Thees murneeng, vheele-a I ves perooseeng thruoogh edduns.muzeella.oorg und sloorpeeng doon cuffffee-a in bleery fug ierned frum steyeeng up vey tuu lete-a, I nuticed a Fureffux ixtenseeun celled Bork Bork Bork! vreettee by Unthuny Hooe-a thet elloos yuoo tu trunslete-a zee text ooff uny veb pege-a intu bork-speek, in oozeer vurds tu meke-a it reed leeke-a it ves vreettee by zee Svedeesh Cheff frum zee Mooppet Shoo feme-a.

Zee Svedeesh Cheff hefeeng beeeng my ell-time-a fefureete-a mooppet, I ves cumpelled tu instell it immedeeetely und seence-a zeen hefe-a beee borkeeng ell murneeng lung in geeddy deleeght. Thees ixtenseeun rooles. Bork Bork Bork!

Translation:

This morning, while I was perusing through addons.mozilla.org and slurping down coffee in bleary fog earned from staying up way too late, I noticed a Firefox extension called Bork Bork Bork! written by Anthony Howe that allows you to translate the text of any web page into bork-speak, in other words to make it read like it was written by the Swedish Chef from the Muppet show fame.

The Swedish Chef having being my all-time favorite muppet, I was compelled to install it immediately and since then have been borking all morning long in giddy delight. This extension rules.

This evening, I made a switch to a new plug-in to handle my Technorati Tags. Since the move to WordPress 2.0, I’d been having problems with my old tag manager, Bunny’s Technorati Tags and Ultimate Tag Warrior came highly recommended, so I decided to give it a try and see. Immediately I noticed that it was in a much bigger league and even though Bunny’s has just recently been fixed with 2.0, I made the call and switched.

So I’m liking this new plug-in and everything looks sunny and joyful, except for the fact that all my tags that were assigned in the past via Bunny’s are no longer around. That sincerely blows, but whatever. There’s a way to rescue them, but as of this moment a bit to A.D.D. to manage it slogging through help files and forums. When I do get it down, I’ll note how I did it here. For now, I just wanted to post something, just to see UTW in action. Sweet.

Update:

Now I am seriously impressed. Within ten minutes of posting this entry, the creator of UTW popped on by and clued me in on how to rescue all my old tags. That is way cool. Thank you Christine D. UTW is a great plug-in and it’s developer made my day!

I just finished installing what’s aiming to be the final release candidate for WordPress 2.0. I’ve been waiting a long time for this update to come out and after quickly playing around with it I can say that installation was no more troublesome that previous updates. A few minutes of uploading and about 3 seconds upgrading. Everything seems to be working and already I’m seeing a lot of cool shit I like.

The whole revamp of the post writing GUI is definitely the most advanced and just plain fucking cool shit I’ve seen in any blog software. The collapsing menus help keep things from getting cluttered while the GUI that handles the actual formatting and input has been simplified to echo any rich text editor. If you’ve sent and html email or used an MS Word-like editor, you’ll find yourself in familiar territory. Instead of squinting at your posts, trying to read a paragraph, all broken apart by links and image urls, the post input box now displays
One of my more favorite improvements is the addition of a post preview using the actual CSS formatting from your live site so as you write your post, you can see it as it would appear on your site live. Instead of squinting at the post text box, parsing slowly through links and image urls as you try to write your post, images now appear directly in the draft as you type it and links are simply highlights blue and underlined. It’s perfect. Everything’s all drag and drop, it’s mind-blowing. I immediately had to start this post to test it out.
I’ve encountered very few issues. most I am sure are there due to the fact that I still need to go over the changelog and browse the documentation. However, my favorite FireFox spell-checking plugin, ASpellFox will only perform if I turn off the rich editing in the post. It’s not a big deal, though. It still works. Of actual WordPress plugins, I notice that only two so far that are not working well and need to be disabled until a future version update. Any disappointment over quirks or learning curves are smothered by sheer coolness. This is a good update.

I’ve always wanted to be able to make flash games, but it’s one of those things I’ve put off. It’s complicated, you have to learn action script and unless you know what you’re doing, it’s impossible to get working and likely looks stupid. Lately, after seeing and playing some particularly good games, I decided to swallow my pride and take a stab at it. Now several fucking horrid, brain squeezing hours later I have completed my first and possibly last flash game. It’s basic, it’s boring, but what do you expect for a first try. Hey, it works! Anyway I’ve posted it here to give you a few seconds of diversion.

Ladies and gentlemen, my first flash game:

Daveb recently got around to installing Tor, an anonymous proxy surfing agent. The project’s homepage describes it as:

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and more. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going. This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to figure out who and where you are. Tor’s technology aims to provide Internet users with protection against “traffic analysis,” a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.

Granted, to most people, this makes no sense or seems hardly worth it, but trust daveb when he tells you that nothing quite thrills him as seeing his IP address, geographic location and machine name change with each request sent to or from his browser or whatever the hell he configures to work with Tor. It’s the shit. It’s open source, free, available on all platforms and is backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who are all a bunch of good people. Daveb recommends.

Bringing William Gibson books and the Matrix just a little closer to reality, Sony nailed a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.

That’s right, you geeky fucks. You don’t even need surgery to get the jack implated into your head (you would have done it anyway, daveb sympathizes).

The technique, achieved by shooting ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce “sensory experiences” such as smells, sounds and images has a variety of applications outside of the video game and entertainment industry, not that you really cared.

Since the sensory data is beamed directly into the brain, images could be sent to the blind from cameras they’d wear. What the cameras were streaming would bypass their dead eyes and hit their brain directly, effectively making them no longer blind. The same could apply to deaf people and other such impaired individuals.

Sony researcher Thomas Dawson described it as “The pulsed ultrasonic signal alters the neural timing in the cortex. No invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live and/or recorded images or hear sounds.”

Is that some cool-ass shit or what? Daveb will be first in line once that shit is mass-produced. It damn well better be during his lifetime, too. He’s a big Matrix Online junkie (sever:”linenoise“, name:”deepnutz“), but fuck that, he wants the real thing!

Lately, daveb has been ruminating on his geekiness. He’s quite violently defensive of it. He’s fucking proud to be an alien from another planet and as far as he’s concerned, the weirder he gets, the better.

His recent foray into Linux has sparked a number of ideas for future projects to further distance himself from society and it’s acceptable lifestyles. TO start things off, daveb needs a computer in every single room of his apartment of doom. He’s already running two, but why stop there. This plan includes the bathroom and daveb is currently trying to fathom how to realistically waterproof a keyboard, monitor and mouse for the shower of doom.

Next item on the geek list is a homemade degausser. For those of you not in the know, a degausser is basically just a really powerful electromagnet used to blast magnetic memory storage (hard drives, etc.) and permanently wipe it’s contents. It can be assembled for only a few dollars with items from Radio Shack and a hardware store. Hidden in or near the exit to his apartment of doom should protect the information on his drives from being compromised by theft or seizure. Somebody tries to remove the machine and ZAP, all the info is gone. not that daveb has anything particularly sensitive on his hard drives, unless you count game saves in which case you win an award for being a bigger loser than daveb. He just likes the idea of it. Degaussers are cool.

Third and last on his current list of geeky things to do (this last being the one item that honestly will likely never see fruition) is to assemble a pneumatic cannon. An air compressor, a big old metal tube to serve as cannon, tripod and plenty of ammo in the form of paint cans filled with cement. That way when they come for daveb, shit will get taken care of, evil dictator style. He’ll just point at the sound of the bullhorn and fire through the walls. Original geeky gangster style (O.G.G). Once again, not that daveb needs this in the literal sense, but he does crave it, for his own reasons. However, daveb’s not sure if that’s exactly legal in NYC (or if there’s even a law covering homemade cannons) and he’s not about to risk getting thrown in the slammer for building one, so whatever, whenever.

Over the past two evenings, daveb has struggled, swore, wept and bled, finally installing Linux on an extra pc he had kicking around. It wasn’t exactly easy and required purchasing a new network adapter, but he’s finally got Ubuntu up and running. Currently he has a one computer running XP in his bedroom and this Linux install running in his living room, so he can be lazy and watch TV, hopefully bringing some redeeming value to the fact that he pays a shitload for cable, yet turns on the TV only once about every two months or so. At this moment, daveb is lazing on his couch, typing this post and waiting for Law & Order to start. It is decadant, it is geeky and it is good.