Primordial Ooze

For the past few weeks, I have been waking up to find ducks swimming in my pool. My son Giovanni, a budding birdwatcher, was the first to realize they were Mallard ducks, both male and female. We thought nothing of this and just enjoyed them as they quietly swam each morning. When I notice them, however, I usually press the chlorine boost button on my automatic chlorinator because, well, seems like the right thing to do.

Ducks

Mama Duck

Papa Drake

What we didn’t know until our landscaper was spraying those trees, was that we have a clutch of about 10 eggs! Soon, we’ll have little ducklings! More photos to come.

Eggs!

Mama Duck hiding from me

By Nick at 6:44 AM |Tagged as backyard , ducks , life , pool | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I can’t believe TrueCrypt, my favorite security utility for Windows, has been available for the Mac since February 2008 and I didn’t know it.

TrueCrypt lets you create files that contain encrypted data. These files can be mounted as drive letters in Windows and as volumes on the Mac.

You can, of course, store anything in these volumes. Make one 1GB and store pictures and video that you don’t want people to see. Or, make it 1MB like mine and just store a bunch of text files.

I store all of my website passwords in my file, so I can keep my website passwords hard and complex. Some of my passwords have been getting simpler in the past year since I switched fully to the Mac and mainly because I didn’t have easy access to my password file. There are other password file solutions out there, but TrueCrypt is by far my favorite.

By Nick at 10:05 PM |Tagged as mac , os x , security | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Currently, my favorite image.

By Nick at 10:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’m a huge fan of PicLens, a Firefox plugin that lets you visualize photostreams in 3D. It’s really amazing. I just got an update and I noticed that YouTube integration has been implemented. It’s possible it was already there, possibly in a previous revision, but this was the first time I saw it.

Here’s a quick rundown… you see the video thumbnails, as you would expect. They seem to preload in the background since videos play almost instantly. You can zoom in fully but on my 24” display that obviously looks like crap. This is YouTube, after all. A quick back-scroll with my mousewheel shrinks the video to a point where it plays nicely. This is all in smooth 3D with no breaks in the video playback. When you et board, you can move down the 3D wall and and the video quiets down smoothly as you would expect.

The implementation is nothing short of amazing!

By Nick at 4:58 PM |Tagged as video youtube tools | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Most people don’t talk about it, but today June 6 is the anniversary of a historic day. It’s the anniversary of the turning point in WWII. It’s the anniversary of D-Day, when thousands soldiers lost their loves in defense of freedom on the shores of Normandy, France.

I’d love to go there one day and pay my respects. I’m not a historian, by any means. Nor a history buff. But I thought about this today and figured I’d write this small tribute.

By Nick at 11:16 PM |Tagged as america , memorial , usa , war , wwii | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My friend Greg had me search for this on YouTube today. It took so long to find it, I felt compelled to archive it here.

Enjoy!

By Nick at 10:57 PM |Tagged as video guitar | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)