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Someone told me long ago that Escape from New York Pizza near Haight Ashbury had real New York Pizza. Quite simply, no. It is not.

Arinell Pizza at 16th & Valencia, they make a New York slice. I was in the city (I hear that San Franciscans gingerly call SF “the city” but folks in LA know that “the city” is New York) in October and had Rosa’s Pizza in Penn Station. The two compare very well.

If you have multiple computers with multiple monitors, Synergy is a great way to keep your hands on a single keyboard & mouse. It’s kind of like a KVM, but it’s not.

I have 2 monitors on 1 computer (my main desktop PC) and a laptop that I haul from home to work. Now, I can keep my hands on one keyboard and mouse while I slide my mouse from my big 19″ main screen, over to the right to my 17″ screen and then … magically to the right again onto my laptop!

You can slide from your PC to your Linux to your Mac. Keyboard input follows the mouse. You can copy/paste across boxen! It’s magic, and it’s FREEE!

Get Synergy
Read a good tutorial. (I thought it was overly verbose and then I needed to read it to figure out one concept)

I was up and running in < 5 minutes.

1-27-21 update:
I hadn’t been using Synergy for a while but with COVID, I needed a better computer setup. I’ve got 2 Windows computers with a total of 3 monitors. It’s wonderful! I paid $30 for it and it’s, no brainer, completely worth it!
I have 2 monitors on the bottom and 1 on top. So I used the custom configuration option to align the cursor movements better. Here’s how:
– Start Synergy
– export the current configuration with File | Save Configuration as…
– modify the configuration file with tips from Synergy (1)
Mine looks like this:

section: links
PSC-ALT-49:
up(50,100) = Tobuscus(0,100)
Tobuscus:
down(0,100) = PSC-ALT-49(50,100)
end

– Point Synergy at the config file with the “Use existing configuration” option.
– Profit!

The will of the California people seems to differ somewhat from my own. Most of the Propositions I voted for failed and most that I voted against succeeded.

I found casting my semi-libertarian vote pretty easy. I voted for (in order, starting at #73) “warning labels” but not bans, competition in the workplace, informed consent, smaller government, unbiased government, open marketplace, open marketplace, open marketplace.

Continue reading ‘How I voted’ »

I need a new bed.

In most every bed I’ve ever slept in for more than a few months, this divot forms where I sleep on my side. Yes, yes, I know that you’re supposed to rotate your bed every couple months. I do that but it only staves off the divoting for a while. I think it’s that I fall asleep stay in once place; I’ve read how people toss and turn in their sleep all night but I think I toss very little if at all.

I spent like $800 on this snazzy bed a few years ago. 4 years later, the divot became permanent. I’m sleeping on an Ikea mattress right now; for the first 3 months I thought I had found a mattress that didn’t sag beneth me. Nope. I put a good-ol’ divot in my family’s guest bed too. The destruction continues.

I didn’t have this problem with a water bed and Stevie points out that his Select Comfort air mattresses don’t get divots.

I’m thinking about getting a Select Comfort bed. What do you think?

Very funny

And this one is especially for Trav

I was fiddling with my BIOS settings trying to get my Cybex Autoview Commander 4 port KVM to stop messing up my keyboard input. Avocent (who bought Cybex) said that I might want to change the BIOS keyboard input setting from “fast” to “normal”. Well, I couldn’t find that option in my BIOS but….

There is an option for hard drive performance. You can choose: bypass, quiet hard drive, or performance hard drive. It had been set to “bypass”. I switched it to “performance” and Yeeeh Haawww! The drive is now a bit louder, making those traditional hard drive clackity sounds, but some disk operations are now much more responsive. Several tasks have gone from “click, wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… done” to “click-done”.

Cool beans.

I’ve been using FTP Voyager and SmartFTP for a long time. Today I was having some trouble getting them working on a new Windows MCE machine. Michie suggested I use Internet Explorer. “But IE FTP sucks.” “No it doesn’t.” She is right. Somewhere in the last couple years IE (6.0) upgraded their built-in FTP client. It has full drag & drop capabilities and it’s pretty and everything.

Here is how to set up an SSHD service on your Windows XP Cygwin machine. This comes from a great guide from Pigtail.net on how to turn an old PC into a Linux Router… aptly named the Linux Router Project (LRP)

Local version of how to install SSHD. And how to install SSH

And yes, this works.

In my attempt at hubris, I’ve added a link to Top100Bloggers.com in my sidebar. If you read my site and like it, vote for me. It’ll make me feel like one of those big-time bloggers.

The thing to click on should look something like this

Click because you love me

The NoNofollow plugin

…is a very simple WordPress-plugin to remove rel=’nofollow’ (as proposed by Google) from links in comments in WP’s output.

This plugin checks the date of any comment and removes rel=’nofollow’ if the comment is older than a configurable number of days. This gives the site admin a chance to remove comment spam whithout the risk of Google following the links.

This will hopefully make hyperlinks in comments and on my site more relevant to search engines. It offers encouragement to legitimate commenters to post legitimate links on the site.

update 10-29-05: Nonofollow wasn’t working correctly all the time and I didn’t bother to figure out why so I’ve switched to a different nofollow plugin, DoFollow. I’ve tried it out and it works very well. Note that it is a filter plugin… it doesn’t alter the database like NoNoFollow (I believe) attempts to do. This is probably a good thing from a forward compatibility standpoint.