Things I'm Liking

Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog ends today (kind of)

Posted 20 Jul 2008 by Laura Scott

Have you seen it yet? This is not something to miss! Personally I love the music, but the real charm is the humor. Neil Patrick Harris is the perfect comic hero/villain.

If you've not heard of this show, it's a little ditty by Firefly and Buffy creator Joss Whedon and cohorts, created as something to do while the writer's strike stalled all production in Hollywood.

Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.

The best show on the web, grasshopper

Posted 7 Apr 2008 by Laura Scott

I've seen a lot of interesting stuff on the web, but really, for a regular show with snap, among the best is Epic-Fu. Check this one out from a few weeks ago:

Firefox 3 making online life much nicer

Posted 24 Mar 2008 by Laura Scott

Today I downloaded and installed Firefox 3 Beta 4. I could not do it before, but now that the Web Developer tools are updated and Firebug has a 1.1 beta that works in FF3, that's enough for me.

I don't know about you, but on both Macs I use regularly, Firefox 2 was crashing all the time. Last night, while writing a blog post for BlogHer, my browser crashed at least a dozen times. On my Mac Pro, Firefox completely melted down -- twice -- requiring complete rebuild from the start, manually adding one plug-in at a time. But I had to stick it out because I need those developer tools. I cannot imagine working without Firebug.

The new UI is clean, and seems to take up a bit less space. And so far FF3 is fast. Me likes.

NetNewsWire now stops slaying your computer (and it's free, too)

Posted 21 Jan 2008 by Laura Scott

One of my biggest frustrations with NetNewsWire was that it scaled horribly. When starting the application, it would take several minutes to load -- not to refresh the feeds, but just to load all the feeds. My poor MacBook Pro would whirr away from all the work it took, and if on battery would drain it within 10 minutes.

Simply put, it was the laptop killer. I used it only very sparingly, and only when I needed to cull through a zillion posts for my BlogHer Contributing Editor gig.

More news, less junk. Faster But on January 9th, NewsGator Technologies updated the application with a major refactoring. Just check out the change notes:

Fixed a bug that prevented automatic sleep for some people.

W00t!

Is that spyware on your blog? (Or are you just glad to see me?)

Posted 13 Apr 2007 by Laura Scott

Recently my longest-used website statistics service, StatCounter, posted a boast about how they turned away big advertisers who wanted to embed spyware cookies into the StatCounter tracking code. They also hinted that another big web stats company did not say no, and is planting spyware into their clients' websites on behalf of undisclosed advertisers.

You install StatCounter to track visitors to your site NOT to open yourself and your visitors up to being spied upon by phantom advertising corporations.

It appears, however, that other players in the world of webstats were happy to take up this offer…

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

Yikes.

My 5p4m-less life

Posted 2 Apr 2007 by Laura Scott

I have a new technological love affair: SpamSieve. 200+ fewer love notes in my in-box every day.

Alas, I'll just have to do without all that helpful unsolicited information. I'll miss notices that I need to go tell my bank my bank account number. I'll not see all those customer inquiries about my eBay items I didn't realize I'd put up for auction. I'll be oblivious to the fact that I've been approved for a $347,978 mortgage. Warnings to avoid enhancement pills will escape my notice. Forget about cureall [sic] stores and veiny illustrations of male appendages. And the Nigerian Minister will just have to find another lucky soul.

I never realized just how much baseline stress receiving so much useless and offensive crap was causing me. My email is clean, and it's quite a lovely day today.

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