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CSSEdit 2.0 was released yesterday and, though I was technically a beta tester, I didn't spend much time with the application, instead opting to edit my CSS files manually in BBEdit. I reasoned that I was too busy doing actual work to learn a new application.

That was a mistake.

Having spent a few hours with CSSEdit 2.0, I've come to regret the time I could have saved using MacRabbit's wonderful app for what would have amounted to only a few minutes of actual learning. Though I don't have the time to fully review the app, I'd like to point out a few highlights.

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This about sums it up:

If Wii Sports is for the non-gamers, Twilight Princess is for the hardcore. After I spent 10 hours with the game, I barely managed to squeak by two temples, with the third so far off that I could scarcely imagine getting there, let alone approach the objective. (For the record, out of 30 or so journalists, nobody came close to the third temple.) I asked how long it took Nintendo's testers to complete the entire game the first time through. The answer is a whopping 70-plus hours. Adding insult to injury, diabolical Nintendo translator and localization manager Bill Trinen told me that he was working on his second play-through of the game. Knowing what to do and where to go, and skipping cut-scenes, Trinen said that he had logged about 27 hours to make it approximately two thirds of the way through the temples themselves - and that doesn't account for any of the side quests or time-sucks like fishing, a single operation that could easily add hours upon hours to Zelda's depth.

I simply don't have that much time. I need games I can pick up and play for 10 minutes at a time.

I'm looking for some forum software suggestions. Something between vBulletin (costs money) and bbPress (way too bare-bones). phpBB is a little too heavy, but seems to be the best out there. I installed the 3.0B2 version as a test.

I'm not going to list all the features I'd like, but it seems to me that "75% of the features of phpBB" is a good approximation. I don't need 20 different user levels, I don't need a calendar or other tools. I just want forum software that has what I'd call "basic forum features." Users with profiles, individual categories, forums, and threads with titles, the ability to search, and so on. I'd like individual post counts and the ability to have at least four kinds of users: admins, moderators, registered users, and guests. I'd also like software that's reasonably priced (or free) and is in fairly widespread use.

I've used phpBB before and am familiar with it. I'm quite familiar with vBulletin, since The Sand Trap uses it for the Golf Talk Forum.

Suggestions?

I'm calling this "The One in Which John Misses the Point." The first comment nails why.

If you have a working N64, by all means, play the darn games you still have on it. Otherwise, fork over 1000 points ($10) for your N64 game, $8 for an SNES or Genesis game, or $5 for an NES title.

The Wii will play GameCube games free, of course, if you have the disc.

I don't see myself buying a lot of Virtual Console content, but I may spend five bucks a time or two to re-live Duck Hunt or something. I got rid of my NES a LOOOONG time ago, John.

In "The Delicious Generation," Paul Kafasis writes:

A fellow developer joked that Disco would be released to much fanfare, and then the developers would realize they'd forgotten to hook up the disc burning functionality, having been so busy with the Smoke.

In my own brief review of Disco, I dismissed the sizzle and attempted to find the steak. Instead, I found recycled beef grounds. Recycled from Mac OS X's built-in disc burning frameworks.

Now, I've been accused in the past of doing a little marketing (prior to PulpFiction's release), but nobody could compare PulpFiction to Disco. The first goal was functionality. Appearance came later. And smoke, particle effects, and useless animation never appeared at all.

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In its raw form, this site wouldn't validate. Why? Because I like the Safari-only "search" text box functionality:

<input type="search" value="" name="s" id="s" size="15" placeholder="Search Here" autosave="com.nslog.search" results="9" /&g;

That one tag causes four errors in validation all by iteself:

1. There is no "search" type.
2. There is no attribute "placeholder."
3. There is no attribute "autosave."
4. There is no attribute "results.

Tough beans. Search stays. I like to get that little "Valid" button as much as the next guy, but the search degrades nicely enough that I'll continue to use it and the site will validate. How? I'll could simply hide the form by user agent, only displaying it for Safari and OmniWeb:

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Wow. I didn't know that desktop icons could be captured with the spacebar trick after hitting cmd-shift-4. They're not only captured, they're captured with full transparency. That's pretty nifty!

I found this information when reading about StyledWindow at bithaus. Then I used it to capture one of the icons on my desktop. I assure you the background was quite busy - not white. Go ahead and give it a try.

P.S. It's rather pointless to capture your dock, as you just get a grey bar with triangles. And, for some reason, dock icons captured in this method are also rather ugly and aliased.

I've spent a few hours today trying to get SpamAssassin (2.6.3) to trust the local network or, at least, to removed RCVD_IN_DYNABLOCK. I've edited /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.conf and /var/qmail/mailnames/barzeski.com/erik/user_prefs. I've changed the site-wide user_prefs.template and restarted the server a few times.

None of these changes seemed to have much effect. RCVD_IN_DYNABLOCK was still being given a score of 2.5, and simple emails from myself to myself were scoring 2.6 (the extra 0.1 is from RCVD_IN_SORBS, because my cable modem is assigned a dynamic IP via Adelphia's cable system).

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I'm having problems with WordPress. Specifically, the email notifications it sends out. Have a look.

This all began when I started monkeying with my own plugin to replace two of WordPress' pluggable functions that send mail, though admittedly this was also at about the same time as the DNS began propagating and the new server started being used to send email over the old server.

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HandBrake rips DVDs on this dual 3GHz Mac Pro with 5 GB of RAM at about 83 frames per second. It will spike to 90 on occasion and dip to 75 or so, too. How's your rip speed?

Update: Duh, yeah, formats help: FFmpeg encoder, 1 Mbps, MP4 video, AAC audio, 44.1 Hz and 128 kbps. I think they may be the default settings.

So, I'm attempting to catch up on "24" (the TV show) before the sixth season begins in January. I don't think I'll make it. I'm using NetFlix, and with only two discs at a time and a 24-hour turn-around and reasonably fast four-day turn-around on returned discs, and five seasons on six discs, I'm looking at around 60 days, and that's without factoring in Sundays (no mail) and delays in watching two discs.

I'm not going to pay $40/season to download the episodes from iTunes. I'm not going to buy a season on DVD. I am looking for a faster way to catch up. So far, the best ideas I've got include "borrow the DVDs from a friend ((Nobody I know locally owns them.))," "rent the DVDs from Blockbuster ((I've yet to investigate this, but I don't know if that's possible.))," or "work through NetFlix as fast as possible, and just save the new season on the TiVo without watching them. ((I may be persuaded to up my NetFlix allocation from 3-per-month (the wife gets one), but I'm hoping there's a better solution.))"

Any ideas?

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Question: At what level do you have SpamAssassin set?

My Answer: The new server at MediaTemple offers SpamAssassin. On the advice of a friend, I set my limit to 5 and only modify the subject currently. It worked reasonably well after a few days of testing, so I changed my parents' email accounts to delete at 5 or higher. Then I lowered my threshhold to 3. I got two false positives, one of which was actually a notification of a comment spam, but a lot more correctly marked spam. I've dropped back to 4 now (the two false positive threes were 3.1 and 3.7). 4 seems to be marking about half of my spam without any (yet) false positives.

I think I can tweak some of SpamAssassin's settings beyond "total score" and "action," but I've not yet gotten into that. I'm just trying to settle on a number at which I can change "modify subject" to "delete." KISS and all that. Somewhere between 4 and 5 seems to be a good spot.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

If, when you ping nslog.com, you get an IP address other than "216.70.123.74," please post the IP address in the comments.

Thank you.

I'm not a perpetual Terminal user in that I don't always have a Terminal window open. Instead, I close them between tasks, forcing me to open new windows roughly 1200 times per day. 😛

The Terminal ships with a few default color schemes, like "Black on light yellow," and when I have more than one terminal window open I often change the colors. I use a red terminal with white text to signify that I'm doing something (like downloading a large file) and that the terminal isn't accepting input. I'll apply blue to my own computer's terminal sessions, and I like to change the terminal color to yellow text on a black background when I plan on being root for more than a few seconds.

Other times, I use the colors just to tell one SSH session apart from another.

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