Mike Cohen

My OLPC Laptop arrived!

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Late this afternoon, UPS left a surprisingly small & heavy box at my door. It was my OLPC laptop! There are no printed manuals; instead a note directs you to a getting started page.

The laptop is much smaller than I expected. The keyboard is a little too small for adult hands to use it comfortably. The screen is very readable, despite the size. It looks like it would be a nice ebook reader for long flights.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to connect it to my home network, since it doesn’t support WPA (an update in early 2008 is supposed to ad WPA support, however). I’m now setting up a computer to computer network on my Mac Mini so I can connect it.

OLPC

I posted a full gallery here.

New Gmail Feature

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This morning I discovered a new Gmail feature I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere yet. The More Actions menu has a new item, “Filter messsages like these”. It takes you straight to the Create Filter screen with the search criteria filled in based on the selected messages.

That was one of my favorite features of Eudora, so it was a welcome addition for me.

Student Given Detention For Using Firefox

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Slashdot reports that a student has been given detention for using Firefox to do his classwork. The student was in class, working on an assignment that necessitated using a browser. The teacher instructed him to stop using Firefox and to do his classwork, to which the student responded that he was doing his classwork using a ‘better’ browser (it is unclear whether the computer was the student’s own computer or not). The clueless teacher (who called the rogue program ‘Firefox.exe’) ordered him to detention.

Update: It’s a hoax.

Bigfoot

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photo.jpg, originally uploaded by mike3k.

This polydactyl cat (6 toes on each paw) has been hanging around here and terrorizing the other cats. He often comes to my door and howls loudly. Today I caught him spraying outside my window. He isn’t fixed and seems to be wild.

NetNewsWire is still the best news reader

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I decided to give Google Reader another chance and try the new features like friends, but after less than a day I went back to NetNewsWire.

I find that I can get through the news a lot faster in NetNewsWire. One big reason is that I have full control over when it gets updated. I have one group, Favorites, that gets updated every hour. The rest of the feeds I only update manually. I put feeds that I need to keep up with constantly, such as software updates and warnings from FeedBurner in the favorites group so I get notified right away.

Google Reader, on the other hand, refreshes continuously. I often find new items before I finish reading the last update.

One of Google Reader’s most popular features (and Scoble’s favorite) is shared items. I can do the same with NetNewsWire by adding an item to my clippings, which are automatically shared here.

Old domains never die

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About a year ago, two kids named Brandon and Erik had a podcast called Mr. Mac Geek, which was usually fairly interesting. As often happens, they became involved with other products and stopped updating their podcast.

I never bothered unsubscribing and it recently came back to life. However, it now appears to be owned by someone else and is full of poorly written misinformation and FUD, such as claims that Macs are plagued by spyware.