Multichat with Digsby

If you’re like me, your friends and family use different Instant messaging (IM) networks. Most of my Atlanta friends, for example, use MSN Messenger, while most of my Charlotte friends use AIM. My best friend from high school uses Yahoo! Messenger, and I have a business need to use a Jabber client.

For years, “all-in-one” chat programs like Trillian and Pidgin have allowed you to use multiple IM networks at once. I have been (and still am) a huge fan of Pidgin, a lightweight app that lets me keep in touch with everyone and not have have to run six different chat programs simultaneously. But that loyalty is wavering in the face of a new client: Digsby.

Digsby allows you to connect to the AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Jabber Networks. Nothing new there, really. But Digsby also allows you to receive notifications from social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. So when someone posts something on your Facebook wall or MySpace profile, a small pop-up will appear, telling you who did what. You can even hover your mouse over the social networking icon and get a summary of what’s going on, so there’s no need for you to launch a web browser just to see what’s going on with Facebook or MySpace. Digsby also supports email notifications from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL mail, as well as any POP or IMAP account, so it’s got you covered there, too.

Digsby has been around for almost a year now, so it’s not really “new”. What is new is that newer versions of the app are much better behaved than earlier ones, which tended to be resource hogs. After being scared off of it by reports that it used up to 200MB of RAM, I’ve finally given it a shot… and I like it! One thing I especially like about it over Pidgin: it keeps like log files in the “My Documents” folder instead of hidden away like Pidgin does; this makes for easy backups with Mozy.

How drunk ARE you?

From the AP:

An Alaska man was surprised when police accused him of stealing a car from a gentleman’s club in Fairbanks. The man, 27, explained to officers that he was in his Chevy Cavalier. The only problem, police said, was that he was behind the wheel of a Ford Escort.

How drunk do you have to be to not recognize your own car… and then get into a different model??? Police said that he had a BAC of .166 – which is twice the legal limit, but frankly not all that high. Not high enough for me to take the wrong car, anyway! The poor sap was charged with auto theft, felony driving under the influence and misdemeanor drugs misconduct.

Read all about it here.

Kate Winslet: Wow!

There’s a brouhaha a brewin’ over pictures of Kate Winslet that appear in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair. Kate looks good in these pictures. I mean, she looks goooooddd. So good, in fact, that many in the media wondered if they weren’t heavily airbrushed (or, more likely these days, photoshopped). Winslet’s people have strenuously denied the claims. I don’t care one way or the other – even with some photoshopping, Kate’s still got it:

Mallomars are Back!

The missus and I were at Walmart this evening, stocking up on some groceries. Imagine my joy when I turned down the cookie aisle and saw these sitting on the shelf:

Yes, folks, Mallomars are in stock at your local Walmart!

If you’ve never had one before, a Mallomar is a graham cracker cookie with marshmallow on top, all encased in a dark chocolate coating. It’s similar to the Moon Pie, a longtime Southern favorite. In fact, both of these delicious treats were introduced in the same year: 1913. But where Moon Pies are more like a “sandwich”, Mallomars are more like cookies. Delicious cookies.

Because they melt so easily, Nabisco only makes them in the cooler months between October and April. Folks have been known to stock up on them late in the winter so as to have a “spring supply” of ’em. And for some reason, Mallomars are really popular in New York: around 70% of all Mallomars are purchased in the New York metropolitan area.

Similar cookies are also popular in Europe. In the German-speaking areas of Switzerland, the local version of the cookies are called Mohrenköpfe (Moor’s heads)!

Wonky Firefox Encoding

Ever since upgrading to Firefox 3.0 back in June of this year, I’ve had a bizarre problem with the browser. On around 10% of the sites I’d visit, the headline would be gibberish, as if the page had been encoded incorrectly. Here’s an example:

As you can see from the screencap, only the headline was affected. The rest of the text looked fine. Interestingly, if I highlighted the “gibberish text” and right-clicked on it, the proper text would displayed in the context menu (i.e. “Search Google for…”).

I troubleshot the issue as thoroughly as I could. I played with the character encodings and I made sure that the server was passing the page as TEXT/HTML and not TEXT/PLAIN. I disabled my Kaspersky Antivirus on the off chance that it was somehow messing with Firefox. I loaded up the page in Firefox’s “safe mode”. I tried creating a new Firefox profile. I tried completely uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox (including deleting any leftover files and folders, in addition to checking the “Remove my Firefox personal data and customizations” option). But nothing seemed to work.

Thankfully, a kind soul over at MozillaZine’s Firefox Support forums pointed me in the direction of my installed fonts. Some program I used installed a copy of the Helvetica font, and that was rendering the page all screwy. Once I opened the Fonts folder in Windows Explorer and moved HELV.TTF to the desktop, the page immediately began rendering correctly. Hooray!

I hadn’t thought about fonts, since only Firefox was displaying this behavior. Internet Explorer, Safari and Google Chrome all worked without complaint on my system, and the font didn’t present a problem in Firefox 2.x.

So if you have an issue where only one part of your Firefox pages are wonky… look to the fonts!

Scottish Pubs: No Drugs For You!

Britain’s march towards INGSOC continues with news that certain Scottish pubs have started testing patrons for drugs as they walk through the door.

Scottish police will use a device called an “Itemiser” to swab the hands of patrons as they enter a pub. The machine will then give a simple, color-coded response: green (no drugs found), yellow (possible drug contamination) and red (definite drug contamination). Patrons with a green result will be welcomed into the pub. Patrons with a yellow result will be given a “drug information pack” and sent away. Patrons with a red result “may be searched by police”, and possibly arrested if drugs are found. Although the test is “completely voluntary”, people that refuse the test will not be admitted inside the pub.

The “Itemizer” has been in limited use in England thus far, and opponents have complained that the device may give false positives if people touch a surface a drug user\dealer has touched previously.

Sadly, few have complained about the attack on civil liberties that such a machine represents.

Dreaming in Color?

This is an interesting story. It seems that Scottish researchers at the University of Dundee have discovered that how you dream is influenced by the type of media you’re exposed to.

People 55 and over – who were exposed to a great deal of black & white movies and television – tend to dream in monochrome around 25% of the time, while people 25 and under almost always dream in color. Even more interesting is that, according to Eva Murzyn, a psychology student who carried out the study, is that “before the advent of black and white television, all the evidence suggests we were dreaming in color”. Studies carried out from 1915 through the 1950s suggested that overwhelming majority of dreams were in black and white. This did not change until the 1960s, when color films became standard and color TV started creeping in to home. By that point, later results suggested “that up to 83-percent of dreams contain some color”.

Murzyn feels that something happens between the ages of 3 and 10 that affects the way we dream, and that whatever media we are exposed to during this time plays heavily into it. I wonder what it will be like for kids of the future that are exposed to 3D HDTV? Engadget thinks that they’ll “wind up dreaming in heavily-compressed SD stretched to the wrong aspect ratio, buffering endlessly before failing out due to a missing plugin”.

WSCC Rocks!

For years, I’ve loved the freeware utilities put out by SysInternals and Nirsoft. If you have a problem – especially an obscure one – and SysInternals or Nirsoft make a utility that addresses the issue… it’s the only way to go to fix it. Unfortunately, most of their products are standalone command-line apps, and it’s difficult to grab them all and throw them on a flash drive. Or at least it was. The freeware app Windows System Control Center gives them all a nice UI to navigate, so each tool is only a couple of mouse clicks away:

Remember WSCC is only a UI – you’ll still have to download the actual programs from SysInternals and Nirsoft.