Sometime yesterday Protopage had an upgrade. Here is what the site looked like before the upgrade.
Below is the same page after the upgrade. Notice how everything is shifted down about half an inch so that the options tab can be seen at the top.
The options tab is not new. Before this upgrade, the tab was at the bottom. That was nice considering that I use the options tab only a few times each year. I have posted a “downgrade” request on the Protopage blog. While I wait for a response, I’ll spend a little more time scrolling on my startpage.
When I was a kid, once summer arrived we were outside everyday from dawn until dark. On the occasional rainy day, one of our favorite things to do was play with Lego’s. We didn’t have all these fancy gears, custom curvy pieces and twenty kinds of rubber tires. We had squares and rectangles and a couple of big green flat pieces. Over the years all the blocks were mixed into a small suitcase and we built a lot of stuff.
We had two basic contests: build the tallest tower or span the widest gap with a bridge. The only rule was that every brick in the suitcase had to be used.
At some point, we acquired some Lock Blocks. These were not “file compatible” with Lego’s. They had the same footprint, but the studs were taller. You couldn’t usefully mix them with the Lego’s. I think we had an over night case for the Lock Blocks. It seems my youngest brother always got stuck with those any time there was a contest.
Now there are Mega Bloks. These are the exact same size as Lego’s and can be used interchangeably. But Mega Bloks aren’t as nice as Lego’s. They aren’t as shiny. They don’t seem to fit as tight and they bend more–important properties when you are building a bridge. On the other hand, Mega Bloks are a lot cheaper so you can build a taller tower for less money.
Today we had our first rainy-day-bridge-contest of the summer. The goal was to span a two foot gap and hold as much weight as possible. The contest was won by a third grader using Mega Bloks that bent, but stayed together. The stiffer Lego’s did come apart under heavy weight.
I created the picture above using Lego Digital Designer. It’s a free download. Using the software you can use any piece that is made by Lego (763 different bricks) to create anything you can dream up. If you really like what you’ve made, Lego will put all the pieces in a package and send them to you. They charge by the brick. My Golden Gate replica would cost $146.08 if I were to order it.
Aside from those black flat pieces, I used only square and rectangle pieces. I’m still “old school” when it comes to Lego’s.
The iPod Touch has become my most valuable piece of technology. Last week I added this gem from Nemustech. Nemus Sync is a free utility that syncs Google Calendar with the Touch’s built-in calendar. Syncing works in both directions.
You have to jailbreak your Touch before you can add this utility. About a month after I bought my Touch I watched a couple of videos on YouTube and found easy to follow step-by-step instructions.
The average person can probably get by just fine with the built-in functionality of the Touch now that POP and IMAP email are included. Some of my jailbreak additions include Wikipedia and Mobile Twitter which I use on a daily basis.
If you do jailbreak your Touch, don’t do the automatic updates of the firmware. I turned those off a long time ago. I think it was the day I got the following message from Apple:
There is an upgrade for iTunes. It’s called Safari. Would you like to install it?
I had a flashback to 1996 when everyone was trying to get you to install “their” browser. I don’t understand how Apple can do something like this and it goes mostly unnoticed. If Microsoft were to try to push a browser out to an OS X machine that was upgrading a media player, it would be all over the tech news.
Today is retirement day for Bill Gates. Now his focus will shift from Microsoft to giving away more than 99% of his money. In case you are wondering, 1% of 50 billion dollars will still leave 500 million dollars. Most people could scrape an existence out of that for a few thousand years.
Here is the video from CES earlier this year. I imagine it will get a lot of air time today.
Here is the (slightly more serious) video tribute from Microsoft’s site.
