TechLifeBlogged

While I've never owned a Mac and don't care to own an iPod I can't argue that Apple has helped change the face of personal computing. This weekend Apple marks a major mile stone. Happy 30th Apple!
The Best of Wired on Apple
30 Years of Apple Products
Tags: apple

There are some really impressive photos of yesterday's solar eclipse as viewed from the International Space Station. The really cool one is of the moon's shadow on the earth.
NASA Shares Solar Eclipse With the World
Tags: iss, eclipse, moon, nasa, photo

So you're going about your day, surfing around the web and find something interesting so you bookmark it with del.icio.us. I mean, everyone has a del.icio.us account don't they? You should if you don't. Anyway, so you think what you found might be interesting to me. Excellent! Let me know by adding the tag for:techlifeblogged as one of the tags for that item. The brilliance here is that when you do that it gets sent to my del.icio.us in box and, therefore, into the RSS feed I have from that in box into my aggregator. So sending me something cool is as easy as tagging it when you find it. Not further opening your email client and cutting an pasting.
I don't know how long del.icio.us has had this feature but it's very cool.
http://del.icio.us/help/for
[via:RSSBlog] Tags: delicious, blogging, tagging, folksonomy, rss, tags

Bluetooth is set to use a new technology called Ultra Wide Band (UWB) with will let you do USB or Firewire speeds at a distance up to 10 feet.
[via: Newsvine]
Tags: bluetooth, uwb

ZDNet: There are new 2 unofficial patches for the recent IE exploit. Then, of course, there is the other one...Firefox.
Tags: security, browsers, ie

There is a new Firefox Tips eBook available from Firefox Facts. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet but it should be a nice supplement to my Firefox page.
Tags: mozilla, firefox, browser

USAToday reports that Cablevision Systems is going to test a new service that will let subscribers record shows using digital set-top boxes. The recordings are stored at the company and not locally at the users home.
Tags: tv, cable, dvr, video

A little odd but interesting never the less, Oil Standard converts prices on the screen from US Dollars to its equivalent price in barrels of oil.
[via: NYT]
Tags: mozilla, firefox, browser

Have you ever had this error when using Firefox:
“Warning: Unresponsive script. A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete.”
I don't recall ever having it but LifeHacker posted a solution. Basically you increase the value of dom.max_script_run_time from it's default value of 5 to something larger like 20.
Tags: mozilla, firefox, browser

The San Diego Area Ruby Users group is trying to start back up again. We're still working out the meeting dates, etc but if you are in the area and are interested check out Kevin's blog post: San Diego Ruby Users Group Revival or leave a message in the comments below. I'll also blog about more details as the time draws closer.
Tags: ruby, rails, san+diego

No, not mine, this genius.
From the Register: "All was apparently well until the woman opened up a list of sites whose password was never saved and unearthed evidence that her man was a frequent visitor of dating websites."
Doh!
Tags: idiot, mozilla, firefox

USAToday: Law professor bans laptops in class, over student protest
"University of Memphis law students are passing a petition against a professor who banned laptop computers from her classroom lectures. "My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing," Professor June Entman said"

I'd have to agree with her. If I were a teacher it would drive me a bit nuts if people were clickity-clacking and trying to format all session long. Plus I know me. I can take notes hella faster on with pen and paper then on a computer. I haven't tried a tablet PC or UMPC, perhaps the pen interface would make me change my mind.
Tags: laptop ban

Everyone is reporting on the delay of vista. Glass being half full, I was excited to learn from Microsoft "...on target to go into broad consumer beta to approximately 2 million users in the second quarter of 2006" This is good news. Open it up, let us hammer on it for a few months.
Tags: microsoft, windows, vista, beta

Many things take advantage of the .NET framework. If you use things like XBox 360 extenders is it critical that you have your framework installed correctly. Aaron Stebner has updated his .NET Framework setup verification tool. The tool now works with .NET Framework 2.0 in addition to the previously supported versions (1.0, 1.0 service packs, 1.1, 1.1 language packs and 1.1 service packs).
Tags: microsoft, .net, dotnet

Lifehacker has a post today: Become a GMail Master. They cover setting up the basic setup info like labels and filters and replying to messages from other accounts. From there they head into extending GMail  using tools like Greasemonkey to add features that Google doesn't provide out-of-the-box.

Tags: gmail, tips, hacks, google

My God, the colors are hideous! But if you want to set up a free video blog, here is a site with plenty of info: freevlog
[via: BloggerBuzz]

There is a new site called Blog Influence. It uses a calculation to determine your blog's influence on the blogosphere.
[(blog+posts+web links) + (bloglines subs * 2)] * 1+(Pagerank/10)


My influence
[2365.5]

[via: RSSBlog]

USAToday reports:

A 2,500-year-old sarcophagus with vivid color illustrations from Homer's epics has been discovered in western Cyprus, archaeologists said Monday. Construction workers found the limestone sarcophagus last week in a tomb near the village of Kouklia, in the coastal Paphos area.

Revolving World notes that Firefox 2.0 alpha has been released.

Note, this is ALPHA software. If you are willing to take that risk, here are the download sites:
Windows EXE - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.win32.installer.exe
Windows ZIP - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.win32.zip
Mac - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.mac.dmg
Linux - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.installer.tar.gz
Linux - firefox-2.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz

I haven't had a chance to try it yet but Mike  says it's more stable than 1.5 on his Mac.

UPDATE: If you want to try this without messing up your current installation, check out this site for a self contained "portable" version of Alpha 1. I say self contained because you just unzip and run it with having to install over your current working version: Portable Firefox Alpha 1
Tags: mozilla, firefox, browser

I've had an issue lately where some web pages were not looking or operating right in Firefox on my home machine but were fine in Firefox at work. I have them set up essentially the same so I couldn't figure out what it could be. Today at work I remember a fix I read about a while back and gave it a try tonight it things seem to be working great again.

The fix:
Shutdown Firefox, go to your Firefox profile directory and delete the file named XUL.mfl. That file is a cache for javascript and other user interface elements. Sometimes it gets corrupt for what ever reason. Since it's a cache you can safely delete it and it will rebuild the next time you launch Firefox.

I've gone a step further and edited my FixFox.bat batch file so that xul.mfl gets deleted when I run it.
Tags: mozilla, firefox, browser, xul

Note March 23, 06: No, this didn't happen again. I had to repost. First time ever for me. I think the original post went up at the same time Google's filer went down last week.