Puzzle Floor

Puzzle Floor is a hardware flooring that is made of interlocking jigsaw-like puzzle pieces. Pretty darned cool, available in multiple colors, and at $15 a square foot, not exactly cheap. I'm very glad that we hadn't heard of this before we finished our recent round of home remodeling. It's tempting.

(Via Paul Music)

The VNC Path to Parental Tech Support

Doing tech support for your parents (or siblings, come to think of it) is a chore that just gets more frustrating when they don't share the same terminology you do for things like icons, windows, menus, and the like. Who knows how much time I've spent over the years just trying to figure out what the person on the other end of the phone is looking at on their screen. It's made much easier now that screen sharing technology is more mainstream.

In Slate, Paul Boutin's Mom, do I have to fix your Wi-Fi again? explains how to use screen sharing software to see what's on your relative's screen, and if necessary, to take it over to just fix things yourself. I sure would like that solution when I've got someone on the other end of the phone who tries to "help" and anticipate what I'm going to tell them to do, usually with the opposite result.

I learned something that I didn't know, too: that Mac OS X Tiger has a built-in VNC server. I had thought that it only had an Apple Remote Desktop server. You'll still need the hilariously-named Chicken of the VNC client software to see and work with the other person's screen.

Looking for QuickTime help

One of the things that I do in my copious free time is serve on the Board of Access Healdsburg, which is the local cable TV public access station. I got to help build a TV studio, which was lots of fun.

Access Healdsburg is expanding our Web presence, and we've set up some of our locally-produced shows with a host that provides a QuickTime Streaming Server. Because the Web doesn't require the kinds of non-commercial constraints that our TV channels do, and because we're constantly struggling for funds, we're looking to add some advertising to the Web video streams. Specifically, we would like to place some ads that would automatically play before and perhaps after the video programs; you've no doubt seen that sort of thing.

Trouble is, we have no idea how to implement that kind of thing with QuickTime Streaming Server. If you do, and you wouldn't mind donating a bit of information to a worthy non-profit, please let me know, and I'll put you together with the right people at Access Healdsburg. Thanks in advance.