PC/Other

Moral of the story, you should not use automatic online translation services such as Babelfish or any computer translation of human languages for any important communication, including your web site.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/64729,online-translator-sparks-diplomatic-row.aspx

Resolution

and on MacBooks:

Trim down Mac OS X applications (but be careful, as one might expect, you can break apps by messing with them in this way)

http://rixstep.com/4/2/trimmit,00.shtml

I asked Rixstep specifically about open source free software Java-based applications, generally ported from GNU-Linux:

Trimming apps:

What about Java-heavy cross-platform FOSS ports such as NeoOffice and Gimp?

Generally yes trimmable, or generally no?

Dan and I (of the Agaric Design Collective) were interested if anyone knows about or is involved in computer rescue and reconditioning efforts in Massachusetts. Naturally, we mean with GNU-Linux software on it, and giving (with training) to community or other worthy groups. And we're interested in particular in the Boston, and especially the MetroWest, area.

ben

Dan's grant
plants do it so it's possible

if you have a solar panel that shifts with the sun
at the end of the day, with leftover electricity
solar arrays in key spots that all they do is make electricity and feed it into the grid

solar power is possible with capacitors and batteries

the real impact, like on the whole mushroom theory
[is it popping up everywhere]

and then people can't just flip the switch of [$5/hr more]

I'm just talking about the science, bottom line numbers

60 Hz, 120 V

[Posted in response to a blog about cheap and free tools for multimedia- here are the free in terms of freedom ones.]

Open source free software resources:

http://gimp.org/ - powerful photo and image editing

General lists:

So you've dropped a million dollars on an awesome home theater setup, another million on an xbox 360, all the cords, controllers, xbox live, cable internet, a nice comfy couch, beer, chips, and Halo 3.

So you frantically take the wrapping off of halo 3, press power on the xbox 360, and....

...you get nothing, just 3 flashing red lights on the ring of light around the power button.

Dan had autosave enabled and yet after a Firefox crash on Windows Vista (Bad Dan! Bad Vista!) so I naturally checked to see if anyone else thought autosave might actually be able to cause or trigger browser crashing. Search came up clean.

Resolution

Probably not: there are no other reports of autosave possibly contributing to a crash, so autosave is probably innocent.

But if you're searching the Internet for this problem, and find this post, let Agaric know! That's evidence, Watson.