Brain on Fire Tim McCormack, distilled.

I set up my S5 on a tripod next to a mockingbird nest and left for 15 minutes. The camera captured one of the parents feeding them a mealworm (perhaps?) and a berry, as well as disposing of a fecal sac.

I'm in the market for a new laptop, but I can't seem to find one with a decent keyboard. I'm a programmer so these are keys that must be easy to hit without looking:

• Esc
• Enter
• All the arrow keys
• Tab
• Home, End
• Del, Backspace
• Alt, Ctrl

Most laptop keyboards, unfortunately, have one of the following problems:

• A stupid little "Fn" key as the lower right key, making it nearly impossible to hit left-Ctrl without looking
• No space around the arrow keys, so I can't feel which button I'm touching
• Little or no consideration for the placement of the Home/End keys, rendering them unusable without hunting (or that blasted Fn key)

My modified keyboard

I've modified my current laptop keyboard to add space and remove annoying keys:

Victims include: Tab, Scroll lock, Ins, Context menu, and some proprietary dollar and euro keys nestled in with the arrows.

I'm not looking for a fancy machine with an amped-up graphics card or fingerprint reader or other such nonsense. I just want a basic laptop with standard hardware and a keyboard that doesn't suck.

Anyone want to recommend a manufacturer?

Cross-posted to LJ and the Neon Guild mailing list.

I've successfully embedded Google Static Maps in an RSS feed that I'm working on, and it displays great in standalone feed readers. Unfortunately, if someone tries to subscribe to my feed using a web-based reader/aggregator (such as Google Reader), my images don't show up. Presumably, the referer of the aggregator website is sent to maps.google.com, which rejects the request as not matching my API key.

With my fancy new Powershot S5 I've been taking some pretty awesome closeups. I've been going back and photographing all the flowers and insects that I've shot before, since I can ridiculously closer now. And I'd like to share some of what I've learned while trying to get my lens right up in the face of various critters.

When my approx. 4-year-old Canon Powershot S1 IS started displaying an image sensor malfunction, I thought I was going to have to drop a cool $400 on a new camera. But Canon's website had a service notice stating that this was a known defect, and that they would repair this for free, including shipping.

What they sent me back was a Canon Powershot S5 IS. Sweet!