Where’s the peanut butter?!

If you have a PocketPC, then it’s definitely in your interest to apply
a screen protector to the screen so you don’t scratch it up with the
stylus. I went from a Handspring Visor to an HP Jornada 545 to a
Toshiba e740 (I think) to an h1910 iPAQ and am now on the h6315
PocketPC phone. Only with the first two devices did I *not* use a
screen protector and I definitely regretted it.

You have basically two options - go struggle to find screen protectors
for your specific device (the screen sizes all vary) and pay way too
much for it, or make your own. I’ll describe creating your own, since
it’s a lot cheaper and more versatile.

1. First, go to any office supply store and buy some laminating
   paper. Avery makes 8.5×11 laminating sheets and sells these in 6
   packs or so. Each sheet is large enough to cut at least 9 screen
   protectors out of and the pack will cost about half of what the screen
   protectors run so you’ve already got about a 6000% savings (or so).
   It’s probably important to be a little careful with your selection -
   the Avery laminating sheets I have (and that I don’t have the part
   number for) work well and do not leave a really gummy screen after
   removal but it’s definitely possible that you could do worse - ymmv.

2. Next, href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0001DT2Z0/104-6780616-3351141?v=glance&n=1064954&n=507846&s=office-products&v=glance">a
   rotary cutter makes it far easier to cut nice straight lines, but
   if you need to you could use scissors or a straight edge and xacto
   knife.

3. Measure the screen width and height and cut out a screen
   protector exactly that size from your laminating sheet.

4. Cut a small corner off of one of the corners of your screen
   protector. Eventually your screen protector will get all scratched up
   (this is the point!) and when you want to replace it, this will be
   much easier if you have a corner cut off. I do this on the lower left
   corner (top left is the start button, top right is “X”, lower right is
   the input mode, lower left is also used but less frequently or less
   frequently a very small target). The cut I make is approximately a 45
   degree angle and the leg is approximately the height of the lower
   toolbar.

5. Make sure your screen is clean small flecks of dust will be
   noticeable after you apply the protector.

6. Start peeling the laminating sheet away from its backing at
   the end where you put your notch. Also, touch the dogeared
   corner - this will smudge the screen behind that spot a tiny bit but
   also make it easier to remove later.

7. Line up the protector on your screen, start sticking the
   exposed end on a little bit.

8. Using a credit card, apply the protector in one smooth
   stroke as much as possible. If you use jerky strokes or do not use a
   straight edge, you will probably wind up with an ugly looking
   protector that sacrifices enough of the viewing experience that you’ll
   want to replace it in a week.

I’ve used this technique for years and my screen protectors usually
last at least 9 months. I can usually get a screen protector cleanly
applied on my first try by now but it definitely took practice (that’s
why there are so many details spelled out above). I’d like to find a
matte finish laminating sheet for a less glossy screen appearance and
a writing experience that feels more like paper, but haven’t tracked
down a suitable material for this. Anyway - enjoy!

propagandhi just wrapped up their set @ neumos and now im drenched in the man-juice of the 8th wonder of the world: the “america’s army” pit. the show was as awesome as you could expect and i want to point out thay john-anthony and adam are fools - nay, damn fools - for missing it. chris was dressed like mayor mcshake, todd was rowdy roddy, and jord turns out to have taken a shine to “never-nude” shorts. the set was super-long and contained almost all the crowdpleasers (yes, ska sucks and stick the flag up your ass you goddamned son of a bitch, no pigs will pay). my only critique is that they didn’t get the set times in sync with the metro buses which means im out catching what could be my death as i scratch this out now. ahh - my chariot has arrived!

src="http://www.psoul.com/files/arnold.jpg">

“You know something - after watching the mulatas shake it, I can
absolutely understand why Brazil is totally devoted to my favorite
body part: the ass.”

– href="http://www.dvblog.org/movies/11_05/arnold_in_brazil.mov">The
governator in Brazil for Carnival

or “how i have wasted hours of my time”

• if you download and burn the x64 isos, they will not install on a 32bit processor machine
• if your device configuration has a primary master disk and secondary master cd drive, it will not successfully mount the cd drive to install but you may see glimmers of hope that convince you it might work if you move your devices between primary/secondary, master/slave, and jumper select/cable select. this is false hope.
• you may reformat and reinstall windows, create a FAT32 partition to hold the setup image and incorrectly think that when installing with askmethod you should have the uncompressed files instead of the isos.
• you may realize you need the isos and they may appear to copy safely over your wireless network but have experienced some corruption on disc 3
• you may decide that you need to use a usb drive to safely copy the isos and may assume that this copy is sure to succeed. you may be wrong again.
• but before realizing the disc 1 iso failed, you may research the error message and be led to believe that using the ide=nomda flag will fix your problem. it will not.
• you may finally get text askmethod to work and complete the install only to ultimately learn that you cannot keep X running for more that about 5 minutes at a time.

god what a piece of shit. some of this is clearly my slightly eccentric hardware but at least in windows i have some reasonable expectation that things will work or give me a not totally misleading error message if they do not.

On December 2 at the UW HUB ballroom the Andrew WK Band will be treating washington to an exclusive sneak peek at his upcoming release which focuses on Tuvalu throat singing, the harmonica, and may also party till he pukes. it will be time to party and the attendees will surely be encouraged to party till they puke or evolve, whichever comes first.

Tonight there will be house parties around the country showing Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices and I’m glad my friends Eva and Adam will be hosting one of them. I haven’t looked at the background of this documentary in particular but the premise is probably along the lines that as a society we need to look beyond price tags when assessing the cost of an experience or commodity. Northwest Environment Watch has been evangelizin this philosophy for years in the environmental arena with a series of publications on “measuring what matters” and it is the key principle behind my ten years of vegetarianism. I’d be a lot happier if we didn’t have to ship thousands of manufacturing jobs away, break the mom and pop shops nationwide, and see the exploitation of foreign workers and weakening of the organized labor movement to start seeing the problems with walmart but houseparties like tonight are the right place to start.

I got an idea for what you can do…
Why don’t you fucking fire your complete marketing team, alright? Get a new one in there that knows how to market a, uh, show that won five motherfucking Emmy’s, Golden Globes, SAG awards, WGA awards, DGA awards, producers’ guild awards, critics top ten lists. You know, if you can’t market that kind of show and get better ratings - then maybe the problem doesn’t lie here. Maybe it lies with marketing.
Goodnight

courtesy of raishad.com.

Rule 1: Don’t do it.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Don’t do it yet.
– Principles of Program Design

after the 30 funniest minutes in the history of television this past monday, nick has just passed me the sad news that arrested delevopment is being cancelled. write your representatives or get out your ski masks and molotov cocktails.

I’ve read ebooks and other content on my PocketPC for a while but a
few things about the experience have never worked quite how I’d like.

• Not enough content There are .lit files and other portable
  document formats available from Project Gutenberg, but for
  interesting, contemporary sources, you really need to roll your
  own.
• Content generation is a pain. The overdrive software to
  convert Word documents into MS Reader files is way more complicated
  than it ought to be. Mobile favorites in IE frequently don’t work,
  don’t synchronize correctly, and don’t give you enough flexibility to
  control spidering. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were more high
  quality content sources.
• The reading experience is frequently poor Pocket Reader
  generally works pretty well, but its library organization could be
  improved, I would like more features (my screen is already small
  enough - I don’t need margins the size of a real book), and other free
  systems seem no better.

The answer to my prayers seems to have come in the format of href="http://www.plkr.org/">Plucker. Plucker is an open source
desktop and mobile application platform for reading offline content.
It was originally designed for Palm and the Plucker application only
runs on Palm but if you have a PocketPC, you can use href="http://vade-mecum.sourceforge.net/">Vade Mecum which seems
to support Plucker files just fine. Plucker doesn’t the paucity of
content issue - though sites like href="http://www.manybooks.net/">manybooks.net do offer Plucker
format downloads. But it is at least generally at the level of
quality for available content sources. Where it excels is in content
generation and the application experience.

Using the Sunrise
Desktop (the successor to JPluck which, in my limited estimation,
seems superior to Plucker Desktop), I can easily create a subscription
to, say, Slate or the Slate RSS
feed, edit my subscription to follow links n deep, set constraints
about going off of slate.com (including which sites I want to allow or
disallow), set constraints about which paths on slate.com I want
crawled and whether or not to get images, and control the subscription
schedule (date/time/frequency). I could also apply a transform to the
documents, opening the possibility that some day I write the hack that
turns all the slate page links into the printable page link and get an
add-free portable library of the current content. And the reader
application gives me basically all the flexibility I want but am not
getting from Pocket Reader.

The whole combination is great and if you have a PocketPC, I really
recommend it.