awesome! thanks.

So I checked the log for my OSX install yesterday, and as I suspected, it was hanging on the printer drivers, which is apparently A Thing with Leopard installs.

I'm trying again today and hoping it goes more smoothly, but in case it freezes up again, where do I click to tell it to skip the printer drivers since this computer doesn't have a printer and almost certainly never will?

[eta: Nevermind, it worked this time. Am now crossing my fingers that the FCS install will go smoothly too, now that this computer is, OS-wise, clean and new.]

System lets your plants blog their daily existence

The "Midori-San" is a system that allows a normal houseplant to write entries in a standard blog. In a similar way to its distant cousin, the "Botanicalls" project, the Midori-San uses surface potential sensors to read the bioelectric current flowing across the surface of the leaves. As the current fluctuates in response to environmental factors such as temperature changes, humidity, vibration, electromagnetic waves and nearby human activity an algorithm translates the data into sentences which are posted to the plant's blog. Owners can subscribe to the plant's blog to follow it's story, and even earn the plant some cash by clicking it's Google Adsense Ads. I guess there is such a thing as easy money.

This is cool - I'm tempted to get a plant and do this. Of course, I'd probably end up accidentally killing it... or my cat would intentionally kill it. And then people reading the blog could watch my plant die. Hmmm... would it be worth all the hate-mail?

It looks like I'll be buying a new notebook next week: [link]

Oooh. I hope it's exciting and fun news, and not just "ooh, fancier insides. Yippee"

There are rumors of an Apple laptop that starts at $800... so maybe not a netbook, or at least not a cheap one....

I have Vista and am using IE 7, and fairly often, when I close a window, the whole shebang shuts down because "Explorer has stopped working." Well, of course it stopped working -- I told it to! Anyone know what this is about/how to stop it?

Explorer is different than Internet Explorer. Explorer is kind of what runs Windows.

Can't help with the problem, though -- I run Vista and IE7 on this laptop, and I've never had that problem.

TV question:

my mother is visiting, and as she always does, she pressed buttons on the remotes and screwed something up. I now have no volume on my TV. I put in a DVD and the volume works fine, but from the cable TV, nothing.

On the bright side, I didn't have to listen to her news shows and (news) talk shows. Actually, maybe I shouldn't try to fix the volume until after she leaves...

What kind of cable box do you have?