On a mailing list, I saw a dumb question answered with a link to Let­Me­GoogleThat­ForY­ou.

Try this: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=is+there+a+Santa+Claus

Or this: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=exploding+coca+cola

In the old days, you might admonish someone to ask smart questions.

I'm about halfway through the 60,000-word Circe chapter of Ulysses, converting it to LaTeX.

For several years, I took the plaintext from the Project Gutenberg etext, prepared the script in XML, used XSLT to transform it into HTML, tarted it up with CSS, and then saved it as a PDF. You can see a screenshot above.

I'll write up tomorrow why I switched to LaTeX last year.

I mentioned in my post on re­Struc­tured­Text that I use a little command-line tool, pbcopy, to pipe the output into the clipboard. I finally found a similar tool for Linux, xsel.

• Mac: pbcopy (UTF-8 aware, unlike the built-in version of pbcopy) copies its input to the pasteboard (Mac name for the clipboard); pbpaste writes the pasteboard to stdout.
• Linux: xsel gets and sets the X selection.
• Windows: winclip reads and writes the clipboard in a variety of formats. Use -m for UTF-8 text. The winclip binary is available as part of the outwit package.

For a long time, I disliked Facebook. It seemed to consist entirely of annoying ac­quain­tances attacking me with vampires or sending me pointless “gifts”.

I've used Facebook more in the last month and it's been less annoying than I remembered it. I check it once or twice a day and see updates from people I know. More en­ter­tain­ing than ex­as­per­at­ing.

Twitter, though, has not clicked for me. Brevity is good, but Twitter is too minimalist. Stream-of-con­scious­ness ejac­u­la­tions. Opaque URLs disdaining ex­pla­na­tion. Feh.

Scott Hanselman has a different take on Twitter.

Maybe I need to “follow” a better class of people.

I'll go and yell at those damn kids to get off my lawn now.

I mentioned Copilot a while back as a way of helping someone by connecting remotely to their desktop.

CrossLoop is another such service. If you want to charge someone for helping them out, CrossLoop will take a cut. Otherwise, unlike Copilot, it's completely free. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it's Windows only: there's no Mac or Linux clients.

I've used it a couple of times to connect to my parents' computers in Dublin and Cape Town. It works well, though it's still painfully slow.

This morning's problem: My father was no longer seeing images in his Yahoo mail. Somehow, he had managed in Firefox to block images on his Yahoo mail server, and only on his Yahoo mail server.

For several years, Firefox has been my default browser. Firefox's extensions have always been its paramount feature for me, but its per­for­mance and developer tools came close. I'm very happy with it, for the most part.

The one thing that makes me unhappy is Firefox 3's CPU con­sump­tion. Time and again, I find it running at close to full uti­liza­tion of one CPU core on my MacBook Pro. The tipoff is usually the warmth of the metal case. Killing the Gmail tab tends to help, but not enough. In Firefox 2, the worst problem was the memory leaks. Within hours, it would have chewed up several hundred megabytes. Memory usage is …continue.

I've appointed myself as Frank's electronic executor. He had an active online life, spending over 20 years in Usenet newsgroups and selling hundreds of pieces of vintage costume jewelry on eBay.

We had a dry run for this in October, after he'd been in hospital for a month. The need to deal with his eBay customers had grown pressing. Lyndol is not tech­ni­cal­ly savvy and was unable to handle it. I had to work out how to get into his eBay, PayPal, and email accounts. For­tu­nate­ly, I was able to phone Frank in the hospital and ask him. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, he had forgotten many of the passwords and I had to …continue.

When my parents visited me in September, I bought them a second laptop and an external drive for backup. One laptop stays in Dublin, the other in Cape Town where they spend much of their year. Both laptops are in Dublin with me at present, so that I can clean them up and get them in sync. (I had to remove some very obscure registry settings to get one DVD drive working again. <sigh/>)

Their backup needs are simple. Both of them have web-based email at Yahoo!. The only personal data on either computer is photos. Inevitably the photos are out of sync between the two machines.

The WD Passport drive came …continue.

Emma had a chance to play with Jacob's Kindle (Amazon, Wikipedia) today, while I looked on.

The electronic paper screen is one of the big selling points. We found the text to be very readable, albeit black-and-white. It works very well for its primary use case—dis­play­ing book pages with minimal battery drain—but it's sluggish when updating menus.

I'm not impressed by the design of the case. The buttons on the side are far too big; the keyboard at the bottom is ridiculous. It would be in­ter­est­ing to see what Apple could do.

I've been using Stanza on my iPhone for the last couple of months, mostly to read Ac­celeran­do on the …continue.

Since the summer, I've been working on and off on a mobile site for Cozi. Chris, one of our interns, did a lot of the initial work. Getting it to a deployable state has been my primary focus over the last few weeks.

I'm happy to say that as of today m.cozi.com is in public beta. Will wrote a little about it at the Cozi Blog; take a look at the promo.

Currently, the mobile site supports shopping lists and the calendar. In the calendar, you can view, create, and edit your ap­point­ments. On the shopping page, you can update your shopping lists and cross off items as you move …continue.