I've been searchin'

That new search widget is not working, now, either, so I've put in a home-brew version based on the Google site search. In the sidebar.

Sam Spade and Charlie Chan got nothin' on me. Oh, wait, if they got nothin' — does that mean they searched and got no results? I'm so confused.

Update, Oct. 13: "Search Blog" in the navbar is fixed, now. I'll leave the home-brew search in the sidebar for a while, in case it reverts. Oct 19: It's reverting.

New search widget

"Search Blog" in the navbar, up top, is not working. So I have added a search widget in the sidebar. Results from this are unreliable, but I suppose it's better than no search at all. The best for now is to use Google directly, with site:hectorowen.blogspot.com followed by the search term, e.g., site:hectorowen.blogspot.com antikythera. FWIW. Other Blogspot sites are afflicted by this, as well. It's not just me.

Update: But see above.

Possibly interesting to bloggers

If I could manage to dig out my old copies of Richard Geis's wonderful magazine, The Alien Critic, later Science Fiction Review, I might be able to find an article by E.C. "Ted" Tubb called "I have just cleaned and oiled my typewriter, which was a wild and crazy thing to do." Or something a lot like that.

If you own a typewriter, take it to the typewriter shop. If you can find one. Trying to do the maintenance on it yourself will lead to all the problems Tubb described in that piece. Mostly, you'll use the wrong kind of oil and put it in all the wrong places, where it will attract molecules of dust that had not even existed prior to the oil application, and which will be the grit that gums things up even worse than they were before.

I have not owned a typewriter for decades. So this is about something else. [Will you just get to the point, for crying out loud?]

I backed up the blog. [Oh, so that's it.] Now I have about 200 MB on my local hard drive, the whole thing, pictures and all. It felt like a daring thing to do. But I may do it again, on another computer. And then I might copy the whole mess to a CD. Don't try to stop me. When I get an idea in my head, I'm gone.

The tool I used was Httrack. It took about half an hour over a fairly quick DSL connection. But now I have a copy of all my wonderful, important words and pictures [Stop that chortling in the peanut gallery!] that is not in the cloud, but right here. It got everything but a couple of the Javascript widgets on the sidebar, and I can browse it locally just the same as online. Comments and all, yes, comments and all.

Now if I could only remember to back up the local disk.

Handy rot-13 bookmarklet

Picked this up at Making Light some years back.

javascript:inText=window.getSelection()+'';if(inText=='')%7Bvoid(inText=prompt('Phrase...','')) %7D;if(!inText)%7BoutText='No%20text%20selected'%7Delse%7BoutText='';for(i=0;i%3CinText.length;i++) %7Bt=inText.charCodeAt(i);if((t%3E64&&t%3C78)%7C%7C(t%3E96&&t%3C110))%7Bt+=13%7Delse%7Bif ((t%3E77&&t%3C91)%7C%7C(t%3E109&&t%3C123))%7Bt-=13%7D%7DoutText+=String.fromCharCode(t)%7D%7Dalert(outText)

That's all one line.

Make a new bookmark and paste that in for the location. When you come across rot-13 text, select it, then click the bookmark. The decoded text shows up in one of those little javascript boxes. Try it on this: "Qevax hc, rirelobql. Gb gur arj cnegare naq gur byq barf. Jr fvzcyl unir gb trg n fxvashy gb fgnaq gung Xvnevna yhapurba." And of course it works the other way round, as well.

New blog title

I think I'll try changing the title of this thing from time to time. Using the title of the novel is insufficiently subtle; it should be something more allusive. I won't change the URL, or URI if you prefer that terminology, so all the links should still work. Let's see what happens.