Recent Entries
Time for Comments Again
I turned off commenting quite a while back due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of comments the site received were spam. I got tired of being reactive and cleaning it up and since this site really doesn’t get much legitimate commenting (hey, I can accept that I’m not popular, heh), I decided the easiest solution was simply to turn comments off altogether.
Well, somehow I missed the news about the Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam services over the last couple of years. They’re services that’ll essentially try and “verify” for you whether a comment is spam or not. So, I found the Low NoSpam addon for EE (it’s actually a combination module and extension, I believe). It seems to work pretty well so far, at least.
So, enjoy your commenting again. If anyone’s out there, at least!
Posted Thursday June 11, 2009 in pMachine / ExpressionEngine, Weblogs by Chris Curtis
Holy Paladins - a.k.a. Healadins
Warning: if you don’t care about WoW, you won’t care about this. =) However, since WoW is one of my bigger pastimes - and I’m woefully slacking on posting to the site - I figured I might as well share some info.
My main character is a protection paladin, Teneral (Shadow Council realm). However, with the recent dual talent ability addition, I decided to give healing a try, so I’ve been working more on my healing gear and learning quite a bit more about that aspect of the class. There’s an amazing amount of information available “out there”, but a lot of it is outdated and other information just isn’t that good. Finding the useful stuff can take some effort. So, I figured I would share some of the information I found on the off chance that others might be able to make use of it.
HolyPaladin.net has a great variety of information useful to, well, holy paladins. Some information’s also much broader than that and is applicable to other specs/classes. The Choosing Gear section is, of course, all about how to choose your gear. Haste, crit, Mp5, spellpower, etc. There’s other information about tactics and strategies to take in both PvE and PvP.
For recommendations on specific gear, what I found on I am a Paladin came in very useful. The author put out a 3-part guide regarding Ulduar gear (and more). Part 1 covers gems, spec/glyphs, and macros. Part 2 covers the majority of the gear slots. Part 3 continues the rest of the gear slots and then talks about enchants, flasks, and food. There are plenty of other useful posts on the site, as well.
These are far from the only good resources out there (Elitist Jerks, anyone?), but they should give other people in a similar position to me somewhere to start. Enjoy!
Posted Tuesday June 2, 2009 in World of Warcraft by Chris Curtis
Gimme My Keys, Firefox!
I’ve been a long-time user of Firefox, but for a while now I’ve actually been browsing with Camino as the regular browser on my mac. After using Firefox 3 (FF3)for a while at work and my other computers, I figured it was finally time to switch back on my mac, too. So, I downloaded and installed it, copied over my more recent bookmarks, and went about my life.
That is, until I noticed that FF3 wasn’t following one of the altered keyboard shortcuts I’d set up the last time I used Firefox to change the Quit shortcut. (For me, ⌘-Q to quit the app is dangerously close to ⌘-W to close a tab.) I use the standard OS X method to alter/reassign keyboard shortcuts, so I just went back and redid the Quit shortcut change for Firefox like before. Except it didn’t work. Sure, my reassigned shortcut of ⌘-⌥-Q worked, but so did the old ⌘-Q, rather defeating the purpose.
So, I started my hunt for an answer. A Mozilla support thread let me know that I wasn’t alone in this frustration and also pointed me in the direction of a Macrumors thread. This, in turn, gave me the actual Bugzilla entry for the issue, including discussion from some of the developers and users. Apparently, a fairly late change in FF3/Gecko 1.9 made it so that system-assigned shortcuts weren’t being observed and it’s unlikely to be fixed really soon. One of the developers mentioned it ought to be possible to get around this with an addon/extension, though.
Now it was off to find an extension to help solve my problem. After far more searching than I’d prefer, I found Keyconfig, an extension by “doranado” that’s been around for quite some time, but looks to have been recently updated. I installed the extension, restarted FF3, reassigned some of the shortcuts (you’ll find the option under the main Tools menu to open up Keyconfig), and held my breath. Thankfully, this seems to have done the trick and I no longer need to worry about accidentally hitting Q when I meant to hit W on a shortcut. I figured this info might be useful for other FF3 users out there.
Posted Sunday August 10, 2008 in Computers & Software by Chris Curtis
Tips For Your Vehicle Gas
I recently received one of those “chain letter” type emails, this one purporting to be from someone working in the gas/oil industry and giving some tips on how to get the most out of your gas. (It also, of course, encouraged me to email it on to ten friends to “get the word out”, but that sure ain’t happening!) I typically don’t much care for those sorts of emails, but this one actually had some pretty decent sounding advice. So, I figured I might as well look into it to see how legit the advice was.
Not surprisingly, snopes.com has an article dealing with these very tips. The consensus point is that following the tips certainly shouldn’t hurt you (aside from possibly taking extra time), but that for the most part the gain you’ll see in practical terms is pretty modest. Anyway, I figured it might be worth passing this info along to anyone else interested.
Posted Friday May 9, 2008 in Real Life by Chris Curtis