jack

The internet says that they made low beam bike lights sometimes (maybe from germany). Any experience having a bike light which is bright enough to cycle on completely unlit roads/paths without having to slow down a lot, without dazzling oncomers? Is any decent bike light likely to do it or do I need to look for something specific?

I've slowly expanded my comfort zone cycling, but it would open more options if I could reliably cycle on dark ways. I used to have a decent light but it was a bit of a trade-off between "being able to see far enough" and "not dazzling people", and now I have a cheap light that's suffices for urban cycling but doesn't light things up much.

I might have asked this before, I can't remember.

There are a lot of webcomics and blogs I read intermittently that have some sort of ongoing story, so the reading pattern I really want to follow is:

1. Feel a bit bored.
2. Go to the last update on this comic/blog I read.
3. Read from there forward until I get bored of it or get up to the present.
4. Go do something productive.
5. Repeat.

However, what I end up doing is:

1. Go to read something I've not read for a while
2. See spoilers on what's going to happen in today's update
3. Spend five minutes faffing looking for the last update I read
4. Read forward from there.
5. Say "sod it", I should give up entirely xor read it every day.

Now maybe "sod it" is the right answer, but can anyone think of a better approach?

* Ideally there'd be a browser plugin which lets me bookmark a date, but when I click "next" automatically updates the bookmark. (Although that may fail with comics where the latest update redirects to the home page.)

* Or maybe, just have a "stuff I'm reading" browser window, and leave it open all the time. Except (a) it's annoying if it's ever accidentally closed and (b) it would have 50+ tabs and (c) is there an easy way to share that between computers

* Alternatively, I could subscribe to RSS updates, and then read from the "last unread" or "last nondeleted" forward? But not everything has a good RSS feed.

I feel like I'm probably missing an obvious way of reading intermittent updates that everyone does by default. (Other than "not bother", I'd find it easier to go cold turkey if I have the option of reading stuff if I like, rather than having to cut out everything at once.)

Would anyone else who's coming to the wedding be willing to help out during it? Mostly low effort, but to have some volunteers to station at the entrances to tell people where to go, and keep people moving through the buffet, etc. But it would be good to have a surplus to cover things we haven't thought of yet and so no-one has to do much.

Thank you!

PS. Thank you everyone who commented on the songs and TEN posts, several were really, really helpful but I didn't get round to thanking them individually.

Comments screened.

I am about to need to print several hundred black and white pages. Assuming this will continue to come up in the future, is it more efficient to buy another inkjet cartridge, buy a laser printer, or get staples or someone to print the big things?

Are color laser printers still more expensive than B&W nowadays?

I have a motorola dext mobile phone, which runs android. It makes phone calls and browses the internet and reads email. But what it does NOT do is connect to the android so-called market place, which is part of the point of having a "modern" phone. According to the internet, this is probably because I didn't register it with a google account when I first set it up, and there's a bug in doing so later which causes it to just hang at the "verifying your account with google" stage.

Most, but not all, recommended the way to solve this is a factory reset.

I don't have much personal data stored on the phone, but I would like to save the contact list first.

Unfortunately, this is confusing. I seem to recall using microsoft activesync when I ported the contacts _to_ this phone. But what I think I did was move the contacts to computer from the old phone, delete old ones and reformat them, move them back to the phone, save them to the sim card, then import them from the sim card to the new phone. (At least, I remember using activesync somehow, and I don't think it works with andriod.)

But I don't know how to save the contacts from the new phone. There does not appear to be an obvious way to store them to the sim card, to the local filesystem, or to a computer. You're SUPPOSED to automatically sync them with a google account -- but this doesn't work if you can't set one up, which is what I'm trying to do.

Any suggestions?

Hm. I think I've reconstructed what happened. As far as I can recall:

1. I created an initial test site on my laptop, which was sync'd to the NearlyFreeSpeech serves.
2. At some point I switched to using the copy on the server as the master copy, editing it with FTP
3. And created a dev and live version of the site, so I could test on dev, check in, and then check out in the live version
4. Real life intervened, and I let some things break, and then didn't renew the subscription for ages.
5. The whole site is deleted (the FAQ says it's deliberately deleted permanently for privacy reasons).

So, that's that. I'd still like to redevelop it: the earliest versions of the openID and login code exist on my laptop, and the rest of the architecture needed rewriting anyway, but I'm very annoyed to have lost the database structure and the HTML design.

I know it's unlikely, but no-one has any helpful suggestions do they? (Other than "always back it up on physically separate AND logistically separate machines" even if only occasionally, which believe me, I definitely agree with.)

If I do redevelop, I'm undecided between making another HTML/PHP site, or plunging into something specifically designed for this sort of thing. Any opinions? (Is there anything that aids the graphical design whilst meeting my idiosyncratic standards of non-inanity?).

I have a twitter account (CartesianDaemon), but I've not used it. I've friended several friends' feeds. How should I read my twitter feed: from the twitter home page? Does it send tweets to email? Does it still text them to you? Or through a third-party app?

I'm thinking seriously of getting a netbook. (A netbook is a mini-mini laptop. The first famous was the Eee PC (sp?) which was ~£200, easy to use, had flash memory (?) and a reliable linux distribution (?))

Either whatever the best one I can for £200, or a more up-to-date one if I'm convinced I need it. I'm not sure exactly how I'd use it, but I think for grabbing when I know I'm going to be out, commuting or travelling all day and want to spod/hack.

Does anyone have any good advice? (Either for which one to get, or whether to get one at all, as opposed to a large mobile phone or a small laptop?)

Livredor and I are in Amsterdam over the weekend. We mostly know what we'll be doing, but will have some time to do touristy stuff we haven't really decided. Where should we go?

How about cartesian-heights.org? It's distinctive, it's a nice name, it looks fairly easy to type.

Are hyphens sane in domain names? I know many sites automatically reject[1] any email address with a "+" in, is a "-" likely to be a problem?

If you saw it, would you remember if it had a hyphen, dot, underscore or nothing between the words? If I said "cartesian heights dot org with a hyphen" would you understand it?

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?

[1] See standard "why go to such an effort to make life more difficult for people?" rant