Kate’s asked me to pass the word along: she’s moving and looking for a new place to rent. Now, normally I don’t just post every classified ad that comes across the transom – but Kate’s special. She’s the community moderator at ChangeEverything.ca, one of the gentlest folks Vancouver has to offer… and a catch for any landlord.

Here’s her announcement (and be advised, she’s serious about the… Read more...

• Noise to Signal cartoon in Russian
  It’s the first sighting in the wild of a Russian translation of an N2S cartoon… and gloriously enough, it’s on the Drupal Russia site! (I’d love to leavea comment… unfortunately, my Russian isn’t good enough to figure out how to get past the captcha.)
  (tags: n2s socialsignal drupal russian taxonomy cartoon

• Flip
  Oh, clever: this app takes characters and finds a symbol that looks like their upside-down equivalent. ˙ʇxǝʇ uʍop-ǝpısdn looɔ ʇǝƃ noʎ os
  (tags: application text fun generator flip)

I opened my favourite collaborative editor, SubEthaEdit, and braced myself. Argh – there it was: that dialog box asking me if I wanted to allow this application to accept incoming connections.

I’d already followed Apple’s instructions for “whitelisting” applications: adding them to the firewall’s list of apps that are allowed to answer when the outside world comes a-callin’. I’d done it, not only for SubEthaEdit, but also for iChat… Read more...

Snow in late March on Richards,
originally uploaded by Alex and Rob.

Every once in a while, the weather smacks us upside the head to remind us that a) climate change might be more than just an idle theory, and b) Vancouver’s still part of Canada.

(Yes… Read more...

Talking to a friend this afternoon, I mentioned how Henry Ford supposedly once said that if he’d asked the public what they’d wanted, they’d have said “faster horses.”

The friend’s sober response, with a nod to climate change: “Maybe he should have.”

My undelivered thought-of-it-five-minutes-later riposte: :”Depends on whether you’d rather be knee-deep in sea water or horseshit.”… Read more...

Ever wondered what happens when a company decides it wants to start drinking the proprietary champagne instead of the open-source Kool-Aid?

Meet Meraki, makers of the mesh-network hardware behind cool initiatives like FreeTheNet.ca, and until very recently enthusiastic friends of people who wanted to install open-source firmware in their products:
…This could be installed in the commodity Meraki hardware which greeted you with a friendly and encouraging… Read more...

Back in the 1993 federal election, then-Prime Minister Kim Campbell was quoted as saying that elections are no time to discuss serious issues. (If memory serves, her comment was actually much more nuanced, but was dumbed down to that pithy, sensational and damaging phrase – which kinda proved her point.)

Last week, Barack Obama challenged that idea – with a scope and, yes, audacity that was nothing short of… Read more...