Dan Conley

If you want me to download your browser to set a world record, perhaps you should let me download it. Almost two hours after it was supposed to be available, the servers are finally on… about half the time. And then when I tried to download it…

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I decided to ditch Ecto. A very good program, but in essence it only allowed me to

1. Post from one place instead of the admin interface of each blog
2. Link to Flickr easier

Now, those are nice options — and I also liked having a local backup of posts, and the ability to draft — but the $18 I’d have spent on it is instead going to go to BeerAlchemy.

More on that in a moment…

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I get very into things that I’m working on. You could say ‘obsessed’ if you’d like to water down the word, but I like to settle for ‘very into.’ Generally, one of two things happens: it settles down into a quietly roaring interest or quickly burns out. Either way is fine except for when your dining room table has books all over it because of the third time I decided to catalog all our books into Delicious Library, no really this time I’m totally doing it.

Yesterday was particularly quick. Here is the rough series of events:

• See the Lifehacker post How to Turn Your PC Into a DVD Ripping Monster (‘Ooh, imagine not having to have our DVD collection by the TV!’)
• Rip Angel Season 2 Disc 3 onto our computer (‘Sorry the Media Center quality is so low honey, I’m using a lot of resources’)
• Try to play the rip via our 360 (‘Wait it doesn’t work’)
• Use a different program, rip The Princess Bride (‘This will work better’)
• Try to play the rip via our 360 (‘Wait come on’)
• Try the first program again using different settings (‘This will work better’)
• Try to play the rip via our 360 (‘Pfff whatever!’)
• Look into third party addons like My Movies (madness has taken my ability to speak)
• Begin to install My Movies but then realize it doesn’t fix the problem (general salivating on self)
• Give up briefly, then realize there may be another way (‘Hey those 400 disc changers on Amazon have to be dropping in price!’)
• 5:42: Experiment ends (/lemon_jelly)

It’d be nice to have complete access to my DVDs, but considering the time and effort involved, it’s not at all worth it. Media Center Edition will play rips with no problem, but due to (I suppose) potential copyright issues they don’t allow rips to be streamed. I came across a fix involving renaming the VOB rip, but that only works if you don’t mind not being able to fast forward or rewind (and apparently it also crashes).

Besides, I obviously didn’t think this through. Could I really justify devoting 4-8 gigs of hard drive space to Anger Management?

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There are two important things to know about me:

1. I am lazy
2. I am cheap

So, I want to be able to blog easily, but have whatever I’m using not cost anything. I’ve been using Deepest Sender, as I’ve mentioned a few times, but I think I may actually be outgrowing it. For one, now that I added a second blog (more on that when it’s ready), the fact that danconley.net auto-logs-in is annoying. You’d think that unchecking ‘log in automatically’ would do the trick, but you would be sadly mistaken.

Also, I’d like to start using more pictures in posts. Maybe not as much here, as I don’t need to illustrate my self-involved delusions, but while the browser admin panel for WordPress allows me to upload images and then insert them, DS does not. Now I understand what Lifehack.org meant when they said Firefox blogging extensions had ‘no good image support.’

While I have a PC as my ‘main’ computer, I do most of my blogging from my Macbook and so any downloadable application would need to work with OS X. But not 10.5, because point 2 up there prevents me from upgrading.

I’ve checked out ecto, as I’ve heard about it a few times, but while $18 is cheap it’s certainly not free, and that is after all what I’m striving for.

Does anyone know of any good — or at least decent — blogging programs that will let me upload images easily? Of course I’m worried that that will mean ‘FTP’ which is a no go: this server is locked down too tightly for any of that port 21 crap. I may be stuck with what I have, or spending some money; I have no problem paying for something if I’ll use it, so biting the bullet re: ecto isn’t out of the question as long as it’s very, very good.

Or I could suck it up and just use CyberDuck to upload things myself

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