Four Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

Screen grab from Absolutely MAD. The author believes this image to be protected as Fair Use under U.S. copyright law.

1. Al Jaffee, RIP. As a kid, I got laughs from my dad's collection of old Mad magazines, for which Jaffee was an artist, retiring a few years ago only at the age of 99.

Jaffee, who died this week at 102, is perhaps best known as the creator of the Mad fold-in, a type of illustration that appeared on the inside back cover of most issues. These could be folded to reveal a new image as shown in the demo here.

By coincidence, I'd found my Absolutely MAD collection of back issues a few days before. (On Linux, mount the DVD and point a PDF reader at the file Start.pdf. Okular worked well for me.)

Among the bonus materials were short video interviews of the self-described Usual Gang of Idiots, including of Jaffee himself (pictured) discussing how he created his fold-ins. As you might expect, he'd start with the answer, and then toil away at getting something to work in the middle.

2. This problem may have been solved for some time, but I only learned how to play DVDs on Linux by chance yesterday. This includes encrypted DVDs, and I look forward to very easily enjoying things like my old Seinfeld collection again.

I am not completely sure why this has been an issue for so long, but it wasn't a dealbreaker for me, and I figured it would get worked out sooner or later.

3. While I'm geeking out on Linux, I'll bask in smugness for a moment. After a recent upgrade, I noticed that my task bar was taking forever to hide itself. A quick search led me to a solution.

In the meantime, I hear that Microsoft is rolling out Start Menu ads. (The article explains how to turn this off -- at least until whatever setting that is suddenly gets changed.)

I have to use Windows now and then, and I was already getting peppered with lots of unwanted notifications, many of them basically ads. I am glad I don't have to encounter such distractions on a daily basis, and especially when I need to get something done.

4. Ask a Manager took me down memory lane this morning, by advising readers not to do something I recall doing in exasperation a couple of times myself. tl;dr: Don't write 'See resume' in a job application field.

-- CAV