Ever been stuck behind a firewall, proxy, NAT box or other such device and wanted to know where you really where?
Here’s my simple, easy and clean What is my IP address site.
chinese restaurant prank call
old but funny chinese restaurant prank call.
Coffee Cake
Ingredients
large bowl
1 cup butter
1.5 cups sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
small bowl 1
1 cup sour cream
0.5 tsp. baking soda
small bowl 2
3 cups flour
3 tsp. baking powder
small bowl 2 (after)
0.25 cups sugar
2 tsp. cinnamon
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- In large bowl, beat butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla until light and fluffy.
- In small bowl 1, dissolve baking soda in sour cream.
- In small bowl 2, combine flour and baking powder.
- Alternately add the contents of both small bowls to the batter.
- In small bowl 2, combine sugar and cinnamon.
- Pour 1/3 of batter into a greased 9 inch tube pan. Sprinkle 1/3 of cinnamon/sugar mixture over batter. Repeat twice more, ending with the sugar mixture.
- Bake at 350 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes.
- Cool for 5 minutes and remove from pan.
Possible Jeopardy “Before & After” answers
You come up with the questions:
- Screen real estate agent
- Sleepless in Seattle Seahawks
- Len (Rosario) Dawson’s Creek
Update:
- Corporate identity crisis
- Pulitzer prize fighter
- Norman Mailer-Daemon
- Best friends with benefits
- Judge Judy Bloom
- Tom Cruise control
- Dry Clean Sweep
- Southern Bell(e) Pepper
- John Daly Show
- Green House Dressing
- Hammond organ transplant
- Lawn Bowling Green Ohio
- Honda Civic duty
- Fort Mason jar
- Hearts of space invaders
- Traffic Jam Session
- Yukon gold standard
- Yukon gold rush
- Personal Space Invaders
- Mean Joe Green bean
- Carly Simon Says
- Dog Walker Texas Ranger
- Johnnie Walker Texas Ranger
- Bloody Mary Poppins
- Donald Duck a l’orange
- Third Wheel of Fortune
- Orange Julius Caesar
Broken: Alsoft’s online ordering system
Alsoft is one of my favourite companies. DiskWarrior is the best Mac OS X disk repair utility, hands down. Well, well worth its price.
As soon as I found out DiskWarrior 4 had been released, I immediately ordered the upgrade, without even finishing the article. This was around December 11.
So, what’s broken?
First, Alsoft’s online store does not send out an email confirmation of your order.
Second, upgrade (loyal) customers are being treated like second-class citizens. It’s been five weeks, and the product is all over stores (and was for sale at Macworld Expo), and I still don’t have my copy.
Third, there’s no way to check order status — I had to phone Alsoft to confirm that, yes, I really had ordered, and yes, it should eventually ship. (But they don’t know when.)
New album release
Did you hear Bob Dylan is releasing an album of Sarah McLachlan covers? It’s called Mumbling Towards Ecstasy.
Stupid microwave trick
While many modern microwaves have an “express cook” button, allowing you to heat something for one minute just by pressing “1,” other less-user-centered devices do not.
In these cases, to heat something for a minute, most people press Time-1-0-0-Start. Instead, press Time-6-0-Start. Same 60 seconds, one fewer keypress.
What hotels should do
The Chandler, AZ SpringHill Suites has both the Gideons’ Holy Bible and The Book of Mormon in the desk drawer.
How about they place a copy of The God Delusion in each room instead?
My Toronto Star crossword puzzle fetcher
On weekday afternoons, the Toronto Star publishes an eight-page PDF edition, “Star PM.” I download this for one reason: the free crossword puzzle.
But sometimes I forget to download this, and since there’s no archive, I lose the opportunity to do that day’s crossword. So I wrote a script to automatically fetch today’s Star PM and save it to my hard drive. Then, I went one better. Using the CoreGraphics Python module, I remove pages 1-7 of the PDF, so I store only the crossword puzzle. Then, it prints the PDF to my default printer.
## Toronto Star crossword puzzle fetcher
##
## Paul Schreiber <misc at paulschreiber dot com>
## http://paulschreiber.com/
## 1.0 -- 26 December 2006
##
## Licensed under a CreativeCommons-Attribution License:
## http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
##
## Usage: starpm.py <directory to store crossword puzzles>
How to fix Safari if it can’t view plugin content
For a while, I haven’t been able to view plugin content (Flash, QuickTime, etc.) in Safari. I decided to do some quick regression to determine the source of the problem.
First, I viewed the pages in another browser, Camino, and they appeared correctly. So my plugins themselves were not corrupt.
Next, I logged in as a different user and viewed the pages in Safari. They appeared correctly. So Safari itself was fine.
Third, I logged back in as my original user and looked for potential culprits:
- I renamed ~/Library/Safari to ~/Library/Safari.orig and launched Safari. No luck—it was still broken.
- I deleted ~/Library/Caches/Safari and relaunched Safari. No luck.
- Then, I moved aside ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist and relaunched Safari. Aha! That was it.
Now, I didn’t want to lose all of my Safari preferences, so I deleted the newly-created com.apple.Safari.plist and put my old one back in place. I went into Terminal and issues this command:
defaults read com.apple.Safari
I searched through the pages of results, looking for anything relevant. I spotted “Saft Block Plugin,” but it was set to 0, or false. Wait — then I saw that WebKitPluginsEnabled had somehow been set to false.
I ran this command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitPluginsEnabled 1
and relaunched Safari and I was back in business.