(The term High-Definition appears to be able to be applied to anything these days, so why not webcams?)

For the past few days I’ve been obsessing watching this webcam over at the Red Rock visitor center, and just now I wrote a quick script to fetch the latest image and update my desktop background with it. It’s almost like having my desk near the window back. (OK, not even close.) But, truth is, it makes a pretty crappy background at 1920×1200. Look at this other one in comparison — now that’s a webcam.

Then I remembered. Since buying a used 20D, I have an old D30 just sitting around. With a bit of Canon software magic, that can easily be setup to take a shot at any interval and automatically transfer it to the PC. I just have to write a little plumbing to get it up on the web.

I want to do this!

A lot of people know that OpenSSH’s client supports tunneling out of the box. But some don’t realize that it also supports tunneled SOCKS out of the box. Here’s how to set up a quick SOCKS proxy across an encrypted tunnel:

ssh -NfD 8888 user@host

The proxy will be on port 8888. The other flags just tell ssh to go immediately to the background (after getting your password, if needed) without running a command.

I’ve started trying to train myself to use Google Reader: rather than trying to remember all of the sites that I want to visit each day, and having to visit each one independently, I can go to one place and view them all. Sure, these are all benefits of RSS readers, and everybody else discovered them years ago. What can I say, I’m slow.

Anyways, Google Reader caches things on its own (which makes sense), and that has a peculiar effect: if Reader hits up the RSS feed while an article exists, and then the author decides to delete said article, said article will appear in Reader, but not on the site.

Which is where I find myself right now: I have an entry from Matt entitled, “A More Perfect Blog,” that shows nowhere on the site. So… where’d it go, Matt?

Not too long ago I was dragged into trying out Twitter. It’s interesting — like a glorified Facebook status; I’m sure they cringe every time someone makes that comparison — but I didn’t really catch on to it.

Now I’ve decided to give Tumblr a try. So far, I like it: it has the main component of Twitter — quick, short blogish entries — but also lets you easily post pictures, videos, quotes, chat transcripts, etc. The icing on the cake would have been posting code snippets complete with syntax highlighting. Ah, one can dream.

Bandwidth graph of the period during which my machine was compromised:

For the month, I’ve used about 34GB; so while my bandwidth usage was minimal overall, it was a sight higher than what I’d consider normal.

I think my kids broke my laptop. I guess that’s one of the risks associated with having children. I mean, I never really expected my possessions to remain unscathed. But this one hurt.

Anyways, in the absence of my “real” laptop, I’m currently writing this on an old Thinkpad 240 that I scrounged off eBay a while ago. It packs a whopping 300MHz Celeron, maxes out at 192MB of RAM, and has a not so bright 10″, 800×600 screen.

Last night I happened to browse over to my (unfinished) website, and, for the first time — probably ever — I was slightly glad that I’d designed it to work with a horizontal resolution of 800 pixels. (I think I was being slightly stubborn at the time.)

And that got me thinking.

As I ponder the purchase of an Asus EEE, the Everex Cloudbook (comes out on Friday!), a Nokia N810 — or just sticking with my N770 — and as a bunch of people have already jumped onto the retro-resolution bandwagon, will there be a renaissance towards designs that fit on small screens?

Lots of us run personal wikis that we use to store random information. But not everybody has a personal server they can just throw the de-jour wiki software onto. Now StikiPad gives you a personal wiki starting at $0/month with file uploads, Google Maps integration, task lists, RSS feeds — their features page is an ocean of buzz words.