Tofu is a nifty app which reflows text into newspaper-like columns in an effort to make it easier to read onscreen. It works very well.

I woke up this morning to find my cable modem not working. This is a problem, because I had planned to work on all sorts of interesting things today – all of which have an online requirement. After a phone call to confirm that I hadn’t simply forgotten to pay my bill, I just sat there staring at the lights on the modem, trying to turn them back on purely by my own will.

I really don’t care a whole lot about the visual presentation of this site beyond the usual “clean” approach that I prefer. Or it might be that I care, but lack the skills to do much about it. Either way, my site ain’t pretty much. Jay put together a very clean, basic template at the office which was originally meant as a wireframe template only. I kind of liked it, so I’ve implemented it here.

TinyP2P What’s that you ask? Well apparently it’s an entire Peer-to-Peer file sharing application, both server and client – in 15 lines of Python code. Damn.

Oh goody, another post by some goofball blogger about how he’s switched tools again. I only mention it in case you noticed that the RSS feed has been wonky for a few days. Of course Textpattern used a different URL for its feed so everything broke with the WordPress switch. The older URL was /?rss=1 and the new one is /feed/rss2/. A little mod_rewrite magic and things seem to be back in order…

And a new one added every hour of every day. I could read all of them and still not be worth a tin toot at Photoshop.

From CNN Money “But customers will be given a one-week grace period after that to return the product. After that grace period ends, the chain will automatically sell them the product, less the rental fee. If the customers don’t want to purchase the movie or game, they can return the product within 30 days for a credit, less a restocking fee.” What’s that? “…less a restocking fee.” How’s that not a late fee again?

I hear that the FCC is considering allowing the use of cell phones on commercial airline flights. Can you just imagine how much more flying will suck? I can’t wait to be trapped in a flying metal tube full of thoughtless rambling assholes. I used to have a minor fear of flying. Now I’m terrified.

For those of you who puzzled over why anyone thought [Lost in Translation][1] was worth watching… Watch it again, seriously. It’s a wonderful movie. If you hate it the second time, I promise you can watch Dodgeball again if you really want to.

Nitpick: Is there a way to (globally) make popup menus in OS X part of the tab order? How many times a day should I have to stop typing while filling in one form or another just to grab the mouse and manipulate a popup menu? Tab-type-tab-type is a pretty good flow that I wish would remain uninterrupted.

So which app windows (and parts of windows) in OS X accept mouse click-through and which don’t and why don’t they behave consistently? Seems that the scroll bars of all windows accept click-through, which is annoying, as the scrollbar is usually all that’s visible of the window I wish to bring to the front. This means I can’t easily bring the rear window forward without scrolling the document as well (kinda like Windows™ that way.

I’m not usually described as, nor do I typically empathize with, Thoreau-spouting twirps or Luddites whining about the march of progress, but there are some very interesting observations in Quitting the Paint Factory, a Harper’s piece by Mark Slouka about maybe slowing down just a little so we each don’t die with a crumpled to-do list in our clenched fists. “I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats.