Not having a particular mandate to get anything major done has let me slip onto the net in search of cool stuff:

• Podcasting is cool, as is iPodder. I get to hear people like Chris Pirillo, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Rose & Leo Laporte yabber on about stuff I find cool. Even if you don’t have an iPod you can still listen in using your favourite MP3 player. I set up my feeds so they play in the morning, its better than CNN. iPodder support for Winamp as a playback target would be a plus.
• iPodder is written in Python using wxWidgets which is quite a shock. The look and feel is excellent, the app is snappy and has a reasonable memory footprint (30MB). It even has a tray icon, so the desktop integration is great, much better than the mess of third party libs you need with Java. Python for the desktop, who knew?
• Digg is cool. Apparently this is a Kevin Rose thing, although that may not be so well known. You can go ‘digg’ stuff and see what others are ‘digging’, can ya digg it?
• Ruby on Rails looks like its cool. It has Ajax libs built in and I want to do a web project with Ajax. I’m going to spend a day or two messing with this tutorial (found via digg) and see what I can make.

I’v wanted to add photos to this website for some time now. I saw this on the make blog and thought it was a fantastic way to use flickr. So from now on expect more photos.

Yes thats toas, in a toaster oven, mmmm. It’s a reference to “Ed, Edd n Eddy”, if you don’t watch you wont get it.

…on modern video cards is pretty bad. I have a (admittedly aging) GeForce 4 4400 with a Philips TV chip. It can do TV out at 600×800. It doesn’t support custom resolutions, its doesn’t support overscan.

Up until recently I thought it could only output video to one monitor at a time, even with the monitors cloned. Turns out I was wrong about that. Enabling the second display, the TV in this case, to show full screen overlay video gets you an ideal setup. Video shows on both monitors, not just the designated one. The video is always full screen on the designated monitor even when the displaying app is minimized. So I can type this blog post on my primary monitor and watch The Transporter ride rough shod over Paris on the TV, very nice indeed.

My next video card will have to do a lot better. I don’t like this overscan/underscan business, I want a straight digital path from the vid card to the display. In a couple of years that display might be a high-def TV of some sort with component or DVI/HDMI inputs. That means the card will probably have HDMI out, no such card exists yet. If the industry wants to get into my living room they need to make the tools to make it happen. Perhaps Tivo should get into the video card business with one of the big vendors and create a card that accepts a cable card and does HDMI output to multiple HDTV sets and a monitor. That would be ideal.

I recently became the victim of comment spam. The Mindshare website in particular was hit hard by a single spammer running a botnet and posting spam from multiple IP’s. The attack package they are using has an easily identifiable signature; the e-mail field always starts with two numbers. This website has been indexed by Google which I am very happy about. This is also how the spammers find their targets. All comments now require registration for the time being. I will hopefully soon lift that restriction when I get another nifty tool installed on the server.

On the positive side my e-mail address has not been indexed by Google which proves that the Hide Mail script is indeed effective for keeping your e-mail address away from automated address harvesters. I now get less spam at than i do in misdirected spam aimed at the entire *.waves.ky doamin.

And at the end of the first quarter its: Spammers:1 Gareth:1