I keep putting off washing my car, then finally getting to it right before a freak storm…or the arrival of a giant cloud of ash. *grumble*
Author Archives: Kelson
What’s Cool in Opera 10
After a long wait, Opera 10 is out! So what’s new in this first double-digit web browser?
Turbo
The biggest new feature is Opera Turbo, which can massively speed up web access on a slow network connection. Turbo takes the compression used for Opera Mini, which has to deal with slow cell phone networks, and brings it to the desktop. On fast connections you won’t need the proxy, but if you’re stuck on dial-up or sharing a busy network, it can help immensely.
I definitely could have used it on the painfully slow hotel wi-fi during Comic-Con!
Turbo can be turned on and off through the status bar, or set to auto-detect your network speed and switch on when it would help, and off when it’s not needed.
Speed
Even without Turbo, Opera 10 is a heck of a lot faster than Opera 9 was! The app itself is a lot snappier, it displays pages faster, and it responds quickly. Opera feels lighter than Firefox again, after the (comparatively) clunky 9.x series.
Web Fonts
Opera’s CEO CTO recommended embedding TrueType fonts with CSS in 2007, but Safari was the first web browser to support it in a non-beta release. Now Firefox, Safari and Opera can all download fonts as-needed. That means websites can use fonts that aren’t already installed on your computer.
Until now, if a designer wanted to use a font other than one of the standard fonts that come pre-installed with Windows or Mac OS, they had to save the text as an image. That’s fine for banners and the like, but a pain for anything that changes regularly…like headlines or content.
You can read more about web fonts at Mozilla Hacks.
Site Compatibility & Features
Website compatibility has improved a lot, and Opera has continued to add support for newer technologies. It’s great to see Opera, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all working toward the next generation of the web. (If only Internet Explorer were along for the ride – at least IE8 has finally caught up with the last generation.)
Spell-Check
Opera has had on-demand spell checking for a while, though on Windows you had to install a separate dictionary. Now it’s built-in, and it’ll underline misspelled words as you type. (Downside: it underlines inside HTML code. I don’t really want to add “href,” “li,” and so forth to my dictionary.)
Unite Postponed
One thing Opera 10 doesn’t have that was introduced in the betas preview snapshots is Opera Unite, which lets you set up a presence on your computer that other people can see for file sharing, social networking, etc. Apparently they decided it needed more work and didn’t want to hold up the release.
But Wait, There’s More!
Some other new features:
- Visual tabs: Stretch out the tab bar and see a thumbnail of each page you have open.
- New e-mail client, including the long-requested ability to compose with formatting.
- Automatic update.
- Customize Speed Dial.
- Web apps integration with web-based email and feed readers.
- Improved developer tools (Dragonfly).
- Opera Link: synchronize bookmarks, history, notes, etc. across multiple computers and phones. (Not new, but I think it syncs more types of data than it used to)
And a lot more.
As a reminder: Opera is free (as in beer). It has been for almost 4 years now, but it’s worth repeating because every once in a while you see someone who thinks it’s still pay or ad-based software.
Mt. Wilson Fire Status (Sep 1 2009)
- Mt Wilson still intact for now! Status, Towercam.
- Image from Mt. Wilson Observatory Towercam at 12:06 pm. Observatory website still up, but towercam very slow.
- Mt. Wilson Towercam showing lots of smoke: 12:21 was the last image I could get.
- Definitely cooler today, but humidity & smoke since the wind changed make it feel worse outside.
- Mt. Wilson good news: smoke on towercam was from backfires. Bad: website offline, cam not updating. Status on backup server.
- Los Angeles Fires Seen From Space (from @ecolady via @ThisIsTrue)
Images from the Mt. Wilson Observatory Towercam & NASA. You can probably figure out which is which.
Grog!
Argentina news warns of the dangers of Monkey Island “Grog.” (via @GreatWhiteSnark)
Sun Rays
A complex display of crepuscular rays lighting up a haze of smoke drifting in from the Station Fire.
This next shot, taken from a 4th story window, isn’t framed as well, but shows off the complexity better.
Touring the Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1992
The Station Fire burning through the Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles is expected to reach the summit of Mt. Wilson sometime tonight. In all likelihood it will damage or destroy the communications towers and the observatory complex. The Mount Wilson Observatory is an active observatory, and is also of historical importance because of discoveries made there over its 105-year history. In particular: Edwin Hubble’s* observations with the 100-inch Hooker telescope (shown at right) indicated that universe is much larger than was previously thought, and that it was expanding — observations that revolutionized astronomy and led to the current Big Bang theory.
I’ve been to the observatory once, on a tour my family took on August 8, 1992. We’d just come back from a trip to Florida where we visited Disney World and Cape Canaveral during the summer I was 16. I really wish I could remember more about the trip…but I took pictures and labeled them (though not in much detail). With the observatory threatened, I thought I’d dig them out and scan them**. You can see all eight on my Mt. Wilson Observatory Tour 1992 photoset on Flickr.
The Observatory’s website is apparently hosted on the grounds, so the fact that its fire status page is still responding indicates it’s still there and has power. The latest update says that they’re setting up a backup info page, but it’s showing a 404 error right now.
*As in the Hubble Space Telescope.
**Scanning them was not a problem. Digging them out? That was a problem. I knew exactly which photo album they were in, and thought I knew where the album was. As it turned out, it wasn’t there. It was in an unopened box shoved at the very back of the long,narrow hall closet, such that I had to move 3 other boxes, several bags, and an unused CD rack just to see that it was labeled “photo albums” on top. Edit: And, oh yeah, the trail of ants along the wall, going after the long-forgotten bag of Halloween candy. The wall I kept brushing up against. How did I forget that part?
That’s the missing piece that makes the classic phrase more than a simple tautology. It’s not just that it’s in the last place you look. It’s that it’s in the last place you want to look.
Station Fire Smoke Plume from Irvine
About 2:00 in the afternoon today, in a park in the Quail Hill area of Irvine. Roughly 50 miles away from the fire, perpendicular to the wind (thankfully!)
That puffy plume looks a lot whiter than the rest, which is clearly smoke, making me wonder if it’s a cloud that’s formed above the fire somehow. Edit: And literally seconds after I post this I spot the term pyrocumulous in another window. So, yeah, it’s a cloud produced by the air heated by the fire. The Wikipedia article has a picture of a cloud produced by this same fire a few days ago.