I really like sharing knowledge with others, and that's what this website is mostly about (with the exception of a rant here and there, when I need to vent some...).

So, whenever I manage to create something that doesn't just fulfil my needs but also works for somebody else, I gain a fair bit of happiness (quite important for an otherwise extremely unsocial introvert like me).

Here's an example: I created my Sun to PS/2 keyboard converter because I needed something like it, and since posting my solution here I've heard from a few others who have built my contraption successfully. The most recent of those who reported back, Edward Robbins, has a subtly different model Sun keyboard and it took us a few email exchanges and experiments to determine how the one (undocumented) extra key on his keyboard could be made to work - but we got there.

Without the net he and I would never have gotten in touch, let alone ended up benefiting mutually from each other's efforts.

For three+ years I've been content with my Hanlin V3 but as it has become more and more unreliable and its flaws more annoying, a week ago I bit the bullet and replaced it with a Nook Simple Touch (for a measly $90). This post is about reducing the porky Nook to its useful Nookleus, so to speak.

click here for the rest of the story...

But dog-shaming.com is pretty hilarious.

Yesterday I sold my remaining 122 issues (10+ years' worth) of National Geographic Magazine (for one dollar), because I need the space in my bookcases and I can't stand the shallow and jingoist bias of the texts anymore.

Looks weird without the yellow spines on the shelf; I pretty much grew up with NGS magazines as my parents had a subscription starting when I was about three or four years old. I loved the magazines as a kid, and they were my prime reason to learn English early (the other was that my parents occasionally discussed things in English when they didn't want us kids to understand them...).

I still love the quality of the photographic work, but somehow that does no longer offset the nature of what is covered (or not) and how it is covered...

Snow causes havoc across eastern OZ :-)