The Donkey’s Mouth

Whatchu’ talkin’ ’bout, Willis?

// April 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

see funny english mistakes

“Kyoto Box” a breakthrough in boiling water!

// April 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Current Events, Humor, Science, Technology

An example of a solarcooker from solarcooker.org

I just read about something called the “Kyoto Box” over at Steve Milloy’s blog.

What is it exactly?  According to an article on the BBC website: Continue Reading

Reviewed: WordPress for iPhone 1.2

// April 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology, wordpress

I’m posting this from my iPhone using the new version of WordPress for iPhone blogging app, version 1.2. It’s pretty awesome and you can check out a snazzy video of it at wordpress.tv.

Well, I started this post several days ago, but never got to finish it because WordPress for iPhone crashed on me and when I restarted it wouldn’t let me access this blog. I was also busy doing other things this weekend and so I forgot about it.

The cool thing is that when I started WordPress up just now and went to this blog it informed that it had auto-recovered the post and I could pick up where I left off. Seems like although there are a few bugs, they’ve got a nice auto-recover built into it.

I’ve taken a few screenshots, but I really suggest you check out the video.

My idea: outsource to a computer

// April 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Humor, Technology

In Dave Barry’s article, Technical Difficulties, he laments the fact that much of modern telephone tech support is being outsourced to foreign countries.

As he so eloquently puts it:

THE GOOD NEWS IS: The foreign tech support people are smart, educated and eager to help, and they speak English.

THE BAD NEWS IS: They speak it in such a way that you understand only about every fifth word.

Continue Reading

More Global, uh Cooling News?

// April 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Current Events, Science

This article Bad news for Catlin Expedition: Satellite Data Shows Arctic Cooling in February and March really ticks me off. I just wish the earth would make up it’s mind. I mean Al Gore’s reputation is at stake here (yes, the Al Gore), not to mention all the trillions we will be spending on fighting global warming.

Apparently, this has been happening since 2005, according to the article: Continue Reading

Wordpress RSS Thumbs Widget

// March 25th, 2009 // 8 Comments » // Plugins

This is a plugin which will provide you with a widget in which you can pull thumbnails from up to two RSS feeds.  I created it to showcase the latest posts from my daughters’ blogs with thumbnails of the posts along with the title of the post and a link to the original post.

Download RSS Thumbs Widget here.

I wrote this because I was originally trying to use the very nice KB Advanced RSS Widget, but apparently, the feed parser in WordPress doesn’t support enclosures.  I still use the KB widget for other feeds on my blog. Continue Reading

No Man’s Land

// February 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Travel

Here I sit on a Hostel Boat (Boat Hostel?) on the Spree river in the middle of Berlin. Looking outside the portal of my room, I can see the remnants of what used to be the Berlin Wall, and the river where I am at now used to be No Man’s Land, where anyone trying to enter from either side would probably have been shot.

The occasion is the European Leadership Forum where regional, national and other leaders from all over Europe have gathered to discuss issues which the mission faces, as well as new things that God is doing in YWAM in Europe. One of the topics which Jeff Fountain, who is the current director, presented this morning is transition of leadership from himself to a new Europe Director. It’s fitting then, that we are positioned here at the old dividing line between East and West, where almost exactly 20 years ago, such amazing transition took place with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

We were also privileged to hear Camille Bishop speak on transition today, too. It was very good teaching to hear in general, but especially in light of the current transition within YWAM European leadership.

This evening, we’re on our own for dinner, so EuroCom will probably have a working dinner to discuss the session we will be leading tomorrow morning on communication.

I think I’m finally used to being on a boat, since yesterday afternoon and evening after we arrived, I kept feeling like I had the flu or something. I just had a strange feeling in my head, which I finally realized was due to the gentle, yet noticeable rocking of the boat.

Posterous.com

// January 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Communication, Technology

Posterous is a relatively new online blogging service which allows you to post things easily to your new blog via e-mail.

You can even attach all kinds of files to your e-mail and they will go online, pictures will be displayed, multuple pictures will be displayed as a gallery, YouTube links as an embedded YouTube video, etc.  Check out all the cool things you can do with it in their FAQ.

Signing up for a Posterous account is dead simple.  Actually, you don’t even have to sign up at all, all you have to do is send an e-mail to post@posterous.com and within a few minutes you’ll get an e-mail back confirming your post and a link to that new post.  There’s also a link to edit or delete that post.

At this point, they only give you a temporary subdomain, but there’s also a link in the e-mail which will take you a page where you can give your account a password and choose your own subdomain (if it doesn’t already exist, of course).  I chose thedonkey.posterous.com.

The cool thing about it is that you can use posterous.com to post to your other sites via e-mail  as well.  One reason this is cool, is that I have been looking for a quick way to post to Twitter via e-mail, since twitter itself doesn’t allow this.  I’ve tried the Twitterrific (link opens in iTunes) app on the iPhone, as well as the online services hahlo.com and PocketTweets.com, but sometimes it’s just easiest to fire up an e-mail message and send it that way.  With Posterous it gives you individual addresses for each service, or one address to post to all services.  For instance, if I send an e-mail to twitter@posterous.com, it will post to only my twitter account.  Cool, huh?

Another cool thing I’m going to try and use it for is updating my Facebook status via e-mail.  Once I’ve set up Posterous to use my Facebook account, I just send an e-mail to facebook@posterous.com and it will update my status.  Double cool.

I’ll post back here about how it’s going.  Maybe even via Posterous.

Vida e Caffe

// December 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // Cuisine

Vida e Caffe (Life and Coffee) is the name of our local, homegrown coffee house here in Globe.  Well, they make great coffee.  Nice and strong.  I started out with a Cubano which is a kind of cappucino where they put sugar in with the coffee when they make it and use heavy cream for the froth.  It’s awesome!  I’m swearing off of Starbucks when I’m in Globe.  (When I’m not, I’ll have to resort to whatever I can find.)

Right now, I’m enjoying a latte.  Hmmm.

iPhone 2.1 Firmware Goodness

// September 22nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Communication, Technology

Well, I’m still kind of holding my breath, but I decided to upgrade to iTunes 8 and my first-gen iPhone to firmware 2.1 last night. I had previously used the Pwnage Tool from the iPhone Dev Team to upgrade to the 2.0 firmware. That went fairly smoothly except for the fact that it didn’t want to enter DFU mode right away, but eventually it did and things went well.

I started the upgrade and held my breath. First iTunes was upgraded to version 8 (more about that here) which went smoothly (as expected). I had already downloaded the 2.1 firmware so I located the place in my Library where the firmware was kept and copied it there. (I just looked for it again, but I can’t find it. You’re best bet is to just let iTunes update it for you.)

The upgrade went fine, my iPhone restarted and (holding my breath) … it started syncing, finished (still holding my breath) and that’s it. No questions asked, no Pwnage tool, no QuickPwn, it just worked, like some others I’ve read about.

One thing, though, I’m missing cydia and installer which is not a big loss, since I didn’t use them very much anyway. I think that may be the key to upgrading smoothly. If you haven’t done it yet and you’ve got a lot of 3rd party (i.e., non-official) apps installed, go in and un-install them all (you’ll lose them anyway during upgrade). I suspect many of the errors are due to conflicts with certain non-official apps.

Still, I will kind of miss the application that allowed me to stream live video to Qik. Even though I hadn’t used it very much, I had great plans for it.

Mostly, the reason I like having my iPhone pwned is that I am living in The Netherlands, and although they sell the new 3G version of the iPhone, they don’t offer official service for the original version. So, it’s either cough up the money for a relatively expensive voice and data plan for two years, or use my original iPhone which I already had anyway.