Category: Computer bits

Computer stuff

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Urban Dictionary

While writing my last blog entry, I stumbled onto an interesting website. Urban Dictionary seems to be a rather unconventional dictionary website. According to the website,

The Urban Dictionary is a slang dictionary with words contributed by users.

Most of the content I’ve seen in it so far is slang that you probably might not find in other online dictionaries like Merriam-Webster, or those stupid words that people make up by adding suffixes to the end. You can add words to the dictionary (along with your definition), or you can add definitions to other words. Some of them make for pretty funny reading.

Definitely not a site for young kids to surf to though.

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Talk like a Pirate Day

My friend Rick emailed me and told me it was Talk like a Pirate Day. Aaarrr, matey!

And NASA has a very cool satellite picture of Hurricane Isabel. It shows very nicely just how large a storm it was, even if it didn’t pack as big a punch as it did swirling over the ocean.

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10 worst jobs in science

A posting at Slashdot.org led me to Popular Science‘s list of Worst Jobs in Science.

It’s a pretty interesting read, and with some jobs that, frankly, I never imagined anybody ever wanting to do. I’m sure they’re all jobs that need to be done, but definitely not by me.

I have to say though, I’m kind of surprised Postdoc only made it to number 10. Even though I’ve never been a Postdoc (yet), I’ve known plenty of them. I think I’d have put it at around 6 or 7.

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Changing looks with stylesheets

I’ve taken the 7 default style sheets that come with MovableType and added them in as alternate stylesheets to the template for my main page.

So, those of you with browsers that can deal with alternate style sheets like Mozilla or Firebird (don’t know if IE or NS do alt style sheets) can use the little Style button at the bottom right of your status bar (Firebird) or the View/Use Style menu (Mozilla) to switch between the different styles and see what the different CSS styles look like.

One of these days I’ll get around to learning enough CSS to create my own styles.

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Multi-function Camcorder

This is pretty cool. DVStreamer turns your DV camcorder into a tape drive and lets you back up 8.7GB of stuff off your computer. There were still a few bugs and glitches with the software according to the Tom’s Hardware Guide review, but it seems like it could be a really cool bit of software once the problems get worked out. And with DV tapes being relatively cheap, it could become an easy (albeit slow) way to backup your computer.