work as if you live in the early days of a better nation
(Photo Credit: Brian Gavriloff, Edmonton Journal)
Yes, I’ve been using mind-control techniques on squirrels to get them to erase the environmental and sartorial stain known as golf from the face of the earth.
Or alternatively, it’s just a picture from a silly-season story about Edmonton squirrels stealing golf balls. You decide. Remember, there is no conspiracy.
Sympatico are hopeless. Not merely can they barely keep a DSL carrier open for a few minutes at our house, but they also have crazy support policies.
They only way that they will support me is if I lug Catherine’s eMac downstairs, and have it hanging straight off the DSL modem. They won’t support any of my linux boxes, and they won’t consider talking to me if I have the Linksys router in place. The fact that I can see their modem losing carrier and trying to resync even when there’s nothing connected to it doesn’t seem to matter to them.
And for this aggravation, I pay $60 a month. Their technical support seems to have got a bit more evil since they partnered with MSN. I think I’m in the market for a new service provider.
Today is:
• the 12th anniversary of Catherine and I meeting (on a boat from Aberdeen to Lerwick).
• the 9th anniversary of my first post to fegmaniax, the only-vaguely-Robyn Hitchcock-related mailing list.
As I’m about to go (almost) entirely digital, I’m looking for ways of reading CF cards on my Linux-based ThinkPad. I was in Henry’s clearance store yesterday, and they had PCMCIA CF card readers for $10. I’ve found that it works well, though it took me a while to get it going. Here’s what I did:
You will need to install Card Services for Linux, if you haven’t already. After that’s done, you can check which cards are installed with cardctl ident:
Socket 0: product info: "Wireless Network CardBus PC Card", "Global", "", "" manfid: 0x0097, 0x8402 Socket 1: product info: "LEXAR ATA FLASH CARD ", "STORM ", "ST BM" manfid: 0x4e01, 0x0200 function: 4 (fixed disk)
Ignore the Socket 0 output — it’s my wireless network card. The adaptor in socket 1 does contain a Lexar CF card; you’ll get a different message if yours is a different manufacturer.
If you don’t get this, it’s likely that (somehow) your system isn’t preloading the ide-cs module; check the /etc/pcmcia/config file, and read the various pcmcia-cs manual pages.
If you check the output of the kernel messages (with dmesg, or your tool of choice), you should see:
hde: LEXAR ATA FLASH, CFA DISK drive
You’ll want to make a mount point for this disk, so mkdir -m777 /mnt/flash. Then you can edit /etc/fstab, and add:
/dev/hde1 /mnt/flash auto noauto,user,rw 0 0
From now on, you can access your camera’s CF card from /mnt/flash. No messing around with USB required!
First Ontario Peaches & Cream sweetcorn of the year, courtesy Catherine’s friend Dorothy’s mother’s farm. It was great!
The best life-advice I’ve ever seen was written on the side of a matchbox.
Years ago, the best online reference for musical saws was put together by Isabelle Garnier at the University of Bordeaux. It fell off the web a while ago, but thanks to archive.org, you can still read it in all its 1996 glory: Isabelle Garnier’s Musical Saw Home Page.
(Click the image to see the original in its full 1.1MB, 7264 × 992 glory.)
I’ve been working with Hugin for a while, but found its colour matching when stitching less than perfect. I just built and tried enblend, which promises much better quality stitching — at the cost of some serious CPU usage.
The above is 8 images, taken when standing at the near the bridge over the Ottawa River. It was handheld, with just a basic Nikon 2MP digicam in auto-everything mode. Can you see the joins?
Hugin just got a load easier to build on Gentoo. You no longer have to jump through hoops of tweaking source to get things to compile. I like the package a lot, and I look forward to using it with my Kaidan panoramic tripod head.
“There seems to be a nasty excrescence on our image of America …” says the artist, ‘Aunty Waihola’.
Digicams produce sequentially-numbered picture files. Every camera has taken a first picture, and quite frequently these pictures and their original file names make it onto the web.
Inspired by a conversation with James Dignan and Ken Weingold, the above is a collage of nine images originally named ‘dscn0001.jpg’ by the owners’ cameras. These thumbnails were found on Google Images, and have been scaled and tiled in a pseudo-random selection.
I don’t who these people are, or what the images are from. The selection and arrangement is arbitrary. The only thing that they have in common are the file names. Somehow, despite their differences, they are strangely related.
There are two differences about me today. I’m sure you can tell what they are straight away:
1) I’m now a part of the OMC Gas Grill family. All my life there was a gas grill family I didn’t know I had. We’re just like any other family, except that we don’t know each other, and all we do is barbecue things.
2) I’m now the proud owner of a Faber Castell 57/87 Rietz slide rule. Watch me multiply with uncanny ease!
Ah, a Scarborough dinner: mutton koththu roti and a bottle of Thums Up Indian cola. The soft drink tastes exactly like the colas I used to remember in Scotland, especially Barrie’s Old Time Cola. It’s slightly more spiced than that plain old brand from Atlanta.
Thums Up’s rather improbably tagline is: “Thums Up, I Want My Thunder.” After that much spicy food and soft drink, well …
We stopped in Madoc on Highway 7 last night for refreshments, and there in the Tim Hortons car park was a huge turtle. With its snake-like neck, thick bowed legs and saurian tail, it looked like an animated gothic footstool.
Just a little down the road, there was another similarly-szied beastie. I wonder if they were calling to one another? Maybe the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
Suggestions, please, as to what you think the above image is.
Together We’re Heavy
This flash game is by the same guy who did Samorost.
(look, The Polyphonic Spree asked me to do this, so who are you to complain? Sure beats their original suggestion of forwarding the link by e-mail. )
6/6/04 10:45 – The Don Valley Parkway as seen from the subway – car free, & filled with cyclists.
The age I am, I thought I was a one cheese sort of a guy. Give me a good mature cheddar — none of your vac-packed rubbish, but something with a bit of history to it, like from Alex Farm Products — and I was in cheese heaven.
Or so I thought. I occasionally like a piece of blue cheese on a steak, so I asked them at Alex's on the Danforth what they’d recommend. They came up with Fourme D’ambert. As Alex say, Its flavour is assertive piquant with a mellow buttery finish.
. I’m already looking forward to it on oatcakes for lunch.
In a different kind of cheesey news, my Sympatico DSL modem is on its last legs. They’re sending me a new one, but this one’s currently pegged at some ridiculously low speed so I can even connect at all. The tech at the (third stage) support centre says they’re really pushing for VoIP, with expected rollout in two years. That would be nice.
ebay.ca seems to have great difficulty generating pages for Mozilla. I can have ebay.ca open on both Mozilla and Internet Explorer, and feed them the same URL. Internet Explorer loads it fine; Mozilla comes up with Page Not Responding.
This appears to be entirely repeatable, certainly on my Windows box. Try it for yourself; here’s a sample URL for camera tripods.
I’m just wondering if Jason Lyttle of Grandaddy has read a lot of John Sladek. His songs of angsty machinery remind me of Sladek’s “Roderick” books.
I’d recommend listening to one or reading the other. Or both. In either order.
21/5/04 15:31 – Don Cherry in a taupe linen suit @ YYZ. He’s smaller than I thought he’d be (I blame big-screen sports bars), and he really does wear those high collars in RL.