Have you ever been outside walking somewhere while it began to rain? I have, and didn’t like it. That’s why I created Remember The Umbrella – a new online service that will email an alert when the forecast is predicting rain in your area.
How does it work?
The site is fairly simple – it connects to the National Weather Service (this is why it’s just United States only at the moment) to get the precipitation percentage for the next 12 hours, and emails the user at the correct time if that percentage is over the threshold that he or she set.
Where is it going from here?
There are many ways to improve the service. First and foremost is TXT messages. Then there will be more features like smart phone apps, “shut your car windows” on-demand warnings, and other things.
One of my pet peeves is when people post links or URLs in prominent locations (posters, advertisements, etc) with the “/index.htm” or “/default.php” or “/default.aspx” or any of the derivatives of these. Please people – with very few exceptions, URLs with default.htm or index.htm or things like those do not have to have those parts of the URL!
What is better than watching a movie in your backyard on a nice warm summer evening … on a huge screen!
We’re approaching the two year anniversary of when Doug, Nathan, Joe, Kelsey, and I built a huge backyard screen for the showing of High School Musical 2 on August 17, 2007. Check out the movie below, see the article on Lifehacker, and get ready for another showing on the huge screen sometime this summer.
UPDATE: These instructions only work on older versions (10.0.22.87) of the Flash Player – there is an updated, easier solution here (via Lifehacker).
If you have two monitors like I do, you may like to have full-screen flash videos playing in your second monitor. There is a problem, though, that as soon as you click in a different window, the Flash goes to non-full screen. In other words, you can’t browse and have full screen flash on your second monitor.
There is a fix for this “security feature,” though. (Disclaimer: Adobe claims that this feature of auto-minimizing is integral to computer security, so proceed with caution)
Make sure you have Flash player version 10.0.22.87 (you can see this version information here).
Open NPSWF32.dll (probably located at c:\Windows\system32\Macromed\flash\npswf32.dll) in a hex editor.
Go to address 0×136340 and change byte 74 to EB.
I have tried this, and it works great. Original source here.
Santa brought me a new laptop for Christmas, a Lenovo ThinkPad T400. I have traditionally been a Dell guy, having an investment in their power adapters, batteries, and docking stations. This time, though, I decided to go with a more conservative model, trading in some “style points” for better performance. I decided on the T400 because of great reviews and the excellent reputation of the ThinkPad line.
One interesting thing about dealing with Lenovo, the Chinese company who purchased the PC division of IBM in 2005, was the shipping log. The laptop actually originated from China (Shenzhen to be exact). The shipment went from China to Alaska, was held up in customs, then to Kentucky, to Illinois, and finally to my house. Luckily Lenovo shipped the laptop via expedited shipping so it didn’t take as long as it could have.
So far I love the laptop. It is very solid, and the feel of the keyboard is amazing. One “small thing” that I have noticed, however, is the placement of the left Ctrl button. On my old Dell laptop and on most desktop keyboards the Ctrl button is the leftmost buton on the keyboard, making it easy to locate when I need to use it for a shortcut (Ctrl+c for copy, Ctrl+t for new tab, etc.). On this laptop, however, the button on the bottom left is the Fn button. How entirely weird! I have to re-train my hand for my keyboard shortcuts, which is a small thing, but still annoying. Sometimes the smallest things are the most noticeable.
Update: Lenovo has finally listened to the community and began a discussion on their Design Matters Blog about this issue.
Have you ever been outside walking somewhere while it began to rain? I have, and didn’t like it. That’s why I created Remember The Umbrella – a new online service that will email an alert when the forecast is predicting rain in your area.
