Critter's Cave

Update

critter42 — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:49:02 +0000

While I’m still going to be updating my progress in getting fit, I’m going to be doing it at Fat Secret because they have a purty app for my Droid phone that will let me update near instantly! Oh yeah, they have a lot of other tools that make sense to me and give me the particular info I need to manage my condition effectively. Like everywhere else, I’m critter42 over there.

New Beginnings

admin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:30:49 +0000

Four years (and a little over a month) ago I quit smoking.

Two years ago I stopped drinking sugared drinks.

A year ago I tipped the scales at 320lbs

A month and a half ago I was diagnosed with diabetes.

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I had always felt somewhat bullet-proof when it came to getting things like diabetes, or heart disease and such. This was a wake-up call. I immediately started a sensible, low calorie diet. At the time of the diagnosis, I couldn’t start a real exercise regimen due to a lingering physical injury. In the last 6 weeks I am down to about 290lbs and lost 6 inches in my waist.

Today, however, I have started a new phase in life and begun a concentrated exercise program – I’m starting slowly and working my way up. My short-term goal is to run the Gibson Guitar 5k on June 12, 2010 – and run the entire distance. My long term goal? Well, when I got out of Navy boot camp, I weighted 152lbs. While I may make it there someday, in my mind I have 175lbs as my ultimate target weight goal. It’s going to take a lot of hard work and it won’t be instant, but it will be worth it.

I decided to start posting my workouts as way to hold myself accountable, as a motivational technique to keep going.

Today, my first day of real exercise in a long time, I did the following:

Stretching Exercies – 10 min
Pushups – 10 (I have GOT to work on that)
Elliptical – 30 minutes weight loss program – averaged 45rpms and a distance of 1.2 miles
Upper body (using 10lb dumbbells)
- front and side arm lifts – 20 each
- arm curls – 20
- arm press – 20
Crunches – 3 reps of 20 each

And as this is about new beginnings, I have also moved my main site to Wordpress from Movable Type and updated the theme to something a little more visually exciting.

This is going to be interesting!

Posting to WordPress 2.9 from within FeedDemon 3.1.0.12 and up

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:27:03 +0000

I’m posting this as a reference for anyone searching for how to configure FeedDemon’s ‘Send To’ feature to work with WordPress 2.9 and up. The instructions on the Newsgator website/knowledge base are outdated.

In FeedDemon (current version as of this writing is 3.1.0.12), click the gear icon (“choose newspaper icons”) below the title of any post and in the popup window click “Send To”.
Click on the Send To icon, “Blog This Item”, then “Configure Blog Publishing Tools.”
Click Add
Put something in the Description field - it doesn’t matter what, just so you know what it is
In Command Line or URL, enter the following address:
http://www.mywebsite.com/wordpressfolder/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=post&content=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION_PLAIN$&post_title=$ITEM_TITLE$
where “www.mywebsite.com” is the location of your WordPress blog and ‘wordpressfolder’ is the subfolder your WordPress folder is installed - usually just ‘wordpress’ (you may or may not have this folder depending on how your site is configured)
You can click “Set as default” if desired, then click OK and OK again.

You are now set to post to your WordPress blog from within FeedDemon’s newspaper.

YATE (yet another test entry)

critter42 — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:53:36 +0000

Yep, this is another test entry to check some settings out.
Nothing to see here…move along

Defeating the Upgrade Monster

critter42 — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 11:24:40 +0000

Almost exactly one year ago, I attempted to upgrade from MT 3.2 to MT4. Since then, my blog here at critterscave.us became unreadable. Finally, after a year of on and off fiddling and a final upgrade to 4.23 that was released earlier this week, as well as completely deleting and reinstalling my templates, I now have a working install again.
And this post proves it

As requested by Mr. Gaiman

critter42 — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 06:11:00 +0000

He wants to demonstrate the power of the blog and mess with Penn Jillette a little bit
Asked and done!

Month of Apple Bugs – First Bug Unveiled

critter42 — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:54:26 +0000

Testing the “Post This” functionality of Month of Apple Bugs – First Bug Unveiled
ens0niq writes “The first bug (a Quicktime rtsp URL Handler Stack-based Buffer Overflow) of the Month of Apple Bugs has been unveiled — as previously promised — by LMH and Kevin Finisterre. From the FAQ: ‘This initiative aims to serve as an effort to improve Mac OS X, uncovering and finding security flaws in different Apple software and third-party applications designed for this operating system. A positive side-effect, probably, will be a more concerned (security-wise) user-base and better practices from the management side of Apple.’”

Final ShadowCon X pictures

critter42 — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 00:51:50 +0000

Here is the link to my final gallery of ShadowCon X pictures – we had a blast! Can’t wait for next year’s!
Gallery: http://www.critterscave.us/NewBlog/ShadowConXPictures/index.htm

FeedDemon 2.0 – definitely worth the wait!

critter42 — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:56:38 +0000

On February 9, 2005, Nick Bradbury released the most recent version of FeedDemon – version 1.5. In the almost year since a LOT has happened. Nick’s one-man show, Bradsoft, was purchased by NewsGator, Nick underwent brain surgery, and became one of the founding Board members of the AttentionTrust non-profit organization. With all this happening he still found time to work on the next version of FeedDemon – 1.6. After a lengthy beta period, and nearing a releasable product, he decided to add features that had been clamored for but were always promised “for the 2.0 version” and is going to skip 1.6 and go to version 2.0, which should be out in public beta very soon.
I have been honored, along with Andrew “Spyder” Herron to be the first non-Newsgator-employees to take a look at and provide feedback on FeedDemon 2.0
One of the most striking (and welcome) differences between 1.5 (and the 1.6 betas) and 2.0 is the change in the UI. Something that frustrated me (and many others) to no end was how groups of feeds (folders, which were called channel groups in older versions of FD) were handled. It should be noted here that FeedDemon was one of the earliest RSS feed aggregators out there and as such, some of the decisions made during the initial design of the program turned out to be not very well-suited to how the usage of news feeds evolved over the subsequent two years. The most obvious aspect of this was his choice to show only one folder (channel group in older versions) at a time. As it turned out many of us would subscribe to hundreds (even thousands) of feeds and having to go through a drop-down, pick the folder we wanted and then browse through those feeds was a significant drain on time. This led to one of the most common feature requests – a treeview/explorer view/whatever you want to call it view. With 2.0, a treeview has been implemented that allows one to see all their folders at once – no more going folder-by-folder. It is just an absolute pleasure to work worth over the current version.
There are some really neat things like tag search subscriptions for technorati, flickr, and deli.cio.us; keyword subs using popular blog search engines; and a subscription overview page that shows not only the unread counts, but also the feeds you pay the most and least attention to – which is really useful for getting rid of feeds that seemed neat at the time, but eventually lost their luster or just didn’t contain the content you wanted.
Probably the most significant new (well, completely revamped and updated) feature (which really was the biggest priority of the 1.6 beta series) is the feeed synchronization feature. Registered users of FeedDemon 1.5 get a free two-year subscription to the Newsgator.com service. As part of this service, they are allowed to synchronize the read/unread status of their feeds with Newsgator. This allows someone, for instance, to read their news feeds at work, let FeedDemon synch with Newsgator and then check for new feeds when they get home, or on the road, or wherever via Newsgator.com. Mac users should be able to sync with Newsgator – and therefore FeedDemon via Newsgator – when a new version of NetNewsWire ( which was also acquired by Newsgator this year) is released, thus allowing cross-platform synchronization (OK, technically cross-platform synching is currently possible because I was able to get FeedDemon 1.5 and the 1.6 betas to work under Wine in Linux , though it took me a couple of hours and I’ve since lost my notes so I can’t provide any help and since I don’t work for Newsgator, they can’t help either – sorry!).
2.0 is just so much more usable than 1.x it is amazing. No way, no how would I want to switch back to the old version – no matter what bug I may encounter. And yes, I have encounted some bugs here and there, but hey, it’s pre-beta! It’s not going to be perfect but I’ve seen full-blown betas introduced by companies (*cough*Microsoft*cough*) that were a lot less ready-for-prime-time than this.
One of the big efforts that is being made for this release is making it new-user/non-techie friendly. Many of the dialogs have been revamped to be less jargon-y, the help and tutorials are going to be updated to help ease the new user into the world or RSS aggregation – Nick and the gang really, really want this to be accessible to the newbies (and I’m tired of “newbies” being used like a dirty word or insult – every single one of us was a newb at one point or another) while still having the power and flexibility to be attractive to us Power Users as well, and I think they have accomplished that goal.

Shadowcon X pictures!! Live from Shadowcon

critter42 — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 20:16:45 +0000

Blogging this in the middle of a Munchkin game at ShadowCon. Here are some pictures taken at ShadowCon this morning!
Edit: URL has been updated to point to the final gallery