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I like my Pixma, except that if one of those printer cartridges has a problem, it won't let you scan, fax, or do anything else. And buying the replacement yellow cartridge at the local office store, just to get scanning working, cost me $14.

I've been fighting this problem too. I've gone through several methods. I found that most spam accounts sign up and then don't activate, so I wrote a cron job to blow away all inactive accounts after a reasonable amount of time for a legitimate person to activate.

Unfortunately, there are still a few spammers who actually activate. Some then wait a couple days and sneak in a post. So far those are at a manageable level and I delete them manually.

I posted details in my blog.

That video also shows the kite doing several dives at low altitude. I've experienced this myself with a "flow form" parachute-style kite while trying to do kite aerial photography. One of those dives led to me bashing my camera into the beach. I can imagine it would be a mess to haul one of their huge kites out of the ocean.

SP2 does not get along with the latest versions of Cygwin, at least if you're using Cygwin's SSH. It all still works if you have a slightly older version of Cygwin.

More info on my blog.

I checked a couple weeks ago and the problem still wasn't fixed, but maybe it is now?

Currently the USCG employes a pair of blimps "Fat Albert" on Cudjoe Key to watch for dope smugglers, air traffic, etc.

Ob: SovietRussia: For Soviet Russia YOU spy on the blimp!

I think the MSNBOT does obey robots.txt. I blogged back in mid June about rejecting MSNBOT, since it was sucking my bandwidth. 22,360 hits in half a month, using nearly 50MB. Google, on the other hand, hit 3600 pages for less than 13MB.

I set the robots.txt rejection on June 13th and my last hit from MSNBOT was on June 14th, so I think it's obeying the instruction.

Several DVDs we've gotten through Netflix have several minutes of trailers you can't skip. All they let you do is hold down the fast forward. I think Universal was the company that set up their DVDs that way.

I bitched about this stuff yesterday in my blog.

I'll still take DVDs over going to the movies, but the DVD experience could be better.

As I discovered in March, you can use the Terraserver images copyright-free.

See the FAQ.

(I mistakenly believed you couldn't use the Terraserver images either when I wrote my blog in January)

I handle bulk emailings to people who signed up at my client's website. They are a legitimate business and unsubscribe those who reply or use the web form. But you invariably get spam bounces and other errors (here are some numbers).

I was amused to find in the bounce mailbox one day an auto-reply from a person who offered to read our message if we'd deposit $5 into his account via Paypal. I don't remember the website, but I wonder if anyone has ever paid $5 to have their email delivered.

Some real companies might be willing to pay $0.05 to $0.15 if it really meant their message was being read. Our small business probably couldn't afford it though. And I'd hate to see the whole email system become pay-per-view.

There is a quirky mapping tool that will let you take GPS tracks and waypoints and plot them onto Terraserver aerial photos.

It's not open source and only for Windows, but it's free: USAPhotoMap

I wrote about it a couple monts ago in my blog. It may be better now...haven't had a chance to try it lately. My main complaint at the time was that the Terraserver maps were not publishable, legally speaking, but I later learned they are.

Any open source tools out there that do something similar? I'd love to build one myself if I had the time.

It would be nice to see your maps plotted on Digital Raster Graphic (DRG) maps. Though you'd probably need more horsepower to serve them up. And despite being public domain U.S. government data, they are pretty difficult to get for free. :(

I have found free DRG data and plotted GPS routes on them for trip reports on my website. I haven't found any tools for doing this that will let me make up these maps and publish the result with no strings attached, so I've settled for overlaying my GPS track onto the map with Photoshop.

http://boonedocks.net/travel/

If anyone knows of a free/cheap tool where I can feed it my GPS track data and a public-domain DRG TIFF file, and plot the result, let me know.

Storing GPS data in each photo seems like overkill to me. If the subject is distant, like a mountain, the lat/lon won't really convey what you want. And maybe I don't want someone to know the GPS coordinates of my house if I take a picture of my dog on the couch. :)

Here's my photo attempt from last year.

Use fast film and a large aperture lens to try to get photos of single meteors with stars as points. Use slower film (and longer exposures) to get star trails. That might be easier since you never know when the meteors will appear (last year I only saw about 100/hour for a couple hours).

You also have to watch out for dew condensing on your lenses. It might also be a good idea to keep your camera bag in the garage for a couple hours to let the camera and lenses cool down.

While there is a lot of "open source" map data out there, there aren't a whole lot of free tools that will help you use it.

The tools and data fall under the GIS heading. Check out these sites to get started:

• FreeGIS - A good index of available stuff.
• MapServer - A tool mainly targeted toward serving map data on the web, but I've used it to make one-off images.
• Data Catalog - I've downloaded free USGS topo maps here. The files are large and it takes some effort to know what you're looking for.

I've used these tools to build maps of GPS tracks on my website. A couple examples:

• Smoky Mountains Hike
• Swamp Kayak Trip
• River Kayak Trip

I've done most of these maps with a lot of manual labor...if anyone knows of open source/free ways to improve the process, I'd appreciate it!

While there is a lot of "open source" map data out there, there aren't a whole lot of free tools that will help you use it.

The tools and data fall under the GIS heading. Check out these sites to get started:

• FreeGIS - A good index of available stuff.
• MapServer - A tool mainly targeted toward serving map data on the web, but I've used it to make one-off images.
• Data Catalog - I've downloaded free USGS topo maps here. The files are large and it takes some effort to know what you're looking for.

I've used these tools to build maps of GPS tracks on my website. A couple examples:

• Smoky Mountains Hike
• Swamp Kayak Trip
• River Kayak Trip

I've done most of these maps with a lot of manual labor...if anyone knows of open source/free ways to improve the process, I'd appreciate it!

While there is a lot of "open source" map data out there, there aren't a whole lot of free tools that will help you use it.

The tools and data fall under the GIS heading. Check out these sites to get started:

• FreeGIS - A good index of available stuff.
• MapServer - A tool mainly targeted toward serving map data on the web, but I've used it to make one-off images.
• Data Catalog - I've downloaded free USGS topo maps here. The files are large and it takes some effort to know what you're looking for.

I've used these tools to build maps of GPS tracks on my website. A couple examples:

• Smoky Mountains Hike
• Swamp Kayak Trip
• River Kayak Trip

I've done most of these maps with a lot of manual labor...if anyone knows of open source/free ways to improve the process, I'd appreciate it!

maps are going to have to be updated much more frequently.

Probably a good idea. I was doing some recent work with plotting GPS tracks on USGS topo maps. These maps, which I downloaded from the web, stated that they had been made in 1964 and last updated in 1976!

I have a Canon Powershot G1 digital camera. It uses a proprietary lithium-ion battery, about the size of a C or D battery, but more square in shape. This battery is fantastic. The camera can run for hundreds of photos, you can leave the viewscreen on, and use the flash a lot before you have to recharge. Through many charges it seems to have no degradations in performance.

On the other hand, I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop which has a lame battery. It is also lithium-ion. When I first got my laptop the battery would last about 3 hours before having to recharge. About a year later, it would last barely 1 hour. Dell knows their batteries don't last very long and only warrant them one year (despite the 3 years I have on the rest of the machine!). I found this out when I contacted them 1 year + 1 week after I bought the laptop. I ended up writing a small windows app called BatteryLog to help track your battery performance. You may want to give it a try on your laptop before your year-warranty runs out.

So basically, it's more than just the technology of the battery, it's also the design and manufacturer. There are some good ones out there!