The metal back of the device is cold, and sucks the heat from your hand.

The rule of web software has been to use a single global platform, and localize the data, language, and results. Theoretically, it should work, but, in practice, it doesn't.

I was testing a new product called Mailarchiva, and I misunderstood the instructions. The upshot was that a mailbox full of messages was moved into Mailarchiva, and I wanted to restore them to the mailbox.

For around a year, my FON hotspot was turned off, due to lack of appropriate permissions to tap into my local sources of broadband. Now, it's back, and in the South Central / USC area.

Sometimes, you'll find that a plug's come a little loose, or it operates right only when the plug's being pushed in one direction.

The best ways to improve WiFi reception is through antenna positioning and using reflectors to guild the signal.

After doing some research on the subject, I was totally confused about Cisco terminal cables. These are just regular serial cables, with with all kinds of weird "cisco-y" features. The big tutorials on the web really confuse the issue by trying to cover every possible type of cable.

Found this on Howtogeek.

Type in this URL: about:config

Type "spell" to filter in only the spellcheck configs.

Change layout.spellcheckDefault to 2. (Double click on it, and then edit the value.)

I stumbled across this really interesting Wiki that was put together to help librarians understand the Web, circa 2006. WISH Knowledge Workers Wiki.

Whooo-wee. It's been four years since I've bought a computer. (Thanks to Josh for the free laptop, and Yvonne for the broken PC, which kept me from buying a full system.) Around '05 I got a cheapie Compaq and a Mini Mac to do web dev stuff, that supplanted a really nice Athlon 64 system that was my main box.

eMachines sells a computer, the EL1300G, that doesn't come with a restore disk; neither does it have a restore partition.

Back in the past, all computers came with either no operating system, or disc(s) for the operating system. Eventually, this evolved into the "restore disc" which was produced by the manufacturer, and contained not only the operating system, but bundled applications.

I went to the hazardous waste disposal station a couple years ago, to dump off some waste. There was a small stack of computers there, and I was looking at them. Seeing someone from the staff there, I asked if I could look through it and take one. (The computers looked like they were from around 2003 or so. P4s.) This staffer said, "no, they're going to melt them down and make new things."

Maybe it's just this lousy economy, but, you just don't see as many decent computers being dumped as they were in the middle of the decade. I found this one in Wilshire Center.

At work I run Firefox without the (great) Adblock Plus plug-in. Adblock Plus mangles the HTML code to insert its own code that displays the "Block Ad" tabs, and this interferes with our CMS. Whenever I insert some code to embed video, Adblock Plus sees it and then adds its own code, ruining the code.

I forgot this, and installed ABP and then had to uninstall it.

Then, I started noticing that TinyMCE was altering URLs in links, so a url like http://example.com/go.php?id=100&start=344 would get mangled, so the ampersand (&) was replaced with & the HTML entity. I'd see: http://example.com/go.php?id=100&start=344

It turns out this is correct behavior, because xml doesn't allow & to be in an attribute. It needs to be escaped. The only problem is that IE6 won't handle these links correctly.

XMPP is Better with BOSH explains why Jabber over an HTTP connection is better than traditional TCP sockets.