A Veritable Cornucopia of Useless Information

WunderBlast 0.3.3

This versions incorporates most of the suggestions made in the comments in the last post. Known issue: the flip animation isn’t currently working, for some reason.

To add:

• Clicking to view more than one type of radar
• Additional radar view preferences on the back side
• Resizing the widget

…I wrote my own widget. Download it! NOW!

http://www.nebraskaroads.com/other/WunderBlast-0.2.1.zip

It’s currently at version 0.2; hopefully, I’ll have some more of that wonderful functionality available in a few days…

Today was the official start of summer, but unofficially, it arrived a few days ago. The best way to describe days like this, in my opinion, is “beer on the back porch” weather: sitting outside, grilling, listening to chill music, and talking to good friends long into the night. That’s one thing I miss from my previous summers in Lincoln. On the other hand, the bar across the street always seems to have a lively outside crowd…

• Number of times that someone has asked me (in all seriousness) if I am married between 8/27/81 and 6/10/05: 0
• Number of times that someone has asked me (in all seriousness) if I am married between 6/11/05 and 6/14/05: 2

Apperently, during the past week I’ve reached some nebulous stage in life where it’s now reasonable to ask if I have a wife. I guess that’s one of the final signs that society (excluding corporate America) considers me an adult.

One of the most-hyped features in Mac OS X Tiger is Dashboard (basically, it’s full of glorified HTML + JavaScript bundles that do stuff). While the overall usefulness of Dashboard is questionable, the Unit Converter “widget” does come in handy from time to time. Unfortunately, Apple didn’t do that great of job in making the actual unit conversions as accurate as they should be; also, some conversions that would be handy (teaspoon/tablespoon/cup conversions, for example) weren’t included. Being the ever-so-helpful person that I am, I fixed this.
Download the updated unit conversions here. To install this file:

• Save the Conversions.js file in some appropriately generic location.
• Open the /Library/Widgets folder, and control-click on the Unit Converter widget. Select “Show Package Contents”.
• Drag the file into the Unit Converter folder. Click Authenticate on the first dialog box, then Replace on the second dialog box, then enter in your password.
• Open Dashboard, click on the Unit Converter widget, and hit Command-R to refresh the widget.

Things I’ve fixed from the Apple-supplied version of the file:

• Added teaspoons, tablespoons, milliliters, imperial pints, and imperial quarts to the Volume conversion list.
• More accurately defined nearly all of the non-metric units in the Volume and Speed lists (the mi/hr to mi/min conversion in particular has a noticeable rounding error in the Apple-supplied version).