Joel Johnson Has Him a Blog

A school in Richmond, Virginia, is selling off a lot of old 500MHz G3 iBooks for $50 a pop; first-come, first serve, in-person only. Anyone in New York want to make a road trip? These aren't awesome laptops, but they're totally worth $50.

I finally played around with PalmOrb, the Palm app that lets you use your Plam Pliot as an external LCD screen (I was inspired by this bit on MAKE today about how to use a Pocket PC to do a similar, albeit swankier thing).

With an original Zire (model m150) and Windows XP, it worked a charm. The problem is, PalmOrb only supports a 4 line by 20 character display in the stable versions, which isn't a lot of room to display data. There are experimental versions that aim to fix that, but even so, LCDSmartie (the software that actually dumps the data out to the Palm via the conduit of PalmOrb) only supports 4 x 40 char screens at most.

It's like there's this great set of open source software that can almost do what I want, but then peters out right before greatness. Since PalmOrb is no longer being maintained, we'll not likely see an improvement on its abilities. Too bad. Palm PDAs are already cheap to pick up on eBay (and I'd definitely want one with a backlight in a permanent installation) right now; Just imagine how cheap they'll be when Palm goes bankrupt.

It's not like I need an LCD screen on the front of my case, anyway. I don't run Folding@home anymore, use FoxyTunes to control my music, and am perfectly happy using Motherboard Monitor's system tray output to keep an eye on my operating temps.

The registration of similar domains to popular sites is a common, asshole tactic for those looking to profit from the hard work of others. It sucks, but whatever. The cure for it is easy: become popular enough to get high Google rank and some noteriety, so that no will mistake your 'boinkboink.net' for the real thing.

An internet friend of mine is getting doubly-screwed, however, by a site that not only has registered a very similar name, but is stealing his content, layout, and images wholesale. Check it out: his site is EverythingUSB, while the clone site is EveryUSB.com. (Poor man's nofollow.)

It's not just a question of a rip-off site covering similar products—we used to get that all the time at Gizmodo and we always thought it was something of a tribute rather than something to be frustrated by—it's a question of a site actually purporting to be the site it is stealing, down to the same 'About' information and founding date.

So underhanded! I blame Google and Adsense and the entire internet.

My mom just called me to say that my Grandma's house partially burnt in a fire last Thursday. Grandma is fine—she's staying with an aunt outside St. Louis—but the family is looking on this as a good time to move her into an assisted-living home.

This is the second home that Grandma has lost to fire, each one taking a little bit more of our family's history along with it. Grandma had a natty suitcase in her room filled with newspaper clippings spanning sixty years of our family's history. I'd always meant to borrow that and scan them in, but never did.

According to Blogebrity, I was once an A-list blogger. Ignoring the question of whether leaving Gizmodo annuls my status (it probably and rightly does), I mention that only to qualify this statement: I have no idea what blogging is.

To me, it's always been short, snarky blips, because that's what I wrote over and over again, but clearly that is no measure. (This is presuming that Gawker sites are even blogs at all, which is a question best left for another, more pedantic time.)

God, I almost navel-gazed my way into a 'what is a blog' post. That is not my aim. Instead!

I think I am going to enjoy the almost-exclusive writing of longer, more researched bits. Part of the reason I left the relative safety of Gawker is so I could actually learn something new about writing, the last of my skills from which I expected to make a living (far behind my 15-year-old self's first-choice hybrid of 'videogame designing, sword-wielding rock star').

But now, instead of banging out a couple dozen half-digested blurbs each day (which is a lot of fun, make no mistake), I'm actually forced to research each piece I write; something not altogether unfamiliar to me, but I feel I have more time to do it right.

It's all part of a new trend I'm trying to incorporate into my life entitled 'Half-Assing It, Then Half-Assing It Again, To Form Something Like a Whole.'

I couldn't have picked a worse time to move my blog over to new hosting than the week I left Gizmodo—the one time I probably could have picked up a few subscribers and readers of my own. No big deal; I'm not really trying to build up a following on my personal blog, which would be sort of weird. Nonetheless, it's good to be back. Now stop reading this.

In addition to this site, I've also gotten Grandma Lemons' cookbook back online, as well, which had been crippled due to comments spammers but is now clean as a whistle. Grandma hand-bound six books of her recipes, one for each of her children. She used the same three-ring binders my Grandfather and she had used to make custom hymnals. She printed the recipes off on the TRS-80 Model 4P (that I still have locked up in my parents' shed) using a Lemons-brand word processing program.

Of course, the limited number of copies meant that we 30-some-odd grandkids got shafted, so my mom and I scanned and hand-typed in the recipes from her original copy and put them online. I'm glad they are easily accessed again, except by those who want to write about raging, veiny dongs on her cheesecake recipe.

I haven't been recording the beer as I once did, mostly because the initial mystery is over—I pretty much know what we're doing and how to do it. The trick now is to discover all the little steps we could be taking to improve the batches and to continue to make mistakes to learn from.

Case in point: the Tongue Splitter Mk. II, a super-hoppy IPA extract kit that we doctored up with even more hops and malt, then idiotically added a full package of priming sugar when bottling. The result? Our first exploded bottles and a beer that foams uncontrollably when exposed to open air.

It's sort of amusing to try to direct the foam into two or three glasses and let it mellow out enough to drink, but it's not great beer to drink in the first place (it's better than the first batch of Tongue Splitter, but still not amazing).

We've ordered another two kits and another secondary carboy (5 gal) to start up the July/August brewing season. Both kits are extracts, one a Beligan-style Witbier and another the most generic Porter that Northern Brewer offers. It's clear that the time for moving to whole grain is near, though—we're simply running out of extract styles that we want to try.

The Saison and Hefeweizen we brewed last were both very tasty, however, so it's not all crap beers. We're approaching a point where we're going to need to take this slightly more seriously (new equipment, more attention paid to temperatures, cleaner brewing environments). If we're going to take it to the next step, however, I want to make sure that we're making beers that are worth the trouble.