Your guide to advertising on the net

Coding Horror (CH), an excellent blog on software, is going to accept advertising. I hope that is good news for ongoing excellence, though I fear Jeff attempting to add new people and scale upwards. By way of introducing this change, Jeff has given us a concise high quality tutorial about: How To Advertise on Your Blog Without (Completely) Selling Out.

NYT Massive Evolution Science Section

Science News 6/26/07- New York Times. It will take a while to get through ALL of this. Wow, the NYT is having a great year.

No search means no iPhone for me

Deal killer.

The Mossberg Solution | Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret | AllThingsD

.... there’s no overall search on the iPhone (except Web searching), and no quick way to move to the top or bottom of pages (except in the Web browser). The only aid is an alphabetical scale on the right in tiny type.

There’s also no way to cut, copy, or paste text...

I'll wait for version 1.1.

Update 7/1/07: help is supposed only the way.

Nice summary of a diy quiet vista desktop

The sweet sound of near-silence has a good summary of a quiet vista desktop build. I'll probably never build another PC, but I like tracking these examples.

Gmail won't send a zipped bat file

I tried to mail a zipped archive to my work address. It contained one batch file -- Gmail rejected the zip since it contained an 'executable' file.

Grrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

I'm beginning to see some more problems with these hosted services.

I renamed the file to .bak.

Google to Acquire GrandCentral?

Google to Acquire GrandCentral? is a recent rumor. The author adds a tongue-in-cheek comment "I wonder why Google would want that company...". GC is all about owning identity of course, and all Google fans now that Google's core strategy is owning identity management and authentication.

I'd probably rather Amazon owned my identity, but I'll take Google over Microsoft or the Banks.

I like GC, but I'm not willing to commit to them (put my GC number on my business card) until they show evidence of persistence. A Google acquisition would do that.

Using a GC number on your business card would eliminate the biggest downside of using a corporate mobile account ...

OS X and Mac Mini tutorial and configuration guide

I've updated the tutorial, and associated system configuration guide, that I prepared for my 77 year old visually impaired mother. The reference may be of general interest in preparing an OS X system for any person with visual impairment, or who needs a minimalist computing environment.

Here's the guide (the configuration information is in an appendix)

• Mac Mini Tutorial (PDF, 2.5MB)
• Mac Mini Tutorial (RTF, 3.5MB)

There's also a companion blog with screencasts, but to date those have not been very useful.

Most recently I made the following changes:

• OS X 10.4.10 allows one to change mouse pointer size. Maybe that's always been there, but I didn't notice it before.
• I stopped using the ctrl-mouse scroll zoom feature and instead enabled the keyboard zoom. I turned off the dizzying screen motion default behavior, now the screen is fixed and moves only when "pushed" by the pointer at a screen margin. I set maximal magnification to "two" and I changed the keyboard mapping from an obscure modifier key to the + and - keys at the far right of the keyboard (which she doesn't use).

I've not added it yet, but I have also found that a lower intensity halogen desk light ($12, I checked before purchase that the cheap thing worked) that illuminates the keyboard, without shining on the display, is very helpful.

See also:

• Adaptive iPod (old style)
• OS X usability hall of horrors
• older post on this topic

I think this would be a great Tidbits 'take control' book topic but they didn't respond to my suggestion. (Anyone who wants to do that can take whatever I put up. No rights reserved.)