Free Wi-Fi for my apartment?

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Last month, the City of Seattle launched a program to bring free Wi-Fi access to several prominent areas around Seattle. The initial launch was in Columbia City and the University District, but other parks planned to go online include downtown’s Westlake, Victor Steinbrueck, Occidental, and Freeway parks.

Progress is obviously being made, as today on my way home for lunch I saw a work crew installing one of the Wi-Fi antennas on a lamppost on the 8th Avenue bridge over Freeway Park. Now I’m starting to wonder if my building just might end up with free Wi-Fi access provided by the City of Seattle. Here’s a look at the local layout:

Freeway Park Wi-Fi

Freeway Park is (roughly) outlined in red. The antenna I saw being installed is marked in yellow (I’m sure there must be more scattered around the park), and my apartment building is outlined in green. Now, I don’t know quite how much coverage beyond the borders of Freeway Park the antennas will provide, but just eyeballing it, I’d say that there’s at least a chance that my building might be covered.

Of course, the downside is that none of my computers are Wi-Fi enabled, so it wouldn’t do me any good. Still, I have a few friends with iBooks that occasionally stop by, so this might be a good thing for them.

iTunes “Now That I Have You” by Information Society from the album Hack (1990, 5:03).

Flickr Badge in Weblog Posts

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Flickr recently introduced a new badge generator with a lot of new features, including the ability to restrict the photos displayed to a certain set or group pool.

I started experimenting with whether it was possible to place badges into my weblog posts where appropriate. For instance, a post about a specific event could include a badge displaying photos from that event’s Flickr photo set or group pool.

My first attempts met with some trouble. The code that the Flickr badge generator creates comes in two sections: the CSS for style, and the HTML code for the badge. Unfortunately, the CSS block was causing issues, breaking validation (under XHTML Transitional, you can’t have a block inside a element) and doing something else that resulted in a random string of characters displaying instead of the badge.

After trying a few different forms of badge, though, I found that as long as I kept the same color and background choices (in step four of the HTML badge creator), the CSS code always stayed the same, and it was only variables in the Javascript call to Flickr that determined which photos were displayed.

So, I chose the style options that I wanted, created a badge, and put the CSS code into my stylesheet. I then took just the HTML code, dropped it into a post, and bingo — everything displays fine. As an example, here’s a random selection of images from the Utilikilts group pool:

www.flickr.com

Other advantages — because the CSS now lives in the stylesheet, you can create different color combinations for different stylesheets (if you use a stylesheet switcher), and your Flickr badges will blend in with the rest of the design no matter which design you choose.

Not a mind-blowing tip, sure, but could be useful from time to time.

Pride leaving Broadway?

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Interesting bit of controversy going on in Seattle’s gay community right now, as the annual Pride Parade has grown so much that organizers want to move it to downtown and the Seattle Center for next year.

This year’s gay pride parade — happening a week from Sunday — may be the last on Capitol Hill, the traditional center of gay life in Seattle.

For more than 20 years, the colorful march has made its way along Broadway and culminated at Volunteer Park, where a festival takes place. A co-chairman of the Seattle Pride Committee, which runs the events, said yesterday that the festival will relocate to the Seattle Center next year.

While the committee hasn’t made any final decisions, the procession also may make its way along a new route through downtown Seattle in 2006.

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To some, the move signals the advances gays and lesbians have made in society. Holding the festival at the Seattle Center — where more traditional celebrations such as Bumbershoot and Bite of Seattle take place — can be seen as a sign of mainstream acceptance and an acknowledgment that gays are part of the entire city, not just one neighborhood.

Still, many find the idea of the gay pride festival being anywhere else but Capitol Hill hard to fathom.

Protest signs have gone up in many storefronts along Capitol Hill’s main drag proclaiming, “Keep the Pride Parade on Broadway.” Dozens of people have signed petitions that have appeared at stores such as Broadway News and the Panache clothing store.

I can see how many of the people in Capitol Hill would be bummed about this, but I also think that having the extra space and possibilities of the Seattle Center would be a good thing. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Either way, though, I’ll be there this year, and next, and most likely, any other year I’m in Seattle.

iTunes “Speedfreak” by Secret Hero from the album Lit Up (1999, 7:07).

Offshoring

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Some things from last night’s Weblogger meetup that just popped into my head.

While Jake was interviewing Chas and I, the topic of offshoring came up. I then decided that the next time I go on vacation, I’m going to turn guest-blogging duties over to one of my regular readers that lives overseas. That way, I’ll be offshoring my blog.

Later I was standing outside with Kristin and Ian, and they commented on my Daring Fireball t-shirt, saying that they needed to make their own (their own site t-shirts, that is, not make their own bootleg Daring Fireball t-shirts, though that got some laughs). They figured that they could probably pay local kids a dollar a shirt to do some nice ghetto-style silkscreening. This led to a mix of child labor/sweat shop/offshoring jokes, culminating in my declaration that, “We only abuse local children!”

Politically correct? No.

Funny?

Definitely.

iTunes “B-Boy Stance (Freestylers Revenge)” by Freestylers feat. Tenor Fly from the album Plastic Compilation Vol. II (1997, 6:50).

Mixes now Podcast compatible

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After poking around a bit, I discovered that (as long as I’ve got everything figured out correctly) it would be fairly easy to enable Podcasting support for the mixes I’m posting.

In theory, then, the post for Difficult Listening Hour 01 should now be Podcast ready, and I’ll do the same for all future mix sessions.

If there are any problems or issues with this, just let me know, as I’ve got no real clue what I’m doing here. :)

June Meetup

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Fun conversations and gadgetry at the Webloggers Meetup last night.

Apple eMate, June Webloggers Meetup, Ralph's Grocery, Seattle, WAPhillip Torrone brought a bunch of old and new hardware, gadgets, and toys along, including an Apple eMate, a Newton, and his cell phone — which is actually an old rotary phone that he’s hacked the cell phone hardware into. Pretty impressive!

Chas and Pops and I spent some time talking about Podcasts, and the possibility of my turning my dj mixes into a podcast stream. I’m still not entirely sure if I’m going to move that way, but I’m at least running it around in my head.

June Webloggers Meetup, Ralph's Grocery, Seattle, WAJake was wandering around interviewing anyone who’d sit still in his vicinity for more than a minute, and tossed a few questions my way. Look for some rather brainless-sounding pauses, “um”s and “aaahh…”s from me in an upcoming podcast from him at some point, if he doesn’t edit me out completely. ;)

As things were winding down, I spent a little time chatting with Kristin and Ian, both first-time attendees. Much enjoyed were the possibilities of answering Jake’s “What tech issue would you ask your state representative about if you had the chance?” question with “Teledildonics“, and Kristin and Ian’s picture outside the local Department of Homeland Security office.

A walk home afterwards, accompanied for a while by Jake and Chas until they went off their respective directions, and the evening was done. Not bad at all.

iTunes “My Weakness” by Moby from the album Play (1999, 3:37).

Tron sequel back in the works?

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An item in Boing Boing about Disney comic books caught my eye today. Not for the comic books, but for the subject of one of them…

…Tron, an extension of the original film and the 2004 video game Tron 2.0, as well as a lead up to a second feature film…

Could the long-hoped-for sequel to Tron finally be back in gear? I don’t want to get too hyped up about this — the last time I did, it turned out to be a 3 — but I can certainly keep my fingers crossed.

iTunes “New World Firestarter” by Bloodhound Gang, The/Ministry/Prodigy (2003, 6:05).

DJ Wüdi Mix: Difficult Listening Hour 01

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Yesterday while poking around on my Audioscrobbler statistics page, I clicked through to look at the statistics for my own mixsessions, and was pleasantly surprised to find that there are a few other people out there listening to them. Not many — but even one more than myself was enough to get my attention.

Prompted by that, and egged on by having a server that’s able to serve things out at a decent speed, I thought I’d start posting my old mix sessions again.

All the mixes I’ll be posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the first: Difficult Listening Hour 01 (43m 03s, 39.43Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Depeche Mode ‘Headstar’
  2. Wink feat. Trent Reznor ‘Black Bomb (Jerry in the Bag)’
  3. Pop Will Eat Itself ‘Menofearthereaper (Concrete No Fee No Fear)’
  4. Coil ‘The Snow (Answers Come in Dreams II)’
  5. Underworld ‘Dirty Epic (Dirty)’
  6. Drum Club ‘Sound System (Underworld)’
  7. Rabbit in the Moon ‘Subfusion’

Download, drop into your .mp3 player, and — hopefully — enjoy!

Update: If I’ve got things right, I should be podcast-enabled now.

Update: I’ve used iTunes to create a CD cover image, ready to download and print for a slipcase, or toss into iTunes. This should be the last update to this post…next week I’ll have a better idea of what I’m doing, and should be able to get all these steps done in one swell foop. :)