Matt's Blog

This is old news, but it still cracks me up… As they do every year, Thinkgeek put up some funny fake products on April Fools’ Day. Among them was Canned Unicorn Meat, which they called “the new white meat.” The National Pork Board sent Thinkgeek a cease and desist nastygram, alleging trademark dilution of their [...]

I posted a few months back about how I’m interested in setting up an Asterisk instance for VoIP, though it would be rather silly as I don’t have phone service, so it’d either use my cell phone via Bluetooth, or use Skype as a channel. (Neither of which, apparently, are commonly-used.) I mentioned before that [...]

More companies need to make new “old” things. This one seems to have been discontinued (why!?), but that only makes me want it more. AM/FM and limited shortwave. Auxiliary inputs (banana plug), even. I could pair it with an active antenna if I were interested in SWL, since I can’t exactly put up a tower [...]

The main page of this site is now a Rails app, and I plan to use Rails more extensively as time goes on. I run Passenger with Apache, which is a pretty nice solution. (I’m thinking of dropping in REE in lieu of standard Ruby, too?) But it had one crippling bug: if you were [...]

The release of the new iPhone 4 was marred by reports that holding it your left hand would interfere with the antenna and cause your signal to drop. Somewhat absurdly, Steve Jobs suggested that maybe people should just hold it differently. Well, oops, someone forgot to tell Apple.

It’s being fiercely opposed and is a far way from reality anyway, but every now and then my tinfoil hat quotient is elevated. I haven’t bought anything, don’t plan to do so too immanently, and won’t talk publicly about it if I do, but I’d just like to put a few things out there: Good-enough [...]

Thunderbird and GMail both now provide a fairly intelligent feature that catches when you say “attached” or similar and will stop you if you try to send the message without an attachment. (And it’s not too annoying if you said “attached” or “attachment” without meaning to attach anything: “The cable is attached to the rotor” [...]

Utah recently executed a man by firing squad, which, it turns out, has been a wee bit controversial. At the end of the day, though, I can’t figure out why the use of a firing squad is controversial. Every argument I have against it also applies to lethal injection or electrocution, which seem to be [...]

With a new machine, I thought it’d be fun to try out the trial of Photoshop CS5. The content-aware fill feature is the one that really draws everyone’s attention, and was indeed something I was psyched about trying. For one, let me state that content-aware fill is terrible at some things. It’s probably things it [...]

Having worked in customer service in the past, I’m privy to a little bit of knowledge most people don’t have: the people working behind the counter are humans. I just got back from Burger King, where the woman in line in front of me clearly had never worked in customer service, or for that matter, [...]