No Canadian weather? That sucks, Asus!

I just got a ASUS O!Play HDP-R1. It’s one of the current crop of media player boxes, like the WDTV. I suspect they’re all the same MIPS hardware/Linux firmware inside. (Hey, you can telnet into it! Whee! Or something.)

At first, I couldn’t get it to work with my network share, but after a firmware upgrade, all is good. The new firmware offers web content, including weather. So I hopped along, and tried to access Toronto weather:

Err, some of us live outside Asia, Europe and the United States, y’know …

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<sup>ping trouble with a long spoon

I like Rob Goodlatte’s Flow Theme for WordPress. But it makes me look like a shambling moron in some of my equations, viz.:

What’s ‘d2 v3′ supposed to mean? I certainly didn’t type that.

Digging (not very deeply) into Rob’s CSS, I found this section

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0;
 border: 0;
 outline: 0;
 font-size: 100%;
 vertical-align: baseline;
 background: transparent;
}

That forces pretty much all text to be aligned with the baseline, including <sup> and <sub>. While it may be all pretty like, it also destroys the sense of my markup.

Deleting the references to sub and sup in line 5 fixes the problem. Let’s have that equation again:

Laaaahrvely.

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oh the irony

in pdf2ps output:

 **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
 **** The file was produced by:
 **** >>>> Adobe PDF Library 7.0 <<<<
 **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
 **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
 **** specification.

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Catherine in Torontoist today

Catherine gets a writeup in Torontoist today: Branching Out.

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it’s a transit routing algorithm!

– from MyTTC.

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Gridlock Blues, by William Beauvais

YouTube – Gridlock Blues.

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chkn

Tropical Desires (224 Adelaide St W, Toronto) does as awesome a jerk chicken as they do roti.

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sometimes, I’m not sure if my colleagues understand me

It’s been like this for weeks

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conservative bias at the CBC!!!111!!!

So where’s the “Will not help at all” option at Budget 2010: How does this budget affect your family? – Point of View

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life-changing roti experience

OM NOM NOM!!!!Had a really good chicken roti from Tropical Desires (224 Adelaide St W, Toronto). Really tender chicken, good veg, mild spices. They’ve only been open a couple of weeks, but I’m planning to be a regular.

It still amazes me that Burrito Boyz is full every day, yet this place is empty.

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RIP Michael Foot

We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.

– Michael Foot, 1983

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spring comes to toronto

first roll up the rim of the year

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trying to determine whether my side of the tracks is the right one

My neighbourhood, Kennedy Park, is pretty much defined by the CNR tracks at the southeast and northwest corners. This is Toporama Web Map Service data overlaid on the toronto.ca | Open neighbourhood polygon:
kennedy park is mostly defined by CNR tracks
It’s all lit up! These are the houses in my streets, each one highlighted in QGIS:
your lower intestine, or all the houses in my street?
More GIS nerdry at Numpty’s Progress.

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jukebox sampler

Every thousandth track from my library:

Track Title Artist Album
1000 How the West Was Won and Where It Got Us R.E.M. New Adventures in Hi-Fi
2000 Lesson 8 / Ex 3 David Hamburger The Acoustic Guitar Method, Book 2
3000 Way of Woe Peter Stampfel The Jig Is Up
4000 Exercise: Changing Chords Jack Hatfield First Lessons Banjo
5000 The Edison Museum They Might Be Giants No!
6000 Got The Jake Leg Too Ray Brothers
7000 Light Is Returning Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc O
8000 Birmingham Sunday Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc J
9000 Bring Me A Leaf From The Sea Carolina Tar Heels Mountain Frolic (Rare Old Timey Classics 1924-37) – Disc D (1925-30)
10000 Window to Mars Elf Power In a Cave
11000 The Book Of Doves Alasdair Roberts Spoils
12000 Grounded Pavement Wowee Zowee
13000 O Holy Night Classic Carols Classic Carols (Piano-Vocal Harmonies)
14000 Track 23 Peter Gelling Teach Yourself Harmonica
15000 Priscilla The Soft Machine The Soft Machine
16000 Colours Gorp Shapes And Colours Game
17000 The Mayor Of Simpleton XTC Upsy Daisy Assortment
18000 Jóga Björk Homogenic
19000 Everything Merges With the Night Brian Eno Another Green World
20000 Great Races – The Marathon Ivor Cutler, et al King Cutler, Part 6
21000 Coal Creek March Dock Boggs His Folkways Years (1963-1968) Disc 1
22000 The Ghost You Draw On My Back Múm Summer Make Good
23000 Tidy (Previously Unreleased Demo) Dressy Bessy Little Music: Singles 1997-2002
24000 Careless Soul Daniel Johnston 1990
25000 Introduction Joyce Ochs First Lessons: Dulcimer
26000 On A Monday Morning Rachel Unthank and the Winterset Cruel Sister

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drinkalottawater

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she did a banjo album? she did a banjo album!

… There are lots of instruments that I’d always really wished to own or be able to play, a piano, a cello, a harp, a clarinette… but I would never had expected that one day I could fall in love with a banjo.

Yes, Julia Kotowski did a banjo album, and it’s free to download: Entertainment For The Braindead – Roadkill.

This puts me in a huge listening dilemma today, as Kyle Creed’s Liberty arrived yesterday. Which to listen to first?

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ringthink

Paul Hart just released Your cellphone’s virtual receptionist – Ringthink. It’s rather clever. Voice recognition is a bit messed up with my thick n’ heavy accent, but it’s not bad.

(and if anyone says that Google Voice does this, well, it does – but not in Canada.)

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Wind Turbine Syndrome: Myths and Facts Webinar | Windustry

This is good: Wind Turbine Syndrome: Myths and Facts Webinar.

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arach, no phobia

Unless you really like spiders, I don’t recommend you see my picture spider in the basement.

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Find The Place: a bloody waste of bloody time

One book put me off geography for ever, and it was called Find the Place. Each page had a map of the UK like this


Next to it, was the numbered list of places. What you were supposed to do was memorize the name and location, and then (with the list covered by the pupils) the teacher would go through the class by turn and you’d have to say the place name. “Find the Place”; clever, huh?

I’ve always been allergic to rote learning, and I never even tried to get these. I just remember trying to hide when that part of the lesson came round. I don’t think there was any theme to the places; they weren’t even the five main glove manufacturing towns in the Midlands, or anything. Just random dots.

To try your mad geog skillz, those dots are real places. Can you name them? Answers after the fold.
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