Schinckel.net

I miss Adam and Wil on TripleJ’s breakfast, the new guys really don’t cut the mustard. But the one interesting thing I have heard them deal with is the debate about “Tom Price”, the mining town in WA.

Who was the person who actually discovered the Iron Ore there?

Was it Lang Hancock, or Bill Burns and Ian Whitcher?

Not that I really care, but this was only 40 or so years ago. There are people who are still alive who were involved in the discovery. So why is there so much uncertainty about what happens? It really makes me wonder how much of ‘ancient’ history is true.

How accurate were the records from 1914-18, let alone hundreds or thousands of years ago? How do we know we haven’t had the wool pulled over our eyes about thing in history?

I mean, Pythagoras didn’t really discover that theorem (the Egyptians knew about it all along), and Aristotle’s 4 humours held back medicine for centuries!

Similarly with the 4 elements and general science. And Fraud (intentional error) just made his results up, yet they have been treated as gospel. Don’t get me onto gospel!

The new plan for writing a novel. Use the random link feature of Wikipedia to get ideas - and the ideas must be weaved into the story as they are found. No skipping pages, or other tricky stuff. I can’t wait - NaNoWriMo 05, lookout. (It must be better than my last year’s effort).

(http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000073036833/ “UK professor concludes: cellphones don’t cause gas station fires”]: He studied all 243 gas station fires from the past 11 years that were supposedly sparked by cellphones and determined that not a single one was actually caused by a handset. The actual cause of most of these fires? Static electricity, which is what everyone who actually knows anything about this stuff has been saying all along. via Engadget.

[composed and posted with ecto]

Steve Almond considers Michael Jackson’s dick. I guess someone had to.

via Blog of a Bookslut.

Redshirt.co.uk: Read all about Batman’s Greatest Boner.

I like the term Googlebombing. The idea is that a heap of sites link to a certain page, using a certain term, and that page then ranks higher when people search for it on Google. There is one in progress for online poker, so I thought I’d add to it. Hopefully, people will go to this, rather than one of the dodgy places that actually offer online poker…

Okay, notification is a breeze. iTunesRater now has two new features:

1. Doesn’t poll, waits for notification from iTunes (requires 4.7.1)
2. Volume Adjustment

Instead of polling iTunes every 5 seconds, the information is only checked when iTunes sends a general notification to the NotificationCenter. This should mean less CPU use, not that I was using much anyway. To get this to work well, I had to notify the AppleScript that a change had been made, by ‘pressing’ one of the interface items. Slightly unorthodox, but effective. Also, a few of my CDs are softer than the rest, I now have a volume adjustment slider on the left hand side that can be used to modify the volume of the current track - don’t use this as your master iTunes volume, it writes the data into your library, so that track will become louder or softer each time you play it. I might actually make this into a fully-fledged iTunes Controller, with AutoRating features. Later. Time to sleep.

I’ve made little secret of the respect I have for people who elope. This is the place to go: Graceland Chapel. Vegas, Baby!

Using the program Meow, it’s possible to see what notifications different programs give to the system - things like changing the menu-bar, that the menu was activated, and in iTunes, that the song has changed. Yes, you heard right - there will be no need to poll the system every n seconds to see if the song is the same! Or if the song is paused! Now I just need to find out how to discover these notifications, and act upon them.

I kinda like the Finder’s column view. I would like to be able to browse within archives, though. Kinda like Windows does. Like my old Amiga used to do, with the ARC: filesystem installed.