Yearly Archives: 2009

Contrail Shadow, Halo, Haze & Sundog

While driving around lunchtime, I saw an airplane pass overhead, its contrail casting a shadow on the thin cloud layer below. I had my camera handy, and was stopped at an intersection, so I snapped a couple of shots. As often seems to happen, the first, haphazard one was the best.

The diagonal line extending down from the sun is, I believe, a sun pillar-like effect in the trails left by the windshield wipers. Also: Unless I’m mistaken, you can just barely see the edge of a halo in the feathery clouds at bottom center. It’s the slight reddening.

A few hours earlier, I saw this:

I glanced out the window while changing lanes on the freeway this morning & noticed the bottom edge of this halo. By the time I had a chance to stop the car and really look, the lower arc seemed to have disappeared, but the left side was sharply visible – as was a sundog. I rolled down the window and snapped a couple of photos while waiting for the light to change. Unfortunately, I couldn’t position anything to block the sun, so the exposure isn’t all that great.

By the time I reached my destination and parked, it had all faded except for a slightly bright patch in the clouds to the left.

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Manic Monday

First, some linkblogging…

And then the “fun” started.

  • Me: I’m going to focus on project X today!
    Computer needed for project X: I’m going to lock up today!
    Me: Argh! #
  • Someone thought it would be a good idea to cover “Wonderful Christmastime?” 8O # (For the record: Shazam says it was Hilary Duff.)
  • OK, after 3½ hours stuck at 74%, I think I can assume chkdsk is stalled. *grumble* #
  • Ate some blackberries I’d forgotten about from a week ago. Good news: I only threw out 1! Bad news: I should’ve thrown out 2. Blech! #
  • Chkdsk round 3 is at 55% on Stage 5 of 5. Going to call it a night & hope my PC runs tomorrow. # (According to Facebook, this posted at 5:55pm!)

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New Plugin: Twitter Tools Skip-FB

I’ve been using Alex King’s Twitter Tools for about a year now to both publish my WordPress posts on Twitter and build a daily (or, on another site, weekly) digest out of my tweets to post on my blog. I’ve recently started using Selective Tweets on Facebook to transfer my Twitter posts to Facebook.

The reason it’s called Selective Tweets is that it lets you choose which items to transfer, instead of just blindly dumping everything from Twitter to Facebook. You do this by adding the #fb hashtag to the end of each tweet that you want to also appear on Facebook.

On the downside: after the message is copied, that extra hashtag is just clutter. You can’t do anything about removing it from Twitter itself, but you can filter it out of your digests on your WordPress blog!

All you have to do is install and activate this plugin (after installing and activating Twitter Tools), and it will use the Twitter Tools API to filter out the #fb hashtag instead of linking it.

Download it: ktv-twitter-tools-skipfb-1.0.zip

I had intended to also filter it out of the sidebar, but the Twitter Tools API doesn’t seem to provide a way to do that.

If I ever do future versions, I’ll track them here: Twitter Tools Skip FB Plugin.

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Southcoast of Borg


Southcoast of Borg, originally uploaded by Kelson.

South Coast Plaza Christmas TreeWe are South Coast Plaza of Borg. You will be overstimulated!

Seriously, after only 20 minutes at the mall on Saturday, I was already feeling overwhelmed. The children’s choir singing “Holly Jolly Christmas” right outside the first store did not help!

I miss the Ghirardelli shop. It was my favorite way to just retreat from the madness that is South Coast Plaza during the Christmas shopping season and prepare myself for the next hour or two.

Oh, yeah…here’s a better photo of the bridge and the mall segment formerly known as Crystal Court.

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Tim is Running Out!

Farscape: Complete Series on DVD

  • Two emails in a row: “Time’s running out…” and “Tim is now following you on Twitter.” Misread the first as “Tim’s running out…” #
  • Wow! Amazon has the complete Farscape series for $58! That’s even better than the ultracheap $70 I spent last month! # Only downside: it doesn’t include the Peacekeeper Wars miniseries, which is a Best Buy exclusive. Best Buy has dropped the price to $70 again, but I don’t see anything about PKW on the website.

Posted in Farscape, Humor | Tagged | 2 Comments

That’s, Um, Not Relaxing

Yow! “Perfectly Relaxing Songs” don’t work so well when the volume changes drastically between one song and the next. #

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Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux

I tried out the Chrome beta for Linux on two different computers yesterday. On the first one, Flash worked right “out of the box.” On the second, it wouldn’t even show up in about:plugins. I couldn’t figure out what was different.

  • Both are 64-bit systems running Fedora 12.
  • Both are running the 32-bit version of Flash from Adobe’s yum repository.
  • Both are running the 64-bit version of Google Chrome from the beta download page.
  • I had run mozilla-plugin-config -i to create the 64-bit wrapper on both computers after updating Flash. (A security update came out yesterday.)
  • Flash works just fine in 64-bit Firefox and Opera.

I looked thoroughly at my home computer last night and came up empty. This morning I took another look at my work computer — the one where Flash actually showed up — and I think I’ve found it.

Chrome is using nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so according to about:plugins. The actual file is in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/. This system has two symbolic links to that file, one in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ and one in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/. IIRC Only one of these was present on my home computer.

So I think this will fix it:

ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

Run the command as root or using sudo.

I’ll check back tonight and update this entry to show whether it worked.

Update: Yes, it worked!

Posted in Computers/Internet, Troubleshooting | Tagged , , , , | 22 Comments

Updating…

  • Google Chrome beta on Linux seems to work well so far, though the Xmarks-for-Chrome beta mangled my bookmarks. Yay for backups. #
  • Busy download day: patches, Thunderbird 3, Chrome extensions, Chrome for Mac/Linux… #
  • It’s time to update Flash (and AIR) on your computer — Adobe’s released a security fix #

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What’s That Smell?

Cutting Gas

Somewhere in Richmond, California. It was, of course, on Cutting Blvd. This photo has been kicking around in a box since 2000, and I finally got around to scanning it.

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First Look Through Google Goggles

I tried out Google’s new Goggles app. Basically it lets you use the camera on an Android phone to do an image-based search. The examples include landmarks, book covers, artwork, logos, contact info, and places.

So I played with it for a bit at home tonight. It’s good at picking out book covers and logos, if you’ve got good lighting and a clear image. 50-50 at landmarks, at least when taking pictures of my monitor. In a couple of cases, it actually picked out the exact photo as a match. It’s not so good at objects, even obvious ones like a Coke can. I’ll have to try it out in the real world next.

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