kmkat and her kneedles

R.I.P., Dick Clark.

Best comment on his passing, retweeted by lectio: 

"Dick Clark is dead at 82. Now we will not be able to ring in the New Year properly. Well played, Mayans, well played."

* * * * *

I am loving the new iPad. Read the NYTimes in bed this morning (very smugly, I might add).

So far I have Adobe, Kindle, Atomic Lite (a browser specially designed for mobile devices that I have on my iPod as well), Skype, PBS (thanks, Kym!), CBS MN, KARE11, KSTP.com, (those three are Twin Cities TV stations), NPR Hourly News, The Weather Channel, WI State Journal (Madison newspaper), the Wall Street Journal, the aforementioned NYTimes, Twitter, a calculator, a clock/stopwatch/timer/alarm, and G! All of those except the NYT and WSJ were free, which is generally my preferred price.

G!, aka G-Whizz! is something I was not aware of. It is a Google apps browser, with integrated access to Gmail, Gtalk, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reader, voice, and a number of other googly  things. It was free (ad-supported) and I am not yet convinced it is worth the $2.99 it would cost to get rid of the ads. Its Twitter feed does not seem to update properly, and Twitter's own app is so good that really, why would I want another? Time will tell...

A request: All of you who have an iPad, please share the name (and price) of your favorite app in the comments. Knitting apps are, of course, solicited most sincerely.

ETA: I love word games, don't much care for ones like Angry Birds.

Tax season = done!

Actually, Monday was my last day. Tuesday (today) was the all-day organizational meeting of the new county board. And it WAS all day -- 9am to 4:30, phew. It took that long to revise the rules of order and to vote on committee assignments. I will have my third term on the finance committee (yay!) and managed to get myself elected to the public protection committee. I figure watching Perry Mason, The Defenders (remember them?), Boston Legal, L.A. Law, and every iteration of Law && Order qualifies me to serve on that committee. Right? Right?

The other exciting news is that I am writing this post on my brand-new iPad! What a fun toy. So far I have set up most of the same apps that I have on my iPod Touch -- Gmail and some other Google apps, a couple Twin Cities TV stations for news, Skype, Twitter, a weather app, the Kindle app, Adobe Reader.

Something I figured out while doing all that was that the iPad would be the perfect way to read a daily newspaper again. We have been without a daily paper for most of the past 13 years since we moved to rural Wisconsin. The Minneapolis paper has never had daily delivery here; we subscribed to the St Paul paper for a few months but basically it sucks as a newspaper, we even subscribed to the NYTimes for a while -- always at least a day late but still possibly better than nothing but not enough better to justify the cost. I really, really missed reading the morning paper --it and my breakfast and morning coffee had been a treasured part of my daily routine for many years.

All this is to say I subscribed to the iPad version of the NYTimes tonight.We shall see if it is worth $20/month. The iPad is plugged into its charger right next to my bed. I may start to start the day with the newspaper again.I''m getting excited just thinking about it!

Privacy.

In case you have been living under a rock for the past couple weeks -- or have been offline, which is, frankly, more likely than any of you actually dwelling beneath boulders --

Google change[d] its privacy policy

which led to any number of reactions, ranging from concerned to outraged:

Information Week.

zdnet.

PC Magazine.

Huffpo.

And best of all for our citizenry at large

36 state attorneys general.

Remember Google's original motto, "Don't be evil"?

Apparently that is true for only certain Google-defined values of evil.

* * * * *

In the interest of calming everyone the f*** down, here is a Lifehacker post showing one way to keep your Google browsing history to yourself. There are several good ideas in that article; many and more thanks to Chris for including it in her regular Friday linkety post.

Free to good home.

I have a couple (2) mini USB 2.0 A to B cables that I bought in error on eBay -- turned out I actually needed micro USB 2.0 A to B cables. First person to claim them and PayPal me a couple bucks for shipping (or yarn!) wins. I tried to sell them on eBay for 99¢ each but had no takers.

Google doodles.

 
Did you know that Google keeps a web page of all the *Google Doodles* it has used since 1998? You can even buy a t-shirt with your favorite Google logo (as long as it celebrates Elmo or Cookie Monster).

Googlausten.

Today is Jane Austen's 235th birthday. Happy birthday, Jane! 

Thanks to @amycrea, who tweeted this.

New toy.

When Matthew came up a couple weeks ago he had just gotten himself a new iPad Touch. It was awesome. I couldn't stop thinking about it.

eBay to the rescue!

The first picture above is the first screen, showing the basic apps that come with it. The second screen is games and other stuff, the third screen is primarily news apps; they were all free. (I did pay $1.99 for a downloadable book to read in the Kindle app.) The gadget has wireless internet access which is a trip in itself. It does pretty much everything an iPhone can do except make phone calls.

This is fun. I have been wanting a snazzy handheld gadget that could access the internet, but I couldn't justify the ongoing expense of a smart phone, especially since cell phone service here is rather limited. Not to mention that I really didn't NEED it; my Tracfone serves my needs perfectly well for <$50/year. Now I have exactly what I lusted for, but much cheaper.

Word clouds.

This is my last post:

 

Here is the blog:

 

Make your own clouds here .

Changes.

I edited some of the settings on the blog. Please let me know in the comments if this has disrupted the feed or anything else. Thanks.

Worldly.

Did you see the Clustrmap in my [unbelievably cluttered] sidebar? I spotted that little bugger on someone else's blog -- I think it was soxanne's (yeah, I have been stealing from here on a regular basis lately) -- and snapped it up for mine own. You should, too. It shows where in the world your readers are located.

On the map above I can see Erika and beentsy and Heather and Carrie and Elizabeth and Eleanor (others, too, but if you are on the East Coast or the Upper Midwest, you are hard to pick out).

But this? This totally amazed me.

 

There have been comments from South Africa and England -- and at least one other country besides the US and Canada and Australia that escapes my memory at the moment -- but Ghana? Lithuania? Romania? Afghanistan? Wowzers, I had no idea.

Okay, you international lurkers, time for you to speak up in the comments: who are you and did you get here? Kurious Kat™ wants to know.

Gaming.

 

One of the downers about getting a Mac was the stunning lack of free apps.

Solitaire? Nope.

Mah Jongg? Sorry.

The Cleaner (a little program I downloaded in the 90s that cleans up cut-and-pasted emails by eliminating extraneous line breaks and ">" at the beginning of quoted text)? Only for Windoze.

I did eventually find an inexpensive games for the Mac -- Kitty Spangles Solitaire has been my official play-while-on-hold game for a couple years. I have tried some free Mah Jongg games, both downloadable and online, but I didn't like any of them as well as the one I used to have for Windows.

And of course, now that I have complained that there are no free games for Mac I have discovered a bunch of online games that I can play. (And hope that there is no malicious code on the sites.)

But the biggest disappointment was that our version of Boggle didn't play on the Mac. We got the CD free in a box of cereal years ago. I have installed it on every PC and laptop we have had in that time, including the ones I had for work, plus copied and shared it with other people, and over the years Smokey and I have played it together for hours. Since 2006, however, when I went Mac, we have been limited to playing it on his laptop, mostly when we are on vacation.

Last week Crazy Aunt Purl mentioned online Boggle and the light bulb flashed above my head.

 

We have become addicted all over again.

* * * * *

Last Friday night we were playing online Boggle (yes, it's an exciting life here at Chez Kat™) when a message window popped up from Elder Son. Who informed us he had nearly been killed recently.

This is the same kid who emailed me from South Africa a few years back when he was studying there to say he had been held up at knife point and was feeling really bad that he had lost his cell phone and $60. I had to go lie down for a bit after reading that email.

Anyway, the most recent expiration of one his nine lives happened when the car in which he was a passenger made an inadvisable left turn and was T-boned on the passenger side by a big SUV. The car he was in was totaled because the entire side was caved in, but he suffered only a little scrape on his shin.

Kids. They make your heart sing and they make it fall through the floor.

* * * * *

This was the scene on the first morning of our most recent camping trip.

 

 

 

 

It was at this point that I got so excited to have coffee that I forgot all about the camera.

New year's goodies.

A new year, and I have some new toys, thanks to Sheepish Annie. Thank you, Sheepie!

She pointed me to a Mac widget that will play any of the BBC radio stations. That was all fine and good, but while I was on the Apple widget page I discovered lots of other fun and free toys.

A weather widget from The Weather Channel (pictured is the sample from the Apple site); a daily factoid widget, just the thing for a geeky nerd/Jeopardy-wannabe like me:

   

An e-mail checker and a thing to convert on thing to another; I'll have to let you know if it will convert, say, degrees Celsius into volume or anything cool like that:
 

A translator:
 

The aforementioned BBC radio thingie:
 

Sun clock:
 

I can read my favorite comics every day, a handy thing for someone who doesn't get a daily newspaper*:
 

I already know how to access many of these things on the Web, but this is a quicker way -- our DSL, which seemed blazingly fast when we got it five or six years ago, is now not so speedy. I am especially enamored of the weather widget given how often Smokey says to me, Check the weather for me, would you? No more opening a new tab in Firefox, going to weather.com, waiting, typing in our zip code, waiting, clicking on the radar or the 5-day forecast, waiting, and finally getting to what we want to see.

The BBC widget only works well when no one else is hogging bandwidth (Andrew, I'm looking at you) but it will be fun sometimes. I also found a widgets for a dictionary, person look-up, international shoe size converter (yes, I needed that; shut up), a timer, a system monitor, a flight tracker, and sticky notes. Oh boyoboy, fun...

* I read the Minneapolis (Star &) Tribune for 30 years, but they do not make daily deliveries to our current location. If I subscribe I get it by mail at least one day late. The St. Paul Pioneer Press will deliver daily, and we subscribed for a number of months, but as a newspaper it is, imho, far inferior to the Strib and not worth the money. In the search for a good daily paper I even tried getting the NYTimes for a while; same problem as the Strib with getting it a day or three late. So we gave up on subscribing to a daily newspaper. I get my news from the web.

* * * * *

Thanks for all the apprciative comments on yesterday's 2008 in pictures post. I need to credit Vicki Knitorious for the idea; it was outstanding.

A couple commenters expressed regret that there were no elevator adventure pictures. I have castigated myself repeatedly since that episode for not taking any photos WHILE I was in the elevator. That would have been blogging at its best. But I was too busy thinking and trying things. Next time...

It's a twofer Wednesday.

Read this and applaud. Thanks to Erika for the link.

It's my turn!