The VGA connector: Dan's history

Dan's Data reviews the 52 year history of the VGA connector, and incidentally says some very interesting things about analog signals and bandwidth. Only the most serious of geeks (often radio people) can say anything about analog signaling. I wonder if a digital connector could handle the bandwidth scaling the VGA connector experienced ...

CamStudio: open source (free) video screen capture

The Download squad was very enthusiastic about the open source (and free) CamStudio screen video capture utility for XP.

Why you shouldn't use XHTML

It's unusual for anyone to handwrite web docs any more. So decisions on using XHTML or HTML4 are out of most users hands. All the same, it's interesting to read while we're likely to stick with HTML4 for a long, long, time.

Vox: Video sharing with privacy controls

I was impressed and a bit surprised to find my mother's Win98 box could show a video I uploaded to Google Video in Firefox.

Better than expected. Problem is, Google Video has no privacy controls, so anyone can see our family videos. Nothing there that should interest any evil men, but it's a nasty world. I assume Google omits privacy controls because their business is about exposure/search, and also lack of privacy means really nasty stuff will be seen and they'll remove it.

Vox's claim to fame is privacy controls. These can be used for good (protect family) or evil. I'll take a look.

Update 10/11/06: They were closed when I first tried, but they're open now and I have a Vox blog. Vox is really all about access control and small communities. I'll be playing with it more.

Engadget: batteries that recharge from a USB port

One of the unexpected outcomes of the USB spec is it defined a low voltage (5V) standard power source. The only think comparable is a car's "lighter". Too bad 12V firewire never caught on.

Now the USB interface can recharge USBCELL batteries through a built-in USB plug - Engadget.

I want a 10 port USB hub that goes with my iMac.

Apple admits notebook sleep on shut is broken

One of the nicest things about the 10.3.x world was the notebooks went to sleep so well. Shut the lid, go to sleep.

When Apple introduced OS X 10.4, they broke this. A number of processes don't respond properly to the sleep command -- including background data indexing (spotlight). It's easy now to close a laptop and cart it off -- with the drive running.

Now an Apple kb article admits the inevitable (without apology) -- you can't rely on the sleep mechanism to work:
Wait for your Apple notebook to fully shut down before you close the display.

This was a real screw-up in 10.4. I wonder if it might be fixed in 10.5.

View web based PPT without Office - Zoho for Firefox

Amit Agarwal writes about the Zoho online service for viewing and editing Office documents -- including PPT: Read or Edit Online Office Documents Without Downloading Them � Digital Inspiration.

Looks like it ought to work on Firefox/Mac. Here's a sample PPT from the St Paul Public Schools (I picked it out of Google at random, but it's incidentally quite interesting reading for me as parent who's kids are in the public schools here). Some slides are garbled, but if you're on a Mac and don't have PPT on hand this works for reading.