Archive for the ‘computers suck’ Category
happiness
Monday, March 3rd, 2008not my favicon
Thursday, February 28th, 2008I’m trying to make Firefox on Windows XP like Firefox with the GrApple theme on OS X. I don’t have to have it look the same, just compress all the bookmarks in the toolbar into the width of the screen.
This is how I want the bookmarks toolbar to look:
And this is how it looks right now on Windows:
I can find any number of links about only showing the favicon, but none about turning it off to save space. Aargh!
stupid hp, part deux
Thursday, February 28th, 2008HP’s Photosmart driver proved its genius once again:
The download figures would have made more sense if it was working in kilobytes. As is, that’s quite a buffer overrun.
once mighty edifices crumble and fall
Friday, February 15th, 2008Friends: After discussion with the other list managers, we've decided to end our policy of asking that list members not "top post" their replies. That's the default behavior of most email clients, and just reminding people of our recommendation to "bottom post" or interleave your replies has become more trouble than its worth. From this point forward, top posting is no longer an issue. Dan Knight, list owner publisher, LowEndMac.com
Rise Up Singing! in freedb
Sunday, February 10th, 2008It took me a while, but I finally put all the track information for Sing Out!’s Rise Up Singing teaching CDs (also on the artists’ website) on freedb. I was given the data just over a year ago by Mark D. Moss, the editor of Sing Out! magazine.
The discs are:
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc A
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc B
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc C
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc D
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc E
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc F
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc G
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc H
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc J
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc K
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc L
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc M
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc O
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc P
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc R
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc S
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc T
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc U
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc W
- Rise Up Singing: The Teaching Disc Y
Perhaps what took longest was working out a UTF-8 safe processing workflow, from converting the original Excel table to e-mailing the entries to the freedb server. Let’s just say that OpenOffice, sqlite, and Perl were very helpful here.
seq for OS X
Friday, February 8th, 2008It has always irked me that OS X doesn’t have the seq command (I am easily irked). Brian Peterson’s old e-mail Re: seq from core utils has it, but the link to sh-utils doesn’t work any more, since the project has been archived. Here’s the new link: http://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/sh-utils/. Compile it as Brian suggested, and all will be well.
$ seq 1 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Joy!
(at least 99% of you will be mystified why anyone would want this.)
definitely the best (perhaps the only) ASCII art Great Horned Owl
Friday, February 8th, 2008
(aptly, it was sent from someone in Environment Canada’s Environmental Assessment in Ontario Region division)
declined
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008NRCan’s Magnetic declination calculator is pretty cool (if you need that sort of thing). It was doing something weird yesterday, though: if you searched for Listowel, ON (43° 43′ North, 80° 57′ West), you actually got the coordinates and declination for Sechelt, BC (49° 28.8′ North, 123° 45.6′ West). And if you in turn searched for Sechelt, you got Fernie, BC instead (49° 30′ North, 115° 3′ West). Hmm.
the analogue hole
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008I have a bunch of Catherine’s old family recordings to digitise (do people still do that - sit around a tape recorder and make recordings?) and I had recorded one of Ken’s shows on minidisc, so I needed a relatively clean way to get analogue audio onto the computer.
I ended up getting a Griffin iMic, a small USB audio input device. The sound quality is remarkably clean; here’s a sine wave recorded from CD to minidisc, then recorded on the iMic:
The iMic seems to work with all Mac audio software as an input device. The free Final Vinyl recording sofware is pretty, but a bit buggy and annoyingly, only works when the iMic is connected. I just use Audacity, and have done with it.
Jeremy = teh smrt!
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008Jeremy Clarkson thought it would be a good idea to publish his bank details to show that the whole thing about identity theft was hooey. Not such a good idea.
across the universe, or eula à gogo
Monday, December 31st, 2007In the Holiday Inn Express in St Louis again. Their clickwrap EULA for wireless access from Zerowire Networks is hilarious. The whole text is quoted after the cut, but the highlights include:
- anything you transmit over the network (like your credit card details, your login for legopr0n.com, or this blog posting) belongs to the hotel, and “may be processed, used, reproduced, modified, adapted, translated, used to create derivative works, shared, published and distributed by HOTEL in its sole and absolute discretion in any media and manner irrevocably in perpetuity in any location throughout the universe”. So I’m sure the murals at the first Holiday Inn Express on Mars will be decorated with credit card info.
- Riddled with typos and random copy-and-pasted sections, you nonetheless “waive any right to claim ambiguity or error in this Agreement!” [yep, the exclamation mark's part of it too]
- About half way into it, it starts representing Hilton Hotels, rather than Holiday Inn. I suspect Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V here.
- Gives up-to-the-minute advice for setting cookie preferences for IE4, a browser that became obsolete in 1998.
As it’s such a mishmash, I think I’m pretty much exempted, ‘cos I crossed my fingers behind my back before clicking “Accept” …
(more…)
wiggly
Saturday, December 29th, 2007Can I just say that the road from Busch to Eureka Springs, Arkansas is the most gratuitously wiggly route I’ve ever driven?
Our route down from Kansas City was longer than I thought; place not blind trust in GPS routing, especially when you’re close to the edge of the maps you’ve uploaded. Due to one wrong turn on my part, we ended up in Overland Park, KS — rather than being on Hwy 71 all the way south. In future, I shall upload all the maps I need, plus all the states/provinces surrounding, so you don’t get that terra incognita/here be dragons feeling of falling off the edge of your wee scrolly map.
how irritating
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007OpenOffice doesn’t import the EOMONTH() function from Excel spreadsheets, but knows what it is when you type it manually. C’mon, people, get hep!
very poor
Thursday, December 13th, 2007It just took my work computer more than 5 minutes to create a new folder on the desktop. How am I supposed to get my work done?
indigo’s most overpriced yet
Friday, December 7th, 2007I saw the most obscene markup in indigo this evening: the Linux Format OpenOffice.org special edition was priced at a hefty $34.95. This costs £10 in the UK.
The thing is, UK prices are quoted tax-inclusive. The ten quid you see is the ten quid you pay. Not so in Canada. In the most boneheaded move ever, our prices don’t include tax, so that $34.95 really costs you $39.84 (in Ontario, at least).
According to Google, £10 is $20.53. Indigo’s markup is almost 100%
so-called wizard
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007Windows has just spent the last 15 minutes searching for a driver for my Garmin GPS. Y’know, the one I use with the computer a lot. It’s claiming it’s new hardware, but in the words of Syd, “I’ve had it for months”. Oh Windows, you really are very stupid. In fact, you are a silly wizard.
it doesn’t get any better than 3D rainbow-effect Comic Sans
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
No, there is better. Much better than this.
whoa, I won something!
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007My strategy of dropping off my business card at every trade show booth that promises quality swag paid off. I just received an MP3 player from Genivar - thanks, folks!
It’s a weird little unit. Looks almost identical to a nano, but is your plain-vanilla USB mass storage device - something that Apple could learn from, but they’re in the business of selling players tied to iTunes. It also has a standard USB connector for days transfer and charging - Apple and iRiver please note.
It seems it’s an S1 type player, so can play videos in its own weird format. It also has a voice recorder, which again records in its own special format (likely some hacked version of GSM).
It will be fun playing with it.
Update: Looks like it’s an ATJ-2135 Actions Semiconductor player of some kind. It can record in ADPCM wav (which sox can convert), or its own weird ACT format (which can be converted using this Windows-only program).
easily amazed
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007I know the technology is not that nifty, but I amused and amazed myself by sshing into the home server whilst on the Via train somewhere between Smith’s Falls and Ottawa.
