Joe Gross

I’ve got a terrible short-term memory. I forget names, dates, places, you name it. I’ve learned to adapt by carrying a little notepad around with me everywhere I go. Any time I run across something I need to remember I write it down rather than trust my swiss cheese of a brain.

I’m also a fan of cargo shorts. I found some I liked and bought one (or two) of every color. The notepad lives in the right cargo pocket. Of course notepads aren’t any good without a pen, and finding a quality spiral bound notepad that will hold a pen isn’t easy. I found a decent one made by Boku that fits a .2mm Sanford Ultra-Fine Uniball in the spiral perfectly.

The problem is that after a few months the notepad starts falling apart and beings to look not-so-fresh. I recently discovered the fabulous Moleskine notepads, but alas, none of them have a spiral to hold a pen. Here’s a quick hack to make your own pen holder for your favorite Moleskine model.

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I’m going to start posting a bunch of my ‘cheap hack’ UNIX tricks that I’ve picked up over the years. This first one is a DSL watchdog script.

How many times have you gone on vacation to find your DSL has burped, requiring a power cycle of your DSL modem, and leaving your home boxes (and email) stranded? If only you could train your cats to hit the power switch. Until then this script should work.

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Today Vik, Richard and I wandered over to Maker Faire to check out a wonderful collection of cool geeky stuff and cool geeky people.

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I just installed the Performancing for Firefox extension and am using it now to test this post. I read a bunch of stuff on the web and want to comment about it but find that opening up a browser to wordpress is a more effort than just bugging Lorah when I see something interesting.

It’s got all the basic features you’d want, including categories, fonts, links, and previews. The linking feature has some issues where if you create a link that’s at the end of a line it makes everything else you type part of that link. Slows you down a little since you have to type the next few characters before making the previous link.

I am a bit lost without spell-check, though. The Google toolbar doesn’t see this as a form so it can’t help. I’m sure as this becomes more popular you’ll see it improve.

All in all, I think this is great! Maybe I’ll actually start posting more often.