You may have noticed I like the Chaser. Whilst watching episode 18, there was a segment bagging The Da Vinci Code, as The Ken Done Code. You’ll need to be Australian to understand it. You won’t need to be Australian to get this bit though: 
I’ve just found FreeMacWare, and love the look and feel of the site. Haven’t found anything I’ve downloaded yet, though.
It’s been a while since I did this, but here are my favourite (or, in one case, least favourite) items from this week’s PostSecret: 
And, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks that the media coverage of someone’s passing was a bit too much (Smack Dab in the Middle). And now we have Brocky to mourn for, too.
While mindlessly surfing tonight (I was actually following referrer links, and seeing where I got to), I came across a great post, over at Breathe in Now: Bus Tickets in Bed. Basically, the idea is to take the nice little messages that appear on the back of our bus tickets: 
This is the front at the top, and the bottom underneath. My personal favourite:
Do not choose to be wrong for the sake of being different in bed.
Well, last night was the final episode of The Chaser’s War on Everything. Those of you who missed this series should rush to your nearest Torrent-site and grab it all. I missed a fair chunk of it, and so when they started Vodcasting it, I subscribed to the feed. However, the quality of the video available from the ABC website is crap, to say the least. So, I’ve begun downloading all episodes, even 22-28, which I have as vodcasts. However, episode 17 is missing. I’ve found a torrent for it, but noone seems to be seeding it. I’ve got episodes 1-14 complete, and partway through 15, 16 and 18. At 235Mb per episode, it’s fairly slow going. But it most certainly is worth it. As for legality issues - I can’t get reasonable ABC reception in my house, so I feel perfectly justified in doing this. I have a right, after all, to view stuff on the ABC.
I listen to Podcasts rather than music most of my commuting time now. One of the ones I subscribe to is The Science Show, from ABC Radio National. Back when I was on dialup, I used to wget the podcasts, and then add them to iTunes using a cool little hack, where I made my computer think it’s own IP address was the address of the abc.net.au server. Then I didn’t have to worry about iTunes not finishing a download, and having to start over. Resumable downloads rock. However, sometimes I would not get all of the file, and not realise. Thus, the other day I was listening to a great segment on Mathematics and the Brain, when the program stopped. I had only grabbed 33 minutes of the 48 minute program. Trying to get iTunes to re-download a podcast is tricky, so instead I used wget to grab the full file, and then deleted the original iTunes file. I then replaced it with my new one. All fixed. This is a side-effect of the fact that iTunes doesn’t keep that good of a track of files. You can move files out from underneath it, and it can’t find them. I’ve come across this from the other perspective - we share the same directory for storing two people’s iTunes libraries, so we don’t have duplicates of all of the same music - but in this case, I used it to my advantage.
I’ve had a couple of “challenging” comments on a couple of posts I’ve made over the past couple of days. It all stems from the fact that a large group of students have “discovered” my blog, and decided to make some comments about and on it. This is not the first time that students I teach have come across it, but in the past, they appeared to be a bit more mature about how they dealt with the fact that I am a person, not just a teacher. I’m close to putting moderation on the posts, as it’s somewhat annoying to have to remove those that I deem to be inappropriate. Which brings me to the point I want to make. By commenting on a person’s blog, you are effectively visiting their house, and leaving your mark. It’s my blog, I’ve put a lot of effort into tweaking the template, and even more into creating content that is, to me at least, meaningful and sometimes important. I reserve the right to remove comments I decide are inappropriate. I’ll usually leave comments that are opposing to my point of view, except if I feel they go too far. If it gets too bad, I’ll just block access from a variety of IP addresses. Like yours.
I’ve always liked the integration of Gmail and Firefox, when you use something like WebMailCompose. However, it’s not clear how to set it up for Gmail Hosted. Just edit the Preferences, and in the Webmail Services tab, find the GMail entry. replace the /mail/ with /hosted/yourdomain.com/ and away you go… Found via Gadgetopia.
I’ve just started playing around with Google Calendars, and think there is a lot of potential here. I also use iCal, and sync my calendars with my Palm Pilot, which is better in a lot of cases for me accessing the data than having to go to a website. And it means I can update stuff when I am away from the computer. However, there is one problem, and Google Calendar may have a solution. Shared Calendars. In particular with my Touch Club, I’m one of several people who might need to update a calendar. It would be great to be able to have one calendar file, that I can update either on my Mac, Palm Pilot, or online, and have other people update this as well. However, you can subscribe to a Google Calendar in iCal, and subscribe to a published iCal calendar in Google Calendar, but not have one calendar that is editable in both programs. I might be happy with a solution that bypasses iCal - if I can edit a calendar on my Palm Pilot, and then sync it with Google Calendar, that might do. I’m already hardly using Mail.app anymore, and doing everything with Gmail. Especially since I got ADSL.
One site I am responsible for is that of my Touch club, Central Scorpions. I did have a blog set up, but have migrated to the system my association uses for results and fixtures. I set up a lovely domain name, and using stealth forwarding, I had that stay in the address bar. We really only want people to visit via the main page, anyway, so that doesn’t raise issues of not being able to bookmark a specific page. However, using IE (Win), if I have a stealth forwarding setup, the site runs v.e.r.y…s.l.o.w. Under Firefox (Mac) it’s fine, and if I use a standard redirect, this is fine too. So, stealth forwarding must do something strange, that IE doesn’t like in conjunction with the js for the rollovers, I think. It may have something to do with the way it’s set up as a frame, I’m not sure.