It’s easy enough to see machines that are on your segment of the network, and browse through any files they might be sharing. But these days machines do a lot more than simple file sharing. There’s no way, though, to tell at a glance if a machine is running ssh, sharing out its iPhoto library, or something similar.

If there are Macs on your network, you can use Flame to quickly suss out and display the services running on the machines in your VLAN. It’s still under development, but it still seems pretty handy. Enjoy.

I woke this morning to the smell of a wildfire. Outside, the morning sky filtered dimly through the haze, washing the bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic in a warm but sickly orange light. The sound of a solitary helicopter and a pair of police sirens in the distance rounded out the ambience.

Suddenly, I felt nostalgic about Southern California. Can’t imagine why.

If you haven’t already heard, Valve released an update to Team Fortress 2 that adds new fun to what was perhaps already my favorite class, the Pyro. But more immediately amusing (and impressive) is their latest introductory video, “Meet the Sniper”.

I think it’s their best machinima to date, and shows that as good as Valve’s efforts have been, they’re getting polished even further. These guys know how to tell a story. But don’t just take my word for it, watch it yourself.

The other night I had a dream about the price of gasoline. I pulled up to the pump and saw that somebody had screwed up and set the price to $2.94 per gallon instead of $4.92. I giddily—albeit furtively, lest the error be corrected, to the woe of my wallet—squeezed the trigger for all it was worth and filled the tank.

Stupid and mundane, I know, but a sweet dream nonetheless.

My posts about WordPress spambot registration have generated a surprising amount of traffic to this site. While few, if any, of those visitors are actually hanging around after the fact, I’m getting enough hits that I figure I’m doing the WP community some tiny bit of good by raising what alarm I can.

Today’s bot registered with a name of jacob73kolp and an e-mail address of jacobkolp@gmail.com.

This brings the total of known bots to five:

• adol77dai51
• alina77vere9uk
• ralyjones25
• ken75muraski
• jacob73kolp

It looks like I also found a CAPTCHA plugin that will work better than Skullbit’s, which worked only briefly on the test server and then simply refused to function properly thereafter. Hopefully this new one’ll be enough to keep the bots out.

You may have heard the “tip” about saving money by buying gasoline in the morning. You might have also read that saving money by exploiting negative thermal expansion is negligible at best. It seems to me there might be something to it, after all.

Twice now I’ve purchased gasoline before my morning commute, and returned home to find prices have been raised by a nickel or thereabouts. My best guess is that the stations don’t raise their prices until after 8:00 a.m. or so, when the managers show up for the day shift (since the poor underpaid bastards working the graveyard shift aren’t about to leave their bulletproof box in the wee hours). Casual observation of other stations in my area suggests that the pattern is reproduced at other stations besides the two I frequent.

So the myth about saving money on gas in the morning may be true, just for completely different reasons. As always, of course, your mileage may vary.