Sillybean

Help.

I run a Yahoo group at work. I inherited it from the creator, who presumably set us up there because while the university offers Listserv, it doesn’t provide us with the other goodies Yahoo offers—calendars, polls, file repositories, etc.

However, one departmental sysadmin with nothing better to do has blocked one of our members, saying [...]

If it’s true that these rumors are flying around in Austin, I can tell you that they haven’t flown over here. Yet.

(Via Charlie Stross, of all people. Not that I don’t expect him to find stories like this, but he lives very, very far from here.)

Update: Via Particles, a very funny rumor roundup.

Styles and templates in Word are nothing at all like CSS and Dreamweaver templates. For one thing, styles in Word aren’t kept completely separate from the document; instead they’re associated with a specific template. You can copy styles to other templates, or you can change the template on which a document is based.

Before I get [...]

I sat down with the Office 2001 Bible today and I think I’ve mostly figured out how to do stylesheets and templates in Word. I’ll write it up in detail this weekend. In the meantime, here’s a great FAQ/tutorial site by the Word gurus of the Office newsgroups.

UPDATE: Done.

There are two things Apple doesn’t like to tell you before you buy an iPod:

You can’t copy songs from the iPod back to the computer

Like any disk, the iPod must be formatted for either Windows or Mac, and while the Mac Finder will recognize the Windows disk, iTunes won’t

But on the eighth day, God created [...]

I’ve been wanting to know how this works for a while now—Word styles are kind of like CSS, but different. (Can I vague that up even more?) I finally found a couple of good articles: one from Microsoft, and Woody’s Office Watch. (Woody Leonhard is the author of the essential, and out-of-print, Word 97 Annoyances.)

This is too cool. Lockergnome got tired of waiting for Amazon to take advantage of RSS, so they’ve done it themselves. Now if you want to keep up with new books in, say, SF/F, history, biography, and chicklit; television shows on DVD; and soundtracks on CD, you can do it right from your favorite newsreader. [...]

There’s a lovely article over at A Whole Lotta Nothing on what makes Mozilla so wonderful. I use IE to check my designs and, occasionally, to read the articles at Ain’t It Cool News, since their crappy design crashes Camino for some reason. Other than that, I’m living in an ad-free, tabbed world. It’s great. [...]

The STC Font Browser gives you a list of all the fonts on your system and lets you preview text in the font you click. Lovely work. (via Design Meme)

This may well be my favorite color picker yet: Quick Color from Kohaistyle. (via Zeldman)

Three things are certain:

Death, taxes, and lost data.

Guess which has occurred.

A file that big?

It might be very useful.

But now it is gone.

Error messages

cannot completely convey.

We now know shared loss.

Windows NT crashed.

I am the Blue Screen of Death.

No one hears your screams.

No one hears me kicking my computer case either, except maybe the neighbors who share [...]

In the fine tradition of Freeloader Friday, I bring you software to help you make labels for all those CDs you’re laboriously stealing from the RIAA.

AudioLabel

CD-Cover Editor

Both for Windows.

Does anyone actually use dmoz.org without getting at least one ”timed out” error?

Some nutcase (I say that in the nicest way possible) has come up with a way to turn waste into oil, fertilizer, carbon black, and other useful stuff. Hell, this is better than fuel cells. (via Metafilter)

I have finally gotten my Tivo doing everything I want it to. It’s been in pieces on the floor for months; it’s a relief to put the lid back on and be done with it—without giving up any of the functionality I wanted. One piece that I needed was just released today, so I suppose [...]

The ISFDB has finally gone public on its new server, isfdb.tamu.edu. This is what happens when you get a lot of old Cepheids in the university’s IT divisions. I couldn’t justify it in my department, but I knew someone could – and it worked! Buy Jeff a beer!