I got a fantastic spam today. It was one of those “buy this stock now!” spams, and it was fairly well done to get past the filter at UNO, which usually stops, well, everything. Even my real mail.

Anyway, the choice lines were the openers: “We live in a time of unthinkable technologies such as self-cooled beer, artificial retinas of the eye, full automated plants. All these open modern methods of saving and transfering of energy.“

Holy cow! Self-cooled beer! Thats, unthinkable, impossible, a feat that soars above and beyond such simple bionic augmentation like artificial retinas. And don’t even get me started on “full automated plants“, thats just too cutting edge for me.

So what was all this dazzling technology a lead in for? Batteries that never need charging. The madness! A revolutionary zero-point energy source, and I can get in on the ground floor! “AC Energy’s Technology “The battery that never needs to be charged” could work in cell phones, laptops, music players or any other portable device.“

As I neared the end of the email, I was beginning to think that this was perhaps a hoax or something. There was simply no way that this could be real, and good things like getting an offer like this never happen to me. But wait, there it was, my reassurance: It’s not some kind of story or something like this, we provide you with 100% information. Energy is our future, don’t waste time. I’m glad they included that in the email, or I might not have spent all my money on AC Energy stocks.

Thats all for now, but I’ll see you in the never-need-to-charge-your-cell-phone future. I’ll be the one looking at you with my artificial retina while pouring my self-cooling beer into a nearby automated plant.

You know what an awesome feature for last.fm would be? A location flag/tag thing. I wish I could set something that would tag everything I listen to as “At Work” or “At Home” or “On iPod” (even though I don’t have one). That way I could create trends and see what I tend to listen to at work, home, doing the dishes, etc.

It’s all in the details man. All of it. Okay not all of it, but a whole huge honkin lot of it.

I had added some Relient K albums to my playlist, but I wanted them higher in the list (right under Run Kid Run) so I selected and dragged them upwards. What did my eyes behold? Something I didn’t expect. I stuck the cover art from the albums right there next to the cursor.

How cool is that?

Now, I don’t know if this essentially useless feature is in any other music program, but it’s got me dragging stuff around and making little collages out of cover art.

You can click through for a full-desktop screenie if you really want to.

I was getting a little sick of foobar2k here at work, and installing cygwin with KDE seemed a little overkill just for Amarok. I decided to give songbird another try. This is my new fave music app for windows. It has enough similarities to my beloved Amarok that it makes for a very good player. It could use some better playlist features, maybe some smart playlists, but all in all pretty awesome.

Got bored and scratched another itch I’ve had in wordpress for a while. I always wanted a way to list my categories on the sidebar on my terms. The best I had found was the well written and executed Category Visibility-RH but I wanted to choose from all my categories and still limit the number listed.

I added a function to my wp-hacks.php and then dropped it into my sidebar. Does the job, and could easily be edited. I swear someday I’ll learn how to make plug-ins, really.

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function jh_random_cats($howMany) {
    global $wpdb ;
 
		$query = "
			SELECT cat_ID, cat_name, category_count
			FROM $wpdb->categories
      WHERE category_count != '0'
    ";
		$categories = $wpdb->get_results($query);
 
		shuffle($categories); // Mix 'em up
 
		for($howMany; $howMany > 0; $howMany--) {
      $poppedCat = array_pop($categories);
      print '<li><a href="'.get_category_link($poppedCat->cat_ID).'">'.$poppedCat->cat_name.'</a> ('.$poppedCat->category_count.')</li>';
    }
}

As a super-cool extra I got to use a PHP function I had never gotten to use before, let alone knew existed: bool shuffle ( array &array ). It, you guessed it, shuffles up an array.