I don’t like Twitter because you can’t have a proper conversation. Facebook is fine, but you need to have a login and be a friend.

So I’ve started posting my stream of consciousness posts to Google Buzz. You don’t need a login and everything is public (just like this blog).

If you have a G-Mail account, you can follow me there. If not, no worries. Just follow my Google Profile page.

Ron’s Google Profile Page (With Buzz Stuff)

I finally enabled the dead-simple WordPress Mobile plugin, so now all of the blogs are mobile / phone friendly. Meaning they should load pretty quickly and be appropriately formatted. I don’t access much from my phone (mainly because my Blackberry has a dead battery and stays attached to a wall), but it seemed to work okay. If it doesn’t work, all I can say is “sorry”, because I don’t know how the plug-in works.

This covers Austin Antics (sybarite.us), Sixty Second Shop (sixtysecondshop.com), and Austin Kontore (kontore.net).

If you are interesting in learning more shop tips and techniques, check out our other site: Sixty Second Shop

Where here at Austin Antics we talk about our ongoing projects, at Sixty Second Shop we focus exclusively on how-to videos.

Why do “yet another” how-to shop video? Because many of them take a long time to get their point across. We wanted something that you can quickly view, get the gist of the concept, and then go and search for more in-depth information. We consider the videos the be starting points, not definitive guides. Easily digestible bits of knowledge.

We hope that you find the videos helpful, and welcome suggestions and feedback.

I’m working on an updated theme and layout, so the blog might be a little screwed up for a while.

For anyone who’s trying to use some of the projects as a jumping-off point, you may find higher resolution photos helpful in figuring out your own designs. I’ve also organized the Electronics stuff by project, so you can check out things you’re interested in. Just click here or on the “Austin & Puerto Rico Photos” link to the right.

I recently upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and things seemed to go fine, until I tried uploading an image to a post. There are two bugs in the code which cause problems. I was able to find a simple fix that works. You’ll need to edit two files in your WordPress install:

wp-admin/includes/media.php
     Line 817 (debug: false) : Remove the trailing comma

wp-includes/js/swfupload/handlers.js
     Line 99 (height:26) : Remove the trailing comma

I’m moving things around a bit on the sidebar. I’m bumping up the Blog links because I use them a lot and get sick of scrolling all the time.

From high above, we wish you a very special day.

Click on photo to enlarge.

For some reason, my anti-spam software (Bad Behavior) suddenly started acting wonky the other day and blocked me from getting into the admin side of the site. Pretty darn annoying. Anyhow, I’ve gone with a new method called reCAPTCHA which prompts you to enter in two distorted words. This one is a little different from ones you’ve used in the past, since your work is actually doing something useful:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

 E-mail me if you have any problems adding comments. Thanks.

I also whacked the Google Calendar, since it wasn’t rendering properly (on any browsers) and was slowing down the site. I’ll probably create a dedicated Calendar page for those who are interesting in keeping up with us. Hopefully 2008 will be less travel-filled.

Update: I created a dedicated page for the Calendar and put a link to the right. It renders a lot better in a larger format.

Yeap, we’re off to Dallas this time. We’re going primarily to see Chasen which I wrote about in my journal Sybarite13 and also to check out Tanner Electronics.

Tanner Electronics is supposed to be similar to the American Science and Surplus in the Chicagoland area. I like the idea of being able to roam around and see what’s available. Ordering from catalogs are okay except that I prefer to see, touch, and get ideas kind a like the book stores. You just never know what you’ll find.