NO_REMOTE (also at How-To Geek and Lifehacker).

I thought this was going to be a PMO post, but it turns out that since I now can safely test Firefox 3 Betas, it’s a DNPMO.

There are a few quirks, but overall it seems to be working how I want.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s voluntary collective licensing plan is the only real way to get out of the “piracy” problems on the web today. The only problem is that the labels would receive far less of a cut than today, though this may still be the same or a greater amount dollars.

I’d also like to see this applied to software.

Here’s how it ought to be:

Each district in the United States hires1 or 2 programmers (predictable yearly IT budget). They all use a bugzilla website to communicate on software projects. The software projects are voted on by employees of the districts. The software is free for anyone to use (not just schools).

Here are programs that I already know that schools need:

• Linux OS
• Open Office
• Smart Board Software
• Blogging tools for teachers (or CMS with teacher-controlled pages)
• intranet bulletin board for students (phpbb would probably do, as long as the accounts could be tied to district network accounts for students)
• computer lab monitoring software (watch and record about 30 screens at once, from one teacher workstation)
• Scheduling checkout of shared resources or labs
• enterprise account management for IT, with email, drive space, etc. for teachers, admins, students, etc. with granular control over permissions for each kind of user
• grade book
• attendance
• media players
• multiple monitor support (for monitor + projector use)
• web browser (firefox, with adblock plus … because really, teachers and students have no business clicking on ads anyway)
• email client (IMAP)
• webmail client (roundcube looks nice)
• chat client (pidgin)
• jabber accounts (tied to other accounts)
• single username and password for network users — password complexity checks, retrieval system for passwords
• intranet CMS, internet CMS
• any other ideas = please comment

I guess it should seem appalling, and maybe it used to to me, but now it just makes sense. What hunter would kill the last of a species — a poor one. There’s already good common sense about gun safety in the hunting culture — why not conservationism, too?

(I’ve realized I won’t stop killing things like bugs, or even stop eating fish, so I have to have a healthier relationship with my feelings about hunting)

I’d say more, but Alfie Kohn pretty much said it all. (except for the full explanation of motivation theory and grades).

When thinking about a few things (Thunderbird’s shady priority for Mozilla, RoundCube, Gmail, Social Networking Sites, iGoogle, Pidgin, etc), I’ve decided that it would be best if there was an opensource project for domain owners to install that would include most of this functionality. It could focus on a jabber-type account for the users (or like drupal or typekey) … TBC

(because domains and hosting aren’t that expensive, and frankly I’d prefer to keep my data to myself)