LinkStash [linkstashbuttonsforoperawin764bit, linkstash] is still my favorite bookmark management tool. And Opera is still my favorite web browser. I’ve previously provided LinkStash buttons for Opera in Windows XP. They also work fine in the 32-bit version of Windows 7. But if you are using LinkStash and Opera in the 64-bit version of Windows 7, you’ll need new buttons.
Here they are:
Note that these assume you installed LinkStash in the default location.
Graphic designer Jonathan Jarvis has created a really cool animated feature describing the current credit crisis.
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
While he doesn’t cover everything in the feature, such as the impact of AIG’s rescue, the video is quite informative and entertaining (in a scary way) for it’s 11 minute runtime.
Double-click the video to watch it in “HD” on the vimeo site.
via The Consumerist
Need a quick chord or scale reference for guitar? Check out GOSK, aka the Guitar Online Survival Kit.
Very handy!
I've been using OpenWiki ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
extensively for the past four years, so I decided to contribute some (short and simple) source code back to the project. I'm not sure if anyone cares, but I found my code to be pretty handy. It is a simplified markup for table formatting, which can get pretty darned cumbersome when using large tables with the default markup.
The code is on the OpenWiki web site here.
My long time friend Brian has relaunched his web site in a blog format. Welcome to the blogosphere Brian!
When he's not coding games, Brian writes the defacto software for Eastern Indian astrology, called Jyotish Tools. His blog is here:
http://blog.jyotishtools.com/
I've been using Ameritrade as my online broker since 1997 (ah, the good old dot-com days). It has always been rock solid and reliable for me, as well as very affordable. This year, Ameritrade merged with TD Waterhouse, and after reading horror stories from people who suffered through the HarrisDirect / E*Trade merger, I was nervous that the classic, reliable Ameritrade would be destroyed or swallowed by an inferior broker system.
In fact, the new TD Ameritrade is as good as it was before, and in some cases even better. The web site is nearly unchanged, and is as sleek and fast as ever. But now trade data is available for download to Quicken on the day of the trade, rather than the next business day. New research tools are gradually coming online (I love the S&P Star Ratings list), and best of all, the trading fee for stocks has dropped by a couple of bucks.
Bravo to TD Ameritrade for the smooth transition. I hate to think of what would have happened if Ameritrade merged with E*Trade instead (as was considered last year).
Say, isn't it interesting that a company named "TD Ameritrade" is actually half-Canadian?
Last night, Timothy Noah posted an article on Slate.com about the Japanese asteroid probe Hayabusa, and the amazing science and pictures it has collected of asteroid Itokawa.
Until now, all I've seen in the press is how much trouble the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has had with the probe, most recently with a balky landing procedure. But no one ever mentioned how successful the Hayabusa mission has actually been. Check out the pictures and descriptions of the asteroid on the official web site. Wow!
http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/snews/2006/0602.shtml
Ever since I've had an internet connection with web access, I've read CNN.com each morning. Sadly, CNN's concept of journalism has gone downhill steadily over the past few years ... their concept of "news" now looks a lot more like Entertainment Tonight. Today is the last day I'll read CNN. With today's interesting news items such as the conviction of Enron executives, an Israeli border referendum, and Mastercard's IPO, CNN has chosen four of its top news links to be about the TV show American Idol. Wha?
For comparison, the BBC World News site has zero Idol links on their front page.
Goodbye CNN. Hello BBC.
(For the record, I've never watched a single episode of American Idol.)
This evening I went to the excellent USGS Earthquake tracking web site to find out if the rocking "thud" our house made tonight was a quake. Although the site lists earthquake info instantly on low-res maps, their precise location maps have always been old pastel-colored topo maps only a geologist could love.
But when I clicked on the link for tonight's quake (a minor 3.2 just a few miles away), I saw a link to Google Maps. And sure enough, the link showed a beautiful satellite view of the exact location of the earthquake. Nice! Odd how easy it is to notice the fault lines in satellite pictures when you are looking for them. And unsettling.
After about 5 years of no noticeable earthquakes, we've felt 5 or 6 minor quakes in the past year, all within about 15 miles of the house. Hmmm…
The slick A9 search engine from Amazon.com has switched from being based on Google and is now based on Microsoft's Windows Live search. Microsoft's search is pretty good, and quickly getting better, but I miss A9's nice automatic inclusion of images from Google Image Search.
A9 does, however, have less useful but interesting additional image search columns, including Flickr, and the… "Specimen Image Database", describe by A9 as follows:
Search for images of a specific taxonomic species. This is currently restricted to images of lice.
Added!
If you read this blog via Bloglines [bloglinesfeedfixed, bloglinesplummer], you may not have seen any posts from me in the past two months. I emailed the plumber a few times, and they determined it was a problem on the Bloglines side. Their support was responsive, and it appears that they managed to get the feed fixed.
Although crunch mode prevented me from posting much, my recent posts, if you missed them, are here:
December 2005: http://www.mikeyp.com/weblog/2005/12/index.html
January 2006: http://www.mikeyp.com/weblog/2006/01/index.html
February 2006: http://www.mikeyp.com/weblog/2006/02/index.html
If you use My Yahoo, you may have noticed new icons next to the titles of your news feeds today. Nice to see Yahoo support this!
You can add MikeyP.com to your My Yahoo page by clicking below:
In case you don't recognize the icon for MikeyP.com, the favicon I use is a picture of a Boss DS-1 guitar distortion pedal, created by Hide Itoh. Check out his other icons and software at http://www.pixture.com.
I've moved MikeyP.com's Technorati link from the sidebar to this blog post.
Technorati blogs that link to MikeyP.com
What's up with web sites suddenly changing their URLs without notifying users? First it was Wired News, and now Mainichi Daily Japan News has moved. The old URL simply gives a 404 error . I wonder if these sites measured the amount of traffic they lost by not forwarding readers to their new locations?
Long time Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki has started writing a blog. It has been almost fad-like for high-level muckity mucks to have blogs, but they usually end up posting droning entries that simply promote their company's strategy or product line. Luckily, Guy's blog is damned interesting and inspirational. Grab the feed and enjoy.
I've had Wired News bookmarked at the address http://www.wired.com/news for years. If you read their news regularly, you might have that URL bookmarked too.
A couple of weeks ago, a click to that URL started giving me page timeouts, 404 Not Found messages, 403 Forbidden messages, etc. I figured their server crapped out over the holiday weekend, and that it would return soon.
I just discovered that Wired moved their news to the front page of http://www.wired.com, but they did not redirect people from the old link. Isn't is incredible that the once premier magazine for internet culture can't properly manage their own links these days?
Recently, my cable modem service from Comcast suddenly felt a bit snappier. I remembered that they were planning to bump my service to 4Mb downstream, 384Kb upstream, so I wanted to test my current connection speeds. While I like the bandwidth meters over at http://www.dslreports.com, I don't like the fact that they require Java.
Fortunately, there is an excellent DHTML bandwidth meter over at Speakeasy.net, and it appears to be very accurate. Try it out!
My results:
Download Speed: 4255 kbps (531.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 337 kbps (42.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Caught on Digg
I got a chuckle when I saw the bloglines [bloglinesfeedfixed, bloglinesplummer] maintenance outage page today, featuring 'The Bloglines Plummer':
Wow, these guys have a huge archive of web browsers. I'd swear I tested against a 3rd of these when we launched our first corporate web site… via an FTP share on Netcom. 
(That was the era when I emailed Yahoo our new URL, and Jerry Yang replied with a 'thanks!')
Caught on digg
I've been looking for a decent RSS reader to use either on my PalmOS Zodiac or on my phone, but none of the apps out there right now seem to be ready for prime time. Since I can access the internet from anywhere on my Zodiac via bluetooth or WiFi, all I want is a basic reader that can grab my latest feeds and display them in clear text. It would be a real plus if it could sync with my list of feeds on bloglines [bloglinesfeedfixed, bloglinesplummer].
Well lo and behold, bloglines has a mobile view of their site! All I need to do is fire up http://bloglines.com/mobile in my PalmOS browser, and I've got all my feeds, ready to read in a mobile-viewable format. Perfect!
Somewhere along the line when I wasn't paying attention, Comcast High-Speed Internet revealed that they outsource their usenet feed (netnews.comcast.net) to Giganews, a respected and reliable usenet feed provider. For Comcast subscribers, there is a 2GB/month download limit.
I did not know that. 
Last month I downloaded 2GB of insert_random_binaries_here from netnews.comcast.net. Apparently, when you hit the 2GB limit, you are banned from the service for an undocumented period of time. Nice, thanks for the warning.
Maybe time to try an alternate service. http://www.usenet-provider.com/ has reviews of many public (fee-based) usenet newsfeed providers.
I wish Giganews had pricing options like AstraWeb or Teranews. Daily limits make a lot more sense than monthly limits.
Would anybody mind if I changed the default font for this blog to be the font from the Slayer logo?
Nah, I didn't think you would. (Link found on today's GMSV)
Recently, I noticed that it was taking forever for a new Internet Explorer window to open on WinXP. For convenience, I always left the Favorites sidebar open, and I realized that having the sidebar open was dramatically slowing IE's launch time. I suppose that for each new window, IE was iterating through the thousands of links I have in the Favorites folder, many of which are still in the folder root yet to be categorized.
Since organizing the Favorites folder is such a major pain anyway, I decided to dump IE's Favorites and find a new bookmark manager program.
LinkStash is an excellent bookmark manager that works with all major browsers, including FireFox. It's fast, easy to customize, easy to manage, and integrates with the browser seamlessly. And I'm actually catching myself searching my local bookmarks before searching Google. Highly recommended.
BTW, after you import your Favorites in to LinkStash, go ahead and delete everything in your Favorites directory (you can re-export them later, if you want). Check out the performance difference in IE!
Google Reader
Got Apex?
Wired News
Sci-Fi Wire
GameTab
Good Morning Silicon Valley
Mainichi Daily Japan News
BusinessWeek Online
NASA Cassini Probe
