I took the final step in my journey away from UserLand products: I unsubscribed from Dave Winer’s Scripting News weblog. It had certainly degraded over the last two years from being about software and programming to a focus on Dave’s life and his senior years. That’s fine with me. Reading it was no longer interesting to me and I found very little that I couldn’t find somewhere else.

Friends and bloggers I read told me I should have done this months ago but I wasn’t ready to do it. After the switch to WordPress, it’s been much easier, mainly because I could stop thinking about how to tinker with my weblog software and instead think about writing.

No, I don’t have any interest in knitting anything. I find things that friends and family would like and post them here–Zarah’s a knitter…

MAKE Magazine: “Flickr user tofuttibreak scanned in an old out of print knitting booklet that has more clear and concise knitting instructions. The simple illustrations are great. It’s a handy reference to bookmark when you just can’t remember how to cast on or do a slip stitch.”

Kerner on Food: “My favorite feature so far has been the telnet interface. I’m hoping that it’s possible to control every function via telnet. There’s also a web interface that lets you monitor temperatures, set alarms, and targets. My setup right now is that I’ve got an alarm on my meat for 150° and the target for the smoker is 230° at the bottom grate.”

bbum’s weblog-o-mat: “It is tomato season here and I’m starting to reap the rewards of a couple of wonderful heirloom tomato plants. Likewise, our local farmer’s market has a cheese vendor [again — she went missing for a while] who sells the tastiest cheddars and parmesan-esque cheeses.”

Kotaku: “The guys over at AtariAge discovered that Imagin Systems, a manufacturer of dental imaging equipment, is, in fact, an old Jaguar, painted white and with a camera attached. It’s called ‘The Hotrod’; apparently, Imagin purchased the molds of the Jaguar and used it to make their $5000 dental camera. It even has the expansion slot for the Jaguar’s CD-Rom slot!”

Pretty Pretty Bang Bang: “Well, the days of me bitching about my job have come to a close. I lost it today. Actually, I was told that the company could no longer afford to pay me (or another girl) because it was on the verge of bankruptcy. So I’m not a loser, I’m just someone without a job.”

Overall, it’s a good thing. Money will be *very* tight for awhile so if anyone has any brilliant ideas for Tammy’s jewelry business, we’re all ears.

Here’s a link from the WebKit open source project commit message page…

WebKit: “* WebInspector/WebInspector.m: (+[WebInspector sharedWebInspector:]): Fixed bug that could cause the inspector to be garbage collected if used in an application with GC enabled.”

Looks like we might be getting garbage collection as some predicted.

Beauty School Dropout: “We whipped up some yummy breakfast burritos (camp food is not haute cuisine but it always tastes so good!) and drove a couple of miles another campground to rent our canoes, since all the canoes at the state park were already reserved”

MAKE Magazine: “VisionFoo made a simple automatic cat water fountain from an aquarium cascade pump”

MAKE Magazine: “Tabletop studio has some good tips and instructions on taking close up photos of jewelry (these techniques are good for other close ups of shiny things too)”