Apple's venerable AirPort Express includes "AirTunes" functionality to stream music wirelessly to it (it has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack) from a machine running iTunes. I use it all the time with an older set of computer speakers to take my music with me to the workshop and mud room. While I have the older model, the newer one is also a fine 802.11n base station.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 7:02 PM on July 1, 2008

Nthing Drupal. As for theming, there are base themes like Zen and blueprint that make it very easy to theme with a bit of CSS and some images.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:58 PM on July 1, 2008

Seconding The West Wing, and adding the older, even better Aaron Sorkin series: SportsNight.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:36 AM on June 18, 2008

Definitely update your version of Windows to at least Windows XP Service Pack 2. There were lots of good changes between SP1 and SP2, and I seem to remember WPA being among them. You should run Windows Update to get your machine to SP2. If that doesn't work, you can download the version of SP2 made for multiple computers here.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 8:41 AM on June 4, 2008

If you still have access to the WordPerfect program (via DOSBox or VM or whatever), I believe it included a converter program that would do batch TXT->WPD->TXT type conversions. I'm thinking 5.1 for DOS included it.

And seconding RTF as the format of choice, but only if the formatting means anything to you. Otherwise, TXT is the universal format; it's fast, small, and readable by darn near everything.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:35 PM on May 25, 2008

OP here. Thanks for the responses so far.

There is no formal agreement regarding work on this road. The way our house is situated, we actually use (relatively) little of the road. I, along with the one neighbor that we do have contact with, plow/snowblow our portions in the winter, which would amount to the first 1000' or so from the main road. It's also used by another party, as access to his barn and cattle, with heavy equipment from time to time. They don't live on... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 9:21 AM on May 21, 2008

I have similar problems on my MacBook Pro (Core2Duo). While the integrated Intel video may have a bit to do with it, this MBP has a Raedon X1600 in it -- not the problem here. And we certainly can't just chalk it up to "Apple hardware is crap"; I have a similar (actually, slightly less) ratio of problems with Apple hardware as with other vendors. I agree with mumkin; the problem is Flash on Mac OS X. Who deserves the blame for this (Apple or Adobe) is another show. I do not have... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:39 AM on May 16, 2008

mkb has it, above. I have different settings for the dozen or so servers that I ssh into on a regular basis. Each of these have a different background color, some have different fonts or sizes, and all of them have "ssh <user@server>" as the shell command. Under 10.4, these preferences were stored as files that could be indexed through Quicksilver, but I haven't been able to do this under 10.5. Instead, the different preferences show up in the right-click menu for Terminal's Dock... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:52 PM on May 15, 2008

Life Balance is great at that sort of thing, but it's way pricey.

HiveMinder has a "random" function, which, given your filters (ie., just stuff tagged with '@home', due today, etc., will give you a random task to do.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:22 PM on May 6, 2008

You'll probably have a hiberfil.sys on there, too, that's equal to your installed RAM for hibernation (though that might only be created when needed). Also, your pagefile will grow and shrink as needed, I think. There are also various registry files that won't be shown by explorer. Nevertheless, those files should not account for all the disk space that is missing.

Are you certain that you didn't create a new partition when you installed?... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 7:18 PM on April 26, 2008

Nth-ing the Reader's Digest book suggestion by Thorzdad. When I was growing up, we knew something was wrong in the house when Dad had his "Big Yellow Book" out. When I bought my first house, the updated version of that book was in my dad's hands as a gift to me. It's a good resource on the basics.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 11:56 AM on April 25, 2008

I love DEVONthink Pro, but it's the only solution to this that I've tried. I have a tendency to keep lots of PDFs and plain text files lying around; with DT they're at least lying around in one place and in some sort of organized fashion. It can do simple wiki-ish linking of content from one place to another, and has some rudimentary Access-like rows/columns database functionality, though its UI is rather painful to use for this sort of thing.

It's also nice that... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 4:16 PM on April 21, 2008

nthing manipulating the RewriteBase line in your .htaccess file. The issue is intimately related to Clean URLs. You should be able to test this by using the 'non-clean' URLs for a bit -- or example, trying http://www.example.com/test/?q=admin/settings/clean-urls and turning them off.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:01 PM on April 10, 2008 marked best answer

Now, you need to manipulate the RewriteBase, probably to

RewriteBase /test

The .htaccess that comes with Drupal should be fine, with the change above. As long as your Apache installation has mod_rewrite loaded you should be ok.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 7:02 PM on April 10, 2008 marked best answer

We like Nexuiz as a (free) Quake replacement at our house.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:32 AM on April 8, 2008

If you can network them, use UDPcast. I use this to deploy identical XP images to a series of laptops. It's multicast, so you can get all the receivers set up and they can all get the image from the sender at the same time. Fast.

I use my trusty Ultimate Boot CD for this, which has UDPcast and lots of other essential utilities on it.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 7:44 AM on April 6, 2008

Seconding bananas and cheese. It's a very strong memory of Mr. Rogers. There was a note left in his kitchen, along with some (Kraft) slices and bananas:

"Wrap cheese around peeled banana, and eat right away."
-- CB"

(Chef Brockett, the neighborhood baker)

Anyone else remember this?

It is quite tasty, and has the added benefit of your kids looking at you funny. :)
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:46 PM on April 2, 2008

1. You might find a combination of ChronoSync and Do Something When useful.

2. Take a look at The MissingSync for Blackberry. For the proximity stuff (and it's just super cool), look at Salling Clicker, though I don't see where it specifically supports your device. There's also Proximity, which will help you roll your own solution.

3. GadgetTrack and Orbicule are two companies that do those sorts of things. There was also a story that a thief... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 9:10 AM on March 21, 2008

Coda from the fine folks at Panic, is also a popular HTML editor for the Mac.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 11:09 AM on March 19, 2008

A good resource for slipstreaming and creating an "Unattended Installer Disc" is the reference guide. I've used this to create a disc so I can rebuild our loaner laptops at work with XP, custom drivers, Office, Firefox+extensions, Foxit, and some other apps. It is a bit of work, but worth it for me, as I can just boot with the CD and walk away (most of the app installs are off the network; you may need separate discs for some of the larger apps, like Office, or use a DVD).... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 9:33 AM on March 15, 2008

Every morning my MacBook Pro gets "docked" to an external mouse/keyboard/fw drive and a nice 24" Dell monitor. Lid closed, all day. As one expects from Apple, it's "slick by default." No issues with resolution switching, wifi vs. wired (thanks, MarcoPolo).

The comment about it having it's own uninterruptible power supply is a good one, and should be considered, particularly if you live in a place with frequent power anomalies, as I do. It's just... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:23 PM on March 14, 2008

Alton Brown's got this covered.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:33 AM on March 14, 2008

You may also be interested in Bob Price's Pre-Nicene New Testament, a compilation of other texts that were considered sacred before the Nicean council made the cuts.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:24 PM on March 3, 2008

Do the guys wear ties around the office? Having them all wear ties with the bottom 4"-6" cut off of them might be fun. You wouldn't have to use expensive ties.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:39 PM on February 21, 2008

TrueCrypt is great, and would be a great solution if you need something cross-platform. However, if this is a Mac only drive, and you never want to mount the encrypted image on a machine that's not running Mac OS X, then 'dance' has it right -- this capability is part of Mac OS X. The hdiutil command that dance links to will help you create an image that grows, or you can use Disk Utility to make one of a fixed size.

I use both -- I have a small TrueCrypt volume on my... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:38 AM on February 18, 2008

Steve and Leo covered this in Episode 82 of the Security Now! podcast. Pogue and Kirth are right: it's a dumb feature of Windows, as it's constantly looking for access points it's been to before.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 4:15 PM on February 7, 2008 marked best answer

I recommend Field General. Should work fine in DOSBox. My brother and I would play this simulator for hours. One if the things we liked the best about it was the stats that it would keep.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 4:56 PM on February 6, 2008 marked best answer

Well, tar+gz is the way to do it, at least on the *nix and Mac side of the fence. But echoing 7-Zip, for Windows. As has been stated, you can use it without compression, and test compression out in various formats to see what sort of space saving you can get. 7-Zip will also split the archive into chunks of either arbitrary or common (FD, CD, DVD) sizes.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:00 PM on January 2, 2008

George Winston (December is overplayed this time of year; nonetheless it's an excellent solo piano Christmas album) and Liz Story are my favorites.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 2:50 PM on December 16, 2007

I agree that it sounds like a permissions problem. More specifically, it sounds like neither app is writing things to ~/Library (Probably both ~/Library/Preferences and ~/L/Application Support). You may find that looking at the console log and system.log with Console.app (located in /Applications/Utilities) might give you some good clues.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 9:14 AM on December 14, 2007

Seconding (or thirding, or whatever) bzflag. It is a lot of fun, and should be fine cross-platform with your Mac and PC. For a more UT-ish open source shooter, try Nexuiz.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 1:00 PM on December 13, 2007

People love the sweet tea that I make, but I don't think any of them is a tea connoisseur. With that disclaimer, here's how I make it:

About two quarts of water put on the stove on high. This sits for nine minutes. On our stove, that heats the water to just below boiling.

Five Tetley tea bags to into the water, which is taken off the heat. Tetley only; I've tried others, but keep coming back to Tetley. The tea bags sit in this... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:03 AM on December 13, 2007

There's always Documents To Go and Excel. The best database software I had for the various Palm devices I carried around was ThinkDB, which I believe is now SmartList To Go from DataViz.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 11:32 AM on December 8, 2007

What I'm confused by is your use of "Downloads alias" above. "Downloads" shouldn't be an alias, it is a top-level folder under your home directory, on par with "Music," "Pictures," "Documents," and the like. Is your ~/Downloads folder actually an alias to ~/Desktop, by any chance?
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:45 AM on December 5, 2007

What about other files -- if you save a file on Desktop, does it appear in Downloads? What about vice versa? If you move a file out of one, does it move it out of the other? What I'm actually wondering is if these folders contain copies, or if they're behaving as one folder, with two different views.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:04 AM on December 5, 2007

I can't think of simple things that would be going on.

Do you have the Archive Utility (/System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility.app) or (my favorite) The Unarchiver set to move/extract files to the Desktop?

Or maybe Folder Actions or Hazel doing things for you?
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 7:33 AM on December 5, 2007

The favorite crunchy snack at our house is Cayenne Pretzels:

20oz bag of pretzel sticks
1pkt Ranch dressing mix
1tsp cayenne pepper
1tsp garlic salt
1c vegetable oil

preheat oven to 225.

Mix oil, dressing mix, and spices. Divide pretzels over two sheet pans. Pour oil mix over pretzels evenly, stir to coat.

Bake for an hour or so total, stirring and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:06 AM on December 4, 2007

Seconding doing a checkout and then a delete as grouse suggested. You put them in a repo so that you can track the changes. In order to do that, you've got to work from a locally-checked out copy anyway.

Maybe do a backup of the originals, put them on CD, sign and date it, and file it away. It'll be a neat thing to have when your software takes over the world.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 8:36 AM on November 24, 2007

Two onions, sliced thin. Pork chops. Salt. Pepper. Sage. Time (not thyme, tho that might be good, too).
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:48 PM on November 19, 2007

If you're on a Mac, Automator can be of help. With the "Create Thumbnail Images" action you can specify the size as well as the "suffix," which gets added to the file name before the extension.

There's also a "Scale Images" action, too.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 5:45 PM on November 19, 2007

Though I suspect eschatfische has nailed it, something else to look into would be bad fonts and bad font caches. They can wreak havoc on Mac OS X. You may want to consider installing a font manager like Font Explorer X, which has options to clean font caches in addition to better font management (imo) than the built-in Font Book.app.
posted to Ask Metafilter by eafarris at 6:01 PM on November 16, 2007