I own a 2000-vintage, non-digital 8mm Sony camcorder.  We don't use it very often, but I do have a fair amount of footage I'd like to transfer to my computer.  How can I do this without resorting to expensive video capture hardware?

I found this device while looking for solutions; would this do the trick?  TIA for advice and suggestions.

OK, here's the scenario:

I took ikilled007's advice and set aside a sizable store of gold.  The apocalypse has arrived: the dollar has completely collapsed, the economy has been decimated, and the nation's cities lie in smoldering ruins after months of food riots and looting.  I drive out of my heavily fortified bunker, which used to be my basement before my house was flattened by gangs of scavengers searching for scrap metal, in my armored Mercedes-Benz G500 with the laser-guided, turret-mounted .50-cal machine gun, with some gold.  I need to restock my food, water, heating oil and diesel for the generator.

As I dodge starving beggars in the street and run over the ones who don't move fast enough, I wonder: where do I go first?  IOW, I'm trying to understand how having gold will help me when paper currency has become worthless.  Do I need to exchange it first?  Exchange it for what?  Do I buy in bulk and give the seller a Krugerrand?

Despite the flippant tone, I'm not mocking those of you who recommend gold investments; I'm genuinely curious how having it on hand will help me get through a catastrophic economic collapse.  Enlighten me.

Anybody else having trouble with Firefox lately?

It seemed to start after the 2.0.0.12 update, but I can't be sure it was directly related to that; it could be in combination with some other update to Windows or another program.  But it crashes.  A lot.

It seems to happen randomly, but I notice it most frequently when scrolling through a Web page (Yahoo! seems especially vulnerable) and then switching to another application, either by clicking on that application's window or using Alt+Tab.  I'll get the dreaded "firefox.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close" dialog box.  And every once in a while it quits with absolutely no warning.

I've tried following the hints on the Firefox crash page on Mozilla's support site.  I've completely uninstalled Firefox, deleted its program folder, deleted my profile folders, and reinstalled using a clean copy downloaded directly from Mozilla (v2.0.0.13 now).  I've tried disabling extensions.  One thing which did seem to help was running in Windows 2000 compatibility mode, but the problem didn't go away completely.  And why would I need to do that now when it was never needed before?

I'm now running it again with the Google toolbar uninstalled (which was the only add-on I've installed since reinstalling Firefox) to see if that helps.  But so far I am at a complete loss as to why it's breaking on my computer after running trouble-free for, well, years.

Any other ideas?

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to finish the 12th and final book of the late Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.  Which is great—and inevitable; it would have been almost criminal for such a massive epic to be left unfinished—but who the hell is Brandon Sanderson?

So I really enjoy candid's daily del.icio.us links postings (and he's not the only one doing this), and now that I'm using del.icio.us regularly, I'd like to share my links as well.  And I have not a freakin' clue how to do it, even after Googling the interwebz.  It has something to do with using LJ's XML-RPC interface, but I have no idea if I have it set up correctly in del.icio.us.

How do I do this?  Is there an LJ client plug-in for doing this?  A Santeria ritual, maybe?

I moved to Google Reader some months ago for all of my RSS needs.  I had become increasingly annoyed by the fragility of LJ's aggregator; the slightest formatting anomaly in an RSS entry could cause my entire friends page to puke, and it had become cluttered to the point that I would often miss a friend's journal entry while scrolling through 37 Slashdot postings.  Moving the feeds to a separate reader cleaned things up considerably, and Google's implementation is the slickest and most robust I've seen.

I don't read a lot of feeds—and I can barely keep up with the ones I have now—but I'll share what I read regularly:

( annotated blogroll )

Feel free to comment with your own interesting finds in the blogosphere.

Is anyone else having trouble accessing Gmail today?  I've been trying to get into my inbox all morning and all I get is the polite "We're totally fucked, please try again later" message.

Of course, if you comment here, I may not get notification since comments are sent to . . . my Gmail account.

Never mind.  I signed out of my Google account and signed back in, and now it works.  Probably a cookie issue or something.