2nding the Rideau Canal. Some friends and I were boating along the St. Lawrence near Kingston a couple of years back, and made a day trip up through the first set of locks. Their boat was 21'-ish, but rough water was not a problem even out on the St. Lawrence -- we did stay along the north shore well east of the lake proper, though. Furthest west we went was to tie up overnight Confederation Basin in Kingston. No idea about the fishing.

We also took a trip up the Ottawa... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 12:45 PM on July 2, 2008

As a datapoint on warranty spam, I drive a '90 Camry that I was given by a family member and have received warranty spam calls. I don't think there's any legitimacy there, unless someone bought a car and gave them my phone number by accident.

Agree that these are misconfigured PBXes, though.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 12:34 PM on July 2, 2008

For skinning/custom layout support, it is really hard to beat ModX, even though it's still technically beta software. Granted, I haven't worked with other CMSes extensively (I tried to get into typo3 for a while but it was too much for my needs) but ModX hits the sweet spot for me.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 11:51 AM on July 1, 2008

What OS are you using? On Linux, Kino and Cinelerra are both nice apps (the former is friendlier than the latter; the latter is much more powerful but challenging to learn), but I'm unfamiliar with Windows and on OS X I've just used iMovie (download iMovie HD from Apple's site if you're unfortunate enough to be stuck with the newest version, which is more or less worthless).

On any of these platforms, you can use the command-line tool ffmpeg to split the audio from a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 8:45 PM on June 26, 2008

I know some guys who make games with Unity, and they tell me it rocks hard. Their games are certainly awesome. However, getting started does require licensing their toolkit, which ain't cheap.

Actionscript is -very- accessible. It's been so long since I learned programming from scratch that I'm having difficulty estimating what it would be like to learn Actionscript and how to compile with the Flex SDK's mxmlc from scratch, but I imagine it's on par with other languages,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 9:13 AM on June 25, 2008

You might try GoodReads which is a social-network oriented web application, but it meets your request that it track "books I want to read" and not just "books I own." I'd be interested in non-webapp software with this set of features too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 5:25 PM on June 22, 2008 marked best answer

Seconding the Hillegass book. However, if you're interested in something more niche than "Cocoa business-ish applications" (say, OpenGL, audio synthesis, etc) you may also want to pick up specific references on those tasks. Objective C is C plus object orientation, and shouldn't be that terribly foreign if you already know C++. The syntax is a bit wonky -- [objname methodname], for instance, but you get used to it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 5:23 PM on June 22, 2008

If you want to do pretty things in Flash, it is somewhat possible (assuming you don't mind some math) to create them using the open source Flex 3 SDK's mxmlc to compile .as sourcefiles (or .mxml, if you swing that way) into .swfs. It's how I make all my flash gizmos, these days.

Inkscape is not to the level of Illustrator yet, but it meets most of my needs.

I could never use Gimp instead of Photoshop, though. That's one place Adobe gets my... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 6:13 PM on June 20, 2008

I know Adobe Contribute allows this, but it isn't really a traditional CMS and is very much non-free and non-free-software.

I've personally done projects with ModX, which has a "quickedit" bar that appears on front-end pages when the user is logged in to the backend. From this bar, you can open a separate window to edit the page content in a TinyMCE instance, which is kinda-sorta-maybe WYSIWYG.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 11:10 AM on June 20, 2008

Yeah, nthing Fry's for parts if you have one handy. I just recently discovered them, and, wow. It's like Radioshack before Radioshack sucked, but warehouse-sized.

You might try reading the MAKE: Blog, which often has beginner-friendly projects. Hackaday also has projects, but they're generally more complex and sometimes not as thoroughly documented. I also really recommend Lady Ada (Limor Fried)'s homepage, which has a bunch of exceptionally... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 8:02 PM on June 14, 2008

I retired my 1.25ghz 12" G4 last Christmas when I upgraded to a shiny new MBP. Even though the speed is nice, I really miss the compact form factor. I upgraded it because it was starting to feel sluggish doing crazy development work -- compiling from source, running the Eclipse IDE, editing huge graphics in Photoshop. If all you're doing is surfing, chatting and wordprocessing, you'll be more than happy with a G4. I'd maxed out the RAM in mine (1.25gb), but otherwise it was all stock.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 8:14 PM on June 9, 2008

Thanks for all the links! One thing I'm noticing is that none of these tools support conflict detection/conflict resolution except via a locking mechanism. I'm particularly interested in a tool that provides something akin to svn/git's conflict-resolution mechanism, where the software can merge two users' versions of a file, assuming that each user has edited a different part of the file, or can detect overlapping/conflicting edits and allow the users to reconcile them. Does such a thing exist... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 3:13 PM on June 6, 2008

[edit: it looks like not even Sharepoint supports svn-style conflict resolution except with another expensive add-on plugin. I may be chasing a product that doesn't exist. ]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 3:16 PM on June 6, 2008

Wow, a question I'm very qualified to answer. I grew up just south of Frederick and spent most of my teenage years trying to find something interesting to do in Frederick.

But okay, seriously. Caroll Creek Linear Park is kind of interesting. It runs through downtown; you could pick it up over by the Delaplaine Center for Visual Arts just south of Caroll and East Street (check out the bridge over the creek next to the Delaplaine building; it's painted with a very... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 12:43 AM on June 5, 2008

I will 2nd Tajitu. Also, it just occured to me that there is an excellent Vietnamese restaraunt on the corner of S. Market and 7th, I believe. It might be further south than that, actually, but it's on the northeast corner of S. Market and something, across the street from an interesting "park" with a fountain. Great food to be had!
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 6:37 PM on June 5, 2008

If your girlfriend has a car and doesn't mind providing transportation, I'd shoot for BWI. Dealing with IAD has never been a pleasant experience. Hassle in the terminal tends to make up for any benefit due to physical proximity to DC. Then again, if you're being picked up, you may be able to avoid the long-term parking hassles I've dealt with.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 12:54 AM on June 5, 2008

The idea that AT and T could detect when you signed your phone onto an European network with a non-AT and T SIM sounds like bunk to me, but I am not a mobile expert. The folks over at Howardforums are, though, so I'd suggest asking that question over there.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 8:04 AM on May 27, 2008

Yeah, I nth Arduino. It's based on AVR-GCC for the Atmel AVR series of microcontrollers, which are used frequently in The Real World, so any skills you learn with Arduino will still be valid if you decide to move beyond it, and it's a great platform to get started with. The first few tutorials on their site deal explicitly with LED control.

Depending on how many lights you want to control and how, you may eventually graduate to using, say, I2C to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 7:33 AM on May 27, 2008

I haven't used this yet, but take a look at Papervision 3d. It's free and opensource, but I'm not sure about the 3d model formats it supports, but it's a starting point.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 2:32 PM on May 18, 2008

Oops, you should probably look at the blog first -- the front page is just a (quite pretty) demo. (There's a non-obvious "take me to the rest of the site" icon in the upper-left corner).
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 2:39 PM on May 18, 2008 marked best answer

Agreed -- if you're loaning money to a friend, write it off. If you can't afford to write it off, and want to keep a friend, don't loan the money. There's nothing like the inflexible terms of a repayment agreement to screw with a friendship, from everything I've been told.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 10:23 AM on May 18, 2008

You could be me, in a lot of ways. I think you may want to work on being more flexible and less judgmental when it comes to evaluating people as friends. I think your criteria make a lot of sense for choosing a girlfriend, not so much for choosing friends with which your interaction isn't quite so intense/prolonged. You don't have to be an ideological clone of your friends, just respect them even with their differences.

I could basically run down the list of your... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 7:45 AM on May 16, 2008

I second toomuchpete -- if you're making decisions about a commercial film and you have to ask these questions here, you have a series of issues that need to be addressed before you go anywhere near production. Hiring an industry-saavy lawyer is the first step to addressing them. The cost may seem high, but it'll seem low relative to the cost of, say, having shooting held up for a day while you wrangle permit issues (during which time you may have to pay the entire crew to stand around doing... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 5:18 PM on May 15, 2008

"So you're saying the best thing about Phoenix is leaving?" -- a friend of a friend at dinner the other night, when we were all discussing why the Phoenix contingent lived in Phoenix.

Just moved to Tempe last fall. I'm not exactly a big fan, but that may involve issues with my own situation moreso than the city itself. I have noticed that if I get out of the city once a month or more and go hiking or just drive somewhere else and have a look around, I stay... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 1:16 AM on May 7, 2008

Gungho is right. DO NOT write anything else to the external drive. For DIY recovery, I'm seconding Disk Warrior.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 5:10 AM on May 1, 2008

I have had no problems with a variety of LaCie D2 drives that I've used over the past four years, and I've put mine through a lot of use/abuse. I'm not sure what would affect lifespan, but I can say that my usage pattern is something along the lines of "don't plug in for weeks while doing things that don't need the data I have stored on the external, plug in, use for a few weeks, repeat." The intermittent use might work in my favor, but I have no idea.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 4:11 PM on April 20, 2008

I think Loulou's right -- you don't have a home by default, you make one. I've always considered "home" to be where I have the strongest ties at any given time, typically where I'm living/working.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 12:13 PM on April 10, 2008

I am not a network ninja, but I'm pretty sure what you're looking for is called "bridging" -- connecting the two separate segments of the network (wifi and wired) so that they share the same address-space and data. Google finds me this article but it's a bit dated and I don't have enough hardware on hand right now to try it out.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 2:30 AM on April 10, 2008

Oops, comments in the link I just posted suggest that the solution presented there will NOT, in fact, solve your problem. However, network bridging is what you need to do. I don't immediately see any other good solutions on Google -- everybody seems to be talking about Internet Sharing, which will not actually bridge the networks (it does NAT, Network Address Translation, instead). I'll keep googling, though!
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 2:35 AM on April 10, 2008

If by "DS" you mean "Nintendo DS", the software you're looking for is called "MoonShell." It comes preloaded on most of the Slot 1 homebrew cards available. I haven't yet bought one, but my research suggests that the M3 DS is generally liked, and there are a couple of others. One thing -- Slot 1 homebrew carts can't play GBA homebrew, and don't have the extra slot 2 RAM that some of the PassMe + Slot 2 solutions have (useful for certain DS software).
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 3:12 PM on April 7, 2008 marked best answer

BibDesk, though it is technically a BibTeX-based package, works great for me. I made my own Word-compatible export template for the cite styles I need to use, and have been getting by alright. I suspect EndNote is probably nicer and smoother, but BibDesk is free and does lots of neat things like organizing PDFs of papers, which is a big deal for me.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 12:28 AM on March 27, 2008

Let me reiterate: "discount camera places" tend to be scams. ResellerRatings.com is your friend. Really.

I just buy from B&H most of the time. Sure, they're a bit pricier, but they're a known quantity.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 7:20 PM on March 11, 2008

Yeah, nthing the "$30/day late fee is draconian" response. I am not a landlord, but I am a renter and I have friends and relatives who are landlords. Of four apartments I've rented, the late fees have tended to be 10% extra rent if paid within a week, or $50, in that range. I've never paid rent late, but that seems reasonable to me. $150 for 3 days.. not so much.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 10:20 PM on March 10, 2008

That machine will definitely edit video, given a Firewire PCI card and the right software.

Keep in mind that DV is about 12GB/hour, so if you actually capture all 40 hours at once you'd need 480gb storage plus some extra for rendering final output. You could do it with significantly less space if you were fairly ruthless in deciding what not to capture, though -- it comes down to the cost of storage vs. the "cost" to you of -not- capturing everything you want,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 11:07 PM on February 27, 2008

You should be fine with a big internal IDE drive. Don't worry about SATA (small additional expense) or SCSI (big additional expense) in this context. I'd go for 500mb to start, for the reasons I outlined above.

Agreed that buying memory from Dell is silly. Find out the specs of the memory they want to sell you (this should be documented online) and buy similar RAM from NewEgg.

If you're looking at DDR memory, which I imagine you are for that age... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 1:22 PM on February 28, 2008 marked best answer

I'm an OkCupid user, myself. There you can actually tell it to show you only people who are, say, atheist or agnostic (or muslim, in your case?). It also allows people to specify how serious about religion they are, from "laughing about it" to "very serious about it." That kind of intel might help you make informed decisions.

I completely sympathize with your complaint, though, when it comes to meeting women "in the wild." I just had a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 8:42 AM on February 27, 2008

Todbot and Krrrlson have pretty much covered everything I'd add about battery issues. I like rdr's suggestion, and I think you could do the "turn off during daylight" thing pretty easily with a photoresistor and a transistor (adding maybe $1 to the cost of each throwie). The question with some of these additions is: does the added cost, size and assembly time outweigh or overshadow the simplicity and cheapness of the original design that makes throwing a couple of hundred of them... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 1:51 PM on February 23, 2008

I carry phone and sunglasses/glasses case in the left front, keys in the right front, wallet in the right back. I don't live in a metro area where I'm likely to get pickpocketed, though based on the comments above if I ever move to one I will be rethinking where I keep the wallet.

Also, nthing "NO CELL PHONE HOLSTER." Ya, rly.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 9:07 AM on February 22, 2008

Nope. Get your own place, and your own cell phone.
posted by b1tr0t at 7:45 PM on February 18 [+] [!]

Quoted for emphasis.

Your father's actions are not okay in any sense of the word. I remember reading your original post and being upset by the way your father treated you, but I didn't (and still don't) know what productive suggestion to make other than take the leap and get out on your own.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 7:56 PM on February 18, 2008

The free version of Finale, Finale Notepad, should meet your needs. It's pretty much crippled if you want to do anything other than place notes on a staff and play them back within the same software (no MIDI export, etc) but for that one purpose, it's easy and free-as-in-beer.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 8:48 AM on February 18, 2008 marked best answer

I've always had very wide/bony hips, for a guy. The only person I ever remember commenting on it was my most recent ex, and that was in a "huh, that's interesting" sense rather than the "oh, that makes you poor boyfriend material" sense. Turned out we weren't a good match, but my hips didn't have anything to do with it. You shouldn't worry so much.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 10:55 PM on February 17, 2008

I have an almost-brand-new Macbook Pro that I use as a mobile desktop -- I have an external KVM at home and an external KVM in my office, and it usually lives on the desk in one of those places. If I'm feeling lazy and want to surf in bed, I grab my 500 Mhz / 256mb RAM G3 pismo. It won't do anything other than run Adium, Firefox and Terminal (I <3 the ssh..) but it meets my needs in that context fine. I don't recommend you go this low-end because there are definitely higher-end low-end... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 10:22 AM on February 16, 2008

And of course I missed the Windows requirement comment above while skimming the thread! Sorry! If that's the case, I'd go with a refurb Mini, but the other posters are right re: the added complexity of dualbooting. Sorry for the doublepost!
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 10:26 AM on February 16, 2008

You might want to look into Decision Center for a Desert City / Decision Theater at ASU. They're more concerned with collaboratively using / building mathematical models than building 3d environments, but they use a VR system for some scenarios too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 12:27 AM on February 15, 2008

If she's willing to drive about an hour, there're some relatively short, picturesque hiking trails at Lost Dutchman State Park, which adjoins Tanto National Forest; it's off the 60 around Apache Junction. I've hiked a couple of them, and they're pretty great. There are longer trails, too, in Tanto -- my roommate and several friends went on an overnight hike/camping trip last weekend.

If she ends up taking the longer trip to Sedona, I recommend she also stop by... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 5:48 PM on February 13, 2008

The issue has to do with Rosetta, the technology OS X uses to emulate the functionality of the old PowerPC processors (like in your Powerbook G4) on your new Intel processor. The bottom line is that Intel chips and PowerPC chips function differently, and Apple created a system that allows software compiled for PowerPC to run (albeit slowly) on Intel. It works okay for software that isn't too processor-intensive (I run Word 2004 on my MBP, for instance), but your games are probably too much for... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 10:39 PM on February 5, 2008

I do art non-professionally, so take this with a grain of salt: You will want a good scanner instead of or in addition to a Wacom tablet. Wacoms are great (I have a cheap one and it still works well for me) but if you're accustomed to drawing on paper, there's no reason not to draw on paper. Ink, scan, and just submit the scan electronically. As several others have said above, a decent scanner will generate fine results.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 10:10 AM on February 4, 2008

I'll be the first to admit that I'm probably not the guy you'd want to ask (poor luck in love, much of it my fault). That said, my perspective is thus: She let you go to do her thing. Do your thing. If she comes back and you're in a place where going back to her is attractive to you, do it. If she comes back and you find yourself involved in a satisfying relationship with someone else -- well, that's your choice to make, and I don't envy you it because it won't be easy, or pretty. But don't... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 8:50 PM on January 29, 2008

I have a Forte VFX-1. It was very expensive and, after the novelty wore off, not particularly fun, at least not with 1995-era games and video hardware (And, since it used a proprietary ISA card that connected only to old PCI video cards, not forwards-compatible.. bleh). I suspect this is one of those things that works better when you can borrow a friend's to extract the novelty value and then be done with it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 8:45 AM on January 29, 2008

Yes, the new BSG starts with the miniseries -- you'll be pretty lost if you start season one without watching it first.
posted to Ask Metafilter by Alterscape at 9:22 PM on January 27, 2008