to persevere: parenting stories and other geekery

One of the new features of Safari on OS X Leopard is the ability to create a Dashboard widget from anything you like on the web. Apple calls it a ‘web clip’ and I used it to do this:

This is the twitter entry box from my twitter homepage, floating in my Dashboard as a widget. (Note the cool looking torn edges look!) So I can now update my twitter from Dashboard, directly to the twitter homepage, without opening an internet browser of any kind. Pretty nice.

Of course, you don’t have to use it for twitter, you could use it for a blog, a search window, comics, whatever you like.

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Tags: twitter, Safari, Leopard, OSX, web clip, Dashboard

Tags: technology by divine.conspiracy

Withrow Winter, originally uploaded by inthelight7.

Everything is equal in the snow: all trees, all lawns, all streets, all rooftops, all cars. Everything is white, white, white, as far as you can see. Covered by snow, the well-kept and neglected lawns look the same. The snow hides the shiny newness of a just-bought car as effectively as it does the rust and dents of a ten-year-old one. Everything looks clean and fresh and unmarred by time or use. Snow, like the silent death it counterfeits, is a great leveler.
- Adrienne Ive

Tags: life, photography by divine.conspiracy

“Peter Jackson, Oscar-winning director of the Lord of the Rings movies, has signed a deal to produce two films based on JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.”

Oh boy oh boy! This is good news. It looks like Jackson’s dispute with New Line is now over. Yes! Well, this is something to look forward to in 2010, I guess! (Maybe they’ll release a new High Def disc edition of all the movies, all 5 together… that would be amazing. I’m drooling just thinking about it.)

Click “read more” below to read the BBC article.

read more | digg story

Tags: General by divine.conspiracy

How did I manage to raise a mouthy stubborn almost-5 year old?

I should explain. The Linguist is my oldest. She’ll be 5 in January. She’s intelligent, capable, reads incredibly well, is learning piano, loves to draw, know her way around OSX and Windows… all the things a geek dad could hope for.

But when she gets mad, she’s so mouthy and rude, I don’t know where this comes from. She started school in September, and this is kind of when it started, but is it just that? I can’t imagine that the other kids are being that mouthy to the teacher, but who knows? To their own parents? Is she overhearing kids arguing with their parents? It’s a mystery to me. Maybe it’s TV. Some of those characters on Arthur or B. G. can be pretty mouthy too.

I guess in the old days you’d call it ‘talking back’. [Read more →]

Tags: kids, life, parenting by divine.conspiracy

If you want to really check out stripped down, check out my tumblog:

divconspiracy.tumblr.com

It’s sort of the ‘best of’ my twitters (minus the @replies), my google reader shared items, and links to my blog posts. Sometimes I’ll even post directly there if it’s something short. Brian Bailey had at one point completely switched his blog over to tumblr, but I’m not ready to do that yet. And as it turns out, neither was he. Tumblr is sort of my cottage, I’m not there all the time, and I just kind of have fun there and relax. I don’t track visitors there (gasp!), or have cool Snap pop ups, or even have any comment capabilities. It’s just a fun blog with aggregation capabilities.

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Tags: tumblr, twitter, Brian Bailey, blog, stripped

Tags: blogs by divine.conspiracy