Blind vs. Deaf, or Technolo-Gee Whiz

Question: would you rather be deaf or blind, if you had to choose one or the other? J and I have been having this conversation for the past few weeks, she preferring to see, and I preferring to hear. We go back and forth, naming the pro's and con's of each, but eventually our discussion degrades, Godwin-like, into an contest of who can name more famous blind or deaf people, and whether "Ray Charles + Stevie Wonder + Andrea Botticelli > Beethoven". (Helen Keller tends to cancel herself out.) So far, everyone we've brought this discussion to has sided with J. They are all wrong.

I should add a disclaimer at this point, stating that I mean no offense to anyone who suffers from either of these disabilities, and that I highly respect anyone who has to overcome such obstacles in life. I just happen to think that for a deaf person, there are more obstacles.

Anyways, this brings me to the second point of this post: over the weekend I came across two new technologies that give sight and sound to your computer.

sight
Behold! Delicious Library!
This is a Mac-only program that uses your computer webcam as a barcode reader to scan, organize, and index your books, music, dvds, and video games. The software costs $40, but there's a free version that we've been playing with. Very addicting. The free version has a limit of 25 items, but J doesn't read and I don't listen to music, watch movies, or play video games, so we're good for now. One of the more interesting features of the software is that it has a nice library-like checkout system. That way you can tell who still has your copy of, say, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! (sorry Cheryl).

sound
Hark! Midomi!
This nice piece of online software has you sing or hum part of a song into your computer's mic, and performs a search to find that song. Finally, a way to get that annoying song that you can't find the name of and then when you try to sing it to other people your singing sucks and they have no idea what you're talking about cause you're off-key and even if you were on-key the part of the song that you actually know could be any song ever. Try it out. Example, my boss at work decided to sing "Like a Virgin" into my coworkers laptop, and seconds later "Like a Surgeon" (Weird Al) showed up as the top hit. Pretty good!

Speed up Firefox

If you only try one of these tips, try pipelining - either way, you will notice these changes.

Here's the source. (Works on FF, Mozilla, Camino, etc.)
Don't be lazy.

Enable Pipelining

Pipelining is an experimental feature, designed to improve page-load
performance, that is unfortunately not well supported by some web servers
and proxies. To try it out, by using about:config
to set the following preferences:

network.http.pipelining

Set this to true, to enable pipelining.

network.http.proxy.pipelining

Set this to true, to enable pipelining to the proxy server.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Set this to 8, to have a maximum of 8 pipelining requests at once. Possible values are from 1 to 8.

Speed up page rendering

By default, Firefox doesn't try to render a web page for 250
milliseconds while it's waiting for data. If you use about:config
to add the Integer preference nglayout.initialpaint.delay, and
set the value to 0, Firefox immediately starts to display the
page, even without complete data. The drawback, especially on slower
machines, is that the total time to display the page will be longer.

i've converted..kinda

I recently got this:


That's right, I converted. I've been needing a new laptop for quite some time now. My old MISM laptop was having overheating and fan issues, and one day while I was in the middle of an intense game of Luxor (the full version), the screen suddenly faded into black and I was never able to get it to come back to life. So I bought the Macbook. Kinda on a whim, actually, because I was really attached to my IBM laptop and always ignored McShumbot's praises of the Mac. But it was cute and white and small and with the Intel processor, I figured that I could run Windows on it if I hated Mac OS X. But it turns out that I LOVE my new laptop and the Mac OS.

The best thing about it? The remote!! That's right, my laptop has an awesome remote that has volume control and the ability to scroll through a playlist. Suggested uses include listening to music and slideshows. My personal favorite use? Watching my favorite TV shows in bed. Now I don't have to reach out and use the keyboard to control everything..the remote does it all. I LOVE IT! (so far I've only gotten it to work in itunes though)

Sidenote: I'm not a huge fan of the Camino web browser yet. I'd agree that yes, it does seem faster than Firefox, but a lot of sites don't support it yet, so it gets really irritating to use at times. Also, I kinda miss my games! There aren't as many good games for Mac OS X. Like Diner Dash 2 is only on Windows. Good thing I beat it already.