I've put premium in the MINI since the day I bought it since the manual says to do so. So yesterday was the first day that I put a tank of regular in it.

Why?

The engine has been sluggish at startup after sitting overnight. It sputters and “harleys” for a bit before purring normally. Trying to find a cause and solution to this problem leads you to the forum holy war between MINI know-it-alls. Some has suggested to put a tank of regular in to fix that problem. Some say it has to do with the ethanol that's being added to gas in the summer. Whatever it is, we'll see if this makes a diff.

Link to an MP4 movie of the MINI sputtering in the morning. (:10, 400KB) You may want to turn up your speakers or use headphones, it's a little hard to hear. Use the tachometer as a guide to what you are hearing, you'll see the needle swing up as the engine settles.

Image by cobalt123 via Flickr, under Creative Commons License.

Sure, Apple currently doesn't have a solution for IM on your shiny new iPhone but I believe there were probably some very good reasons why they didn't include it in the first place (battery life being the biggest reason).

So to fill the void, a couple of sites have popped up so you can IM on your iPhone. The first I found was a web interface for AOL IM which to date has received over 1000 digs. What people need to realize is that by using these services, you are allowing a proxy to pass your information to AOL and back again, namely your username, password and all conversation. The author does mention this and claims to not save any information but how can anyone be certain? I downloaded the source code to have a look-see and I found references to MySQL calls in the code. The calls seemed innocuous in nature, however. But what is stopping anyone from offering a faux version of the “source code” and having a more malicious version running live?

Where does it end? A site that will check your credit card balances for you– all they need are your account number and expiration date?

Moral of the story: beware of what you give up to third parties.

Day 6 and the blossom has opened the second tier of fruit. The leaves (or petals) that conceals each tier seems to wither and fall off after opening, leaving just the fruit.

A simple, easy to use color scheme picker for web sites. Allows the selection of many different styles based on one color.

Link.

Some day you may find this useful like I did.

The new MacBooks have internal iSight cameras. While this is an excellent tool, it may not be desirable in all situations (such as classrooms or labs) You can disable it in software by removing…

/System/Library/QuickTime/QuickTimeUSBVDCDigitizer.component

…applications will complain that the camera is already in use by another application.

If you want to make sure they also can't use an external Firewire iSight remove…

/System/Library/Extensions/Apple_iSight.kext

I moved the component rather than deleting it so I could re-enable it again. Link.

Wow, a lot has happened in 3 days. Yesterday, the blossom head took a turn southward, bending down to the ground in typical banana bloom fashion. Today, the first petal opened up to reveal the top-most row of flowers and ultimately fruit. In the pictures below, the stamen (contains the pollen) sits around the pistil which sits atop the soon to be fruit. I expect there to be more petals opening below in the next few days.

Click the pictures for a larger image.

Jeff spotted two original Austin Mini Coopers while in D.C. The green one is a Mini Cooper Truck! Click each one for more photos on Flickr.