Interestingly, the SiteAdvisor service and browser plugin that I mentioned a few months ago has been bought by McAfee. I still have their plugin installed, because I believe it is a necessary plugin even if you never need to use it. (I keep the Google Phishing Filter installed for this reason too — it doesn’t intrude, so why run the risk of not having it?) I wonder what the purchase of SiteAdvisor will mean for the service.

I have started using a wide-screen monitor at work — 24" and awesome — and have been experimenting with having a vertical taskbar along the right side of the screen. I’ve seen the screenshots of Windows Vista with a sidebar and thought it was a bit funny; it takes up too much screen real-estate on a “normal” monitor. However, I can say that with a wide-screen, this setup starts making more than sense: it’s great.

I had a strange desire when brushing my teeth last night to know why toothpaste seems to always be mint flavoured. As far as I could think, there are a couple of reasons it could be:

1. Mint makes things taste funny so you don’t want to eat things afterwards (thus making your teeth dirty again).
   
2. Mint makes your mouth feel fresh, and is good at masking other flavours and smells — I’m thinking this could be a reason for after-dinner mints too!
   

A quick look over the internet revealed more speculation, but no concrete facts. Interesting thoughts were that mint is strong enough to cover up the weird taste toothpaste would have otherwise and that, back in the early days of toothpaste, mint was a cheap and easy flavouring to get hold of.

I was feeling tired one day this week, so naturally a piece called How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off would catch my attention. It’s about how to, supposedly, condition yourself so that you will get up when your alarm goes off automatically — to the stage where you become physically uncomfortable if you remain in bed.

Whilst this seems to be a little extreme — sometimes it’s nice to lie there and snooze! — a second article seemed more practical. This was about how to become an early riser ; that is, to get your body into the rhythm of getting up at a reasonable time each morning.

One thing that seems curiously missing from the Internet — based on my searching, at any rate — is how to encode to MP3 in Ubuntu Dapper. By default you can encode to FLAC and Ogg, which is a problem for me because the iPod doesn’t support either of these.

MP3 encoding is provided by the GStreamer lame plugin in gstreamer-plugins-ugly. However, the version of this included in the main/restricted/universe (I’m not sure which) doesn’t include the lame plugin; meaning that even after installing the ugly plugins, you cannot encode MP3s. This confused me until today when I discovered that the standard version doesn’t include lame.