Random…aw, heck…you know the drill…

Perhaps someday I’ll come up with a topic that (1) is interesting and (b) I know something about, but until that [unlikely] event occurs, here’s more random goodness from the interwebz:

• Don’t you just hate people who write “interwebz”?
• Xslimmer simultaneously intrigues and scares me to death. This Mac-only application purports to slit open the belly of your favorite software like an overripe tuna, drag the guts out over the dining room table, smoosh them around a bit and then excise the stuff that’s not needed for your particular machine. I get antsy just thinking about a program that fiddles with the code of other programs, especially when I use those other programs to make what passes for a living around here.At the same time, the theory seems sound. Many Mac apps are still coded in universal binary so they work on both PowerPC and Intel processors. Many also are installed with multiple language options. Xslimmer simply (ha!) removes the code that’s not necessary for your machine. It also backs up the original app and allows you to restore it if, as the company itself puts it, “you suspect it does not work correctly after being slimmed down.”

  Anyway, at this point I have plenty of hard drive space, but if you’re running an Intel machine and are running low on space, you might give it a whirl. Then report back here…if you’re able.

• If you don’t want to make your programs skinnier, maybe you could just find some alternatives via AlternativeTO. This site provides suggestions for replacements Windows, Mac, and Linux programs. Of course, as they say, YMMV.
• While Xslimmer may not be what I need right now, I sure could use some good anatomical charts of Japanese monsters. Not sure what they mean by “mythical,” though.
• Honda’s experiment is nice, but here’s what I really want:

I’m pretty sure that if we were to see this bike from the other side, we could confirm that there’s a steering tube that connects the handlebars to the front wheel via a series of linkages that aren’t visible from this side. Our recumbent tandem uses a similar setup for steering. (We look just as weird riding it, but in a different way.) [Via Soup.io]

• Don’t know if you spent any time on Soup.io*, but if you did you might have noticed that it employs a design referred to as “endless scrolling.” This isn’t entirely accurate, of course, as the amount of possible content for a website is not infinite, even if the boredom associated with much of it is. But what it means is that every time you think you’re getting to the bottom of the page, additional content is loaded. No, it’s not magic; it’s a sufficiently advanced technology known as JQuery, and if you have enough garbage content on your blog to make it worthwhile, here are the instructions for implementing it.[Actually, while I wouldn’t suggest using this technique on a commercial website, it does have some advantages for blogs and similar sites that are comprised of a series of articles.]

I’ve got more, but since I haven’t implemented the jQuery Endless Crap™ plugin, let’s just conclude it here, shall we? Have a great weekend!

*Update: I’ve removed the link to Soup.io because the site contains some material that’s inappropriate for the informal PG rating of the Gazette. I apologize if you stumbled across some of it; the site is an aggregator, pulling content from a variety of sources, and you never know what’s going to appear.