Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

As the Apple Turns RSS feed

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I’m tossing this up here because until today, I had never, ever, ever seen nor heard of any mention of an RSS feed for everyone’s favorite Apple-flavored soap opera, As the Apple Turns (I even just dug through their help pages and v2.0 FAQ to be sure I wan’t entirely off base — at least, as far as this is concerned). However, in a typically off-the-cuff mention, the heretofore super-secret-ninja-RSS-feed address has been leaked (and leaked by no less august a personage than the AtAT team themselves): http://www.appleturns.com/rss/.

Hey, I thought it was exciting.

Mac OS X Panther Hacks

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I just wanted to toss out a quick congratulations to Phil, who with the release of O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Panther Hacks, is now officially a published (co-)author!

I haven’t even managed to wrangle my infamy into that particular accolade. ;)

iTunes: “Life In Ecstacy (Long Dong)” by Trust in 6 from the album Techno-Trax Vol. 1 (1991, 6:37).

Google to me in eight clicks

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Meme time, started by A Whole Lotta Nothing, and being tracked by Kottke: how many clicks to get from Google’s homepage to your website without using the search box?

For me, it’s eight.

  1. Google »
  2. More »
  3. Blogger »
  4. Knowledge »
  5. Working With Blogger »
  6. How Not to Get Fired Because of Your Blog »
  7. Seattle Times: Microsoft Fires Worker Over Weblog »
  8. eclecticism

Awww, shucks!

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This was rather flattering to run across tonight…

Which blog has your favorite design?

Only one? eclecticism, by Michael Hanscom. It is the most intentionally designed blog I know, and the design is significant, a protest of stereotyping blog designs according to gender. Go Michael!

Thanks, Alicia!

Amusingly enough, I’m starting to run ideas around in my head to expand the choices a bit, too. No clue when they’ll show up, but hopefully they’ll be appreciated also. :)

iTunes: “Happy Phantom (Live)” by Amos, Tori from the album Y Kant Tori Read (and Other Rarities) (1994, 3:37).

Meme fun

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This was originally a LiveJournal meme, but it was so goofy and intricate that I had to join in the fun. So. Bear with me.

  1. Take your LJ username and replace each letter with the corresponding number (A=1, B=2, etc…). If your name contains numbers, you’ll need to convert them to letters first before you can convert to numbers.
    • Michael Hanscom = 13 9 3 8 1 5 12 8 1 14 19 3 15 13 (Since I’m doing this here, rather than on LiveJournal, I’ll use the name I post under on this weblog — which, conveniently enough, just happens to be my real name.)
  2. Add all of the numbers together to create a kind of super number.
    • 124
  3. Make a note of the first digit of this number, then add the digits of the number together.
    • First digit is 1.
    • 1 + 2 + 4 = 7.
  4. Find the post of this number in your LJ. If you don’t have that many posts, add the digits together again. Keep doing so until the number is smaller than your pathetic number of posts.
  5. Take the digit you noted in step 3, and count that many words into the post.
    • Just
  6. Use the resulting word in a Google Image Search, and select a picture from the first page. Post the results for us all to see.

'Just Try It' from Anger Dog StudiosA quick note regarding this image: while it was by far the best of the images that Google found for me, it was found on this journal page (no permalink, entry “Wow wow wow!!!” from Jan. 25, 2004), where it had been re-posted from Anger Dog Studios. I debated re-re-posting it here, but liked the image enough that I decided to go ahead and toss it up with credit to the original artist, who I’ll also be e-mailing and asking formal permission to leave the piece up. There’s a lot more excellent artwork at Anger Dog Studios, too, so feel free to wander that way and peruse what’s available in their galleries.

Reading protected LiveJournal entries via RSS

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Being able to subscribe to an RSS feed for any LiveJournal weblog by adding /rss to the end of the URL is all well and good, but I’ve been grumbling for a while that the downside to that is that it won’t let you read protected “friends only” entries, as by pulling the RSS feed you’re not actually logged into the LiveJournal system.

Well, many thanks to Phil for pointing out a trick he picked up from Brent Simmons — if you add /rss?auth=digest to the end of the URL, and include the standard HTTP authentication at the beginning of the URL (username:password@ between the protocol and the server address), then the RSS feed will include the protected entries.

In other words, using my LiveJournal as an example (even though it doesn’t have any protected entries, it’ll work for demonstrating the URL changes)…

  1. LiveJournal URL: http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/
  2. LiveJournal RSS feed: http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/rss (which actually maps to http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/data/rss)
  3. LiveJournal RSS feed with protected entries: http://username:password@www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/data/rss?auth=digest

Update: It appears that at some point over the past few months, ending the URL with ?auth=digest is no longer necessary. Simply using the string http://username:password@www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss (where the first ‘username’ and ‘password’ set are yours, and the second ‘username’ is that of the journal you’re reading) seems to work fine.

NOTE: This is not a technique for “hacking” LiveJournal to allow you to read protected entries that you would not otherwise have access to! All this does is allow you to ‘log in’ to LiveJournal via your RSS reader so that you can read your friends protected entries just as if you were logged in to the LiveJournal web interface. I do not know of a way to read protected entries that you have not been granted access to, and I’m not interested in trying to find one.

iTunes: “Getting Snippy With It” by Rollins, Henry from the album Talk is Cheap, Vol. 1 (2003, 6:48).

West Coast Bloggers

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Hellz yeah, biznatch — West Coast Bloggers, REPREZENT!

West Coast Bloggers

Or something like that.

Do we get our own gang signs now?

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes: “1/3 of a Nation” by Bytet from the album First Bite (1993, 5:13).

Adsense down?

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Google’s Adsense appears to be down at the moment, which is causing loading problems for my weblog. Apologies to all if it’s hitting you, but there’s not a thing I can do about it except wait for them to get things together.

iTunes: “Unravel” by Björk from the album Homogenic (1997, 3:17).

Sample-liscious!

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Feel like having some sampling fun with George W. Bush? Head on over to the George W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive.

The George W Bush Public Domain Audio Archive is a public domain database of the speeches of George W. Bush. Every phrase from each major speech has been made into an individual audio file, where the filename is, in most cases, the exact text content of the sample. This allows you to search the entire database for individual keywords. […] What you do with the database is up to you. Musicians, linguists, historians, media professionals, students and activists may all find this database to be of use. You are free to download and use these samples for any purpose, both non-commercial and commercial.

(via BOP)

iTunes: “Fuzzy Math” by Bots, The (2004, 3:27).

Seattle Metroblogging

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Last month, I linked to the Metroblogging project: a series of city-specific weblogs. At the time, Seattle was in the “coming soon” list…well, folks, Seattle.Metroblogging is now live.

And what do you know — there’s a familiar name in the contributing authors list.

Mine, in fact.

So far I’ve just tossed one post up, but more will come in the future. Feel free to stop by and check in every so often!

iTunes: “Sit Down” by James from the album Alterno-Daze: 90’s Natural Selection (1995, 4:07).