Scatter Cushion Affair again today. Strange Capitalisation there, S.C.A. What could it mean?

VIRGIN MOBILE DIGITAL TV (or VMDT) Our Telewest STB gave up the ghost the other day, a faint duvet covered mass floated up into the nether. So, today came the cable guy and it wasn’t Jim Carry, thankfully. The box had to be replaced, but he replaced it with the exact same model, bastard, it really is a crummy piece of crap that thing, slow as molasses, whatever molasses is. The strange thing is though, the guy rang on the doorbell again some 15 minutes later my first thought being that yet another telewest employee had misplaced something because a year or so ago a telewest engineer lost his test modem and came to our house panting desperate that it might have been left here. lol. But no, he said that he had just done a test and my cable modem’s signal was too strong. Wha? The mind boogles, how did he test that from outside? Well, I haven’t had any stability issues with my internet access at all for god knows how long, but I let him do it anyway, he attached some kind of extra screw on thing to the CAT5 screw on thing. But now i’m wondering, have I just been bugged? Have MI5 requested that I be spied upon? Eek, its so Veronica Mars.

ETCO AT MY BASTARD FRIEND Has anyone figured out how to add MT 3.3.1 style Tags to entries from within ecto yet?

WORDunimPRESSed I’m going to change my website for the new season… sometime. I want to take longer over it this time, unlike what I usually do which is suddenly think to myself, “Hey! I fancy changing my website” and then spending less than a day on it, including both the illustrator nonsense and the coding up. I do have some dandy (that’s a hint) ideas for it already. Anyway, one of the things I was going to do as well was to migrate from Movable Type to Wordpress because that seems to be the IN thing these days. But after reading Dave2’s experience I’m not sure there’s any point. Ah well.

MANTS! Gabi is ill She’s been ill for about 4 days now, I’ve given her some medicine each day and at first she seems better, but then the next day she’s fallen back ill again. It’s so sad. She’s my girlfriend in Animal Crossing and I love her to bits. It’s eating me up to see her suffer like this.

I really have had a boring couple of days, and the world seems to agree with me. Or at least the blogosphere does, I haven’t felt inclined to bookmark anything in ages. Sure there have been one or 2 major things happening in the news over the last week but they’ve all been so obscenely *aliens hovering in a small spacecraft laughing and pointing at earth* stupid that i’ve pretty much felt bemused by it all.

I wrote about Screen Spanning Doctor some time ago, it’s still the only half decent solution to the problem of the iBook not offering much flexibility with it’s VGA output, without the patch you wouldn’t be able to use an external screen higher than 1024×768. There was still a problem with speed, I use my external monitor at 1600×1200 and you could feel the iBook’s graphic chip suffering under the strain of having 2 screens worth of display to power. Today for the first time, whilst set in screen spanning mode I changed the iBook’s screen to 640×480x256 color thinking “Ack this will never work” but Christ it did, the lcd went to 256 color with the external display staying at 1600×1200xMillion color and it no longer feels sluggish! I both feel happy, and a bit stupid for not trying it before. I just never imagined it working. I still don’t know how a graphics processor can power 2 screens that are in different colour modes. So yeah, because 640×480x256 takes up such little video ram, it barely hits performance. Also whats great is that as soon as you pull the Mini-VGA connector out the iBook reverts to its native res and colours, and again when you plug the VGA back in it remembers how I had it with the 256 colours, so no messing. Neato. The screenshot is of the entire ibook screen when in this mode, haha bit cramped, I turn the brightness to bottom so I can’t see it. There’s no menu and dock because they’re on the big 1600×1200 side.

I hunted through Version Tracker the other day looking for a blogging client that did everything I need, must have tried about 10 and they were all simply dreadful, I ended back at ecto and figured I may as well give it another try. Turns out I hadn’t given it enough of a chance the first time around, most of the things I needed such as keyword support and the like where there all along, they just needed enabling. I put this down to the fact that I hadn’t had the mac for all that long so I was a little bit too eager I guess. Anyway, I had to spend quite a while getting it all to my liking but hell is it powerful. Most of its genius isn’t noticed until you try things out, such as dragging a photo in your entry and double clicking on it to discover a whole dialog of a thousand and one things it will do for you. Only 2 issues I have with it now are, the iTunes button on the toolbar does sod all (I presume a sheet is supposed to appear like with the iPhoto button), and the Categories list shows all sub-categories with the same importance as the primary ones, and because I use the tags MT extension all my main 5 or 6 categories are a bit lost in all the other sub-categories. Bit of a needle-haystack thing going on.

Oh and shape IM+ ppl, this is how a shareware app should be done! When I loaded ecto after not touching it all these months I got the register dialog because the trial had expired. But one of the options was to restart the trial, but lose any custom settings I had made. How perfect is that! Usually, if you come back to a shareware app after months to give it another go you won’t be able to. So, I’ll put that in my book of how things should be done.

Ok, so as well as having a bit of a problem with heading tags in ecto, i’m also confused about Tags.
When i noticed the Tags panel in the edit window i had presumed that it was for adding keywords. Turns out it’s for adding technorati tags and they don’t get added to the meta-keywords. Sob. How do you add keywords via ecto?

Took me days to get ecto working the first place, i had overlooked setting an API password on my MT installation. Silly me.

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