So I was browsing my new favorite organization site, Umbra, when I come across their Clutch Sink Caddy:

Notice anything strange about the sink? If not, take a look at the drain — I don’t know about you, but I really don’t think sinks come with 1 1/2 drains lol.

On December 7, 2007 I sat down to write a big update post, but never got around to finishing it lol. What I did manage to write is below, ’cause frankly I’ve forgotten anything else I was going to say, and I think the Gmail fiasco is at least worth mentioning:

My Gmail and eBay accounts got hacked.
Yep, that’s right, the worst nightmare for millions of Gmail users happened to me. I still don’t know why or how the hacker figured out my not-so-easy-to-guess password, but early last month I woke up one morning and couldn’t log in. I could still access Reader and Groups and whatever other services I was automatically signed in to, but not from another computer. I filled out numerous Gmail help forms, and as the days went by, only received automated replies.

To expand on the above paragraph … I also foolishly used the same password for both my Gmail and eBay accounts. The hacker obviously knew this too and decided to link them together and scam people by selling fake PS3s. In the end, it took about a week for me to get my Gmail account back (practically torture since it contained all my email) … but eBay was amazing and restored my access in literally 5 minutes. I’ve since changed my passwords and started using Thunderbird so I don’t have to funnel everything into Gmail, among other things. Here’s a screenshot I took of my account immediately after regaining access:

And “Tengjiao Ji” can die

I’ve been using 30 Boxes for years now, but just discovered the desktop calendar Rainlendar last week — and its ability to read a daily-updated iCal file on your hard drive with this script (instead of just importing it once). Since I wasn’t leaving 30 Boxes, I wanted to give the script a try ’cause having my calendar on my desktop and online would be awesome. Except I had to do some tweaking first.

All the steps below are basically the same as the ones here — just slightly modified since that post is over 2 years old and some things have changed:

1. Create a folder called “Calendar” under your C:\ drive.
2. Download wget for Windows, extract it to a folder, and place that folder in your C:\Program Files folder.
3. Now you need to create the script to handle the automated downloading. You can call it download.bat or calendar.bat (or whatever-you-want.bat) and place it in your C:\Calendar folder. Copy and paste the code below into the new file:

@echo off
"C:\Program Files\wget-1.11.4b\wget.exe" --spider http://30boxes.com/iCalUser/xxxxx/name/numbers/1/
"C:\Program Files\wget-1.11.4b\wget.exe" -O "C:\Calendar\calendar.ics" http://30boxes.com/iCalUser/xxxxx/name/numbers/1/

Both URLs are the same, but need to be changed to reflect your calendar — find yours in 30 Boxes’ “Sharing” settings. Just copy the location of the “ICS File” link and overwrite each URL with it.

These last steps will set up a scheduled task to run the script however often you’d like:

1. Go to your Control Panel.
2. Open the Scheduled Tasks folder.
3. Click “Add Scheduled Task,” then “Next.”
4. Hit “Browse” and find your download.bat (or whatever you named it) file.
5. Name your task and select how often you want it run (mine runs daily). Hit “Next.”
6. Pick when you want it to start, and “Next” again.
7. Leave the username and password fields alone. “Next” again.
8. Check the “open advanced properties for this task when I click finish” box, and hit “Finish.”
9. If an error comes up, hit “OK.” In the advanced properties box, check “run only if logged on” at the bottom. Hit “OK” again.
10. Right-click on your scheduled task and run it to make sure it works.

All you have to do now is tell Rainlendar where the calendar.ics file is (make sure the scheduled task has run at least once before doing this — otherwise the file won’t be there):

1. Open Rainlendar’s options.
2. Go to the “Calendars” section.
3. Click on the name of your calendar.
4. In the “iCalendar Format” area, click on the “Filename” row and browse to where calendar.ics is with the “…” button.
5. Switch “Monitor changes” to “Yes,” then hit “OK” and you’re done!

For the record, here’s what my 30 Boxes + Rainlendar (with the default theme) looks like:

Not 100% sure about this, but I think my listener survey comment was mentioned in episode 16 of the WordPress Podcast! I’d taken the survey months ago and pretty much forgotten what I’d written, but as I finally got around to listening to the episode last night, one of the comments Charles was reading started to sound very familiar. Here’s an excerpt:

Charles: (10:40) Our next survey answer says, “That I get all my news in one place, plus reviews of plugins, etc. With so many WordPress tools out there it’s nice to have a way to know which ones stand out.”

David: (10:55) There really is so much gray noise out there when it comes to plugins and the new and interesting things that are coming out in the community. In episode 10 we commented on the fact that there’s dozens upon dozens of Digg tools now and it’s really hard to figure out which ones are the good ones and which ones are ones that you can kinda skip.

Charles: (11:22) Exactly.

Yeah

I’m so excited. I was looking for new desktop wallpaper yesterday (for the 405945th time … I can never find anything I like for more than 10 minutes) and suddenly decided on the pretty blue Mac one … but why get just the wallpaper when I can get the whole thing? On a whim I Googled “make my PC look like a Mac” and was hit with lots and lots of ways to completely turn my GUI upside down. So I said wheee and got to work!

Here’s the before shot:

And here’s the after shot:

Impressed? I am! Here’s the somewhat exhaustive list of programs I used:

WindowBlinds: applied the Tiger skin to my windows
ObjectDock: gave me a dock
ObjectBar: gave me a Finder bar at the top of the screen
Konfabulator (by Yahoo): supplied the cool desktop widgets
YzShadow: added a subtle shadow to the windows
IconPackager: replaced the standard Windows icons with Mac icons
CursorXP: replaced the standard Windows cursors with Mac cursors
Trillian: displayed my buddy list with a nice iChat skin

A big thanks goes out to these sites for tons of links and downloads: Make Your PC Work Like a Mac, Turn your PC into a Mac, Mac Emulation Resources, and How To Make Windows Look Like A Mac.

I know the mods don’t change anything in how Windows works (they probably make it slower lol), but now I’m halfway to owning a Mac and even if there was slowness, I’d deal with it I’m not done either — Mac Emulation Resources has a bajillion awesome things I need to check out!

Edit: I turned my PC back to the way it was yesterday (the 12th) ’cause everything just seemed to be getting slower and slower and … yeah. But it was fun while it lasted

Hehe. Who will win?

Behold the Superbrowser! Some guy decided to install the top 100 Firefox extensions just to see what would happen. Check it out, it’s kinda funny yet cool at the same time … I even found new extensions from reading the comments

On a completely unrelated note, the weather never ceases to amaze me. Yesterday it was 70 degrees and sunny (except for the annoying 10-minute downpour), and now tonight there’s a chance of snow