review

Finally a review of Muse's September 2007 concert in Seattle! Now I'll give my own pseudo-review:

I got my wife a Palm TX in December 2005. It worked for almost a year, then just as the warranty was about to expire the power button started getting all flaky and only working on 1/3 presses at best. It never really worked great to begin with, often requiring one to hold down the button for a second or two until registering that you pushed it. It seems that others had the Palm TX power button problem as well:

I am constantly late at returning library books. While studying at the University of Waterloo I racked up huge fines, often just by being one day late (they would send me an overdue notice the day after they were due, thus incurring $1 per book, before I could renew). I eventually wrote a little python script that would log on to the University of Waterloo's library website and renew books for me (the script ran automatically every night). That worked great for the last year that I was at Waterloo.

When I came back to Vancouver I was also late at returning books to the Vancouver Public Library. I stumbled on a site a while ago called Library Elf that sends me reminders when my books I have taken out from the VPL are almost due. It supports many other libraries as well. It automatically logs into any libraries that you add to your account and you can receive notification up to one week in advance, or every week, by RRSS and/or email. It has worked great for me, except for one time when it didn't send me any reminder. Perhaps GMail thought it was spam, I'm not sure. I might add the RSS option, just in case.

Recipematcher.com is a recipe website where you enter in all the ingredients you have and you can then search for recipes that use those ingredients (the results are sorted by which recipes require you to buy the least numbers of ingredients). It's a great idea. Too bad that updating the list of ingredients you have on hand is a major pain in the ass. I filled it out quickly and for some things I checked off the box even though I didn't have it because it's something that I have no problem buying or having extra around. Like onions, tomato sauce, or chicken breasts. I don't any of those around right now but I have no problem buying them because they will easily get used up.

I tried two applications for uploaded photos to flickr in Linux. The first is juploadr-1.0, which crashed many times for me and after an entire day of trying I just couldn't get all of the 500 photos I wanted to upload, uploaded. I had much better luck with kflickr-0.6. There seems to be a trend of quality KDE applications (amarok, KDE itself, k3b). Not so many Java or Gnome ones, but I digress. Originally I liked the way of editing descriptions and tags in kflickr but then I realized that neither of these applications compared to flickr's organizer feature, so it didn't matter. kflickr did crash on me if I right-clicked anywhere on the imported images.