work as if you live in the early days of a better nation
The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum is a joy of a website. It’s the first site for a very long time that I’ve spent more than an hour at, browsing through the meticulously compiled catalogue. It shows that not all cars have to be huge SUVs; most of the engines here are under 500cc, yet they still provide mobility.
My Future Photo just arrived. I didn’t know that Canada Post could move so quickly. The quality’s great, too.
I’ve been playing too much Kingdom of Loathing, an extremely silly RPG. Its stick-man graphics are the best.
It seems that yesterday was probably our last Grocery Gateway delivery. The somewhat dejected driver said that service as we know it ends on Friday. If anything of the company remains, it won’t deliver the same range of stock, and it very probably won’t deliver in Scarborough.
Apart from their recent payment debacle (where they claimed that MasterCard had stopped a payment fully two months after the transaction — and afterwards, Grocery Gateway’s payments department was spectacularly rude to me, and gave me derisory compensation for the half day I wasted sorting out their error), we’ve found them to be useful. Most of our 40+ deliveries have been as we ordered, and on time. We’ll have to find an alternative now.
I’m disappointed that they weren’t more of a success. They didn’t seem to advertise very well, and never played their environmental card one bit. I don’t know how many car journeys a full grocery delivery van could cut out, but it’s a sane, rational way of dealing with our pollution problem.
Waitaminute — sane, rational, anti-pollution, North America? What was I thinking?
I’ve ordered mine: http://www.blackspotsneaker.org/preview
The sumachs are beginning to flame, trees are beginning to brown, and I
haven’t seen a groundhog for days. Looks like it’s doing that autumn thing.
Hey little leaf, lying on the ground
Now you’re turning slightly brown.
Why don’t you hop right back on the tree?
Turn the colour green like you’re meant to be.
— “Same Old Man”, The Holy Modal Rounders.
I’ve just ordered some digital prints from Future Photo. Their website seems to work pretty well. Let’s see how they turn out.
I do have one complaint — they send your username and password in clear
text by e-mail when you register. Bad futureshop, no FMCG!
Got two messages from the taller Holy Modal Rounder, Steve Weber,
tonight. He was jamming away, and recorded a great song for me, Blue Navigator.
My blog appears to be a (very minor) commodity in BlogShares: We Saw A Chicken …
Highly unlikely, but I saw a biggish brown animal with a strangely
shaped tail swimming in the Don River. Could it be Castor?
I walk. And when mass thoughtlessness blocks my way, I get angry.
…. is that you can e-mail in blog entries. Like this one.
There’s a big do at the Salaheddin Islamic Centre this weekend. It seems that there’s some convention being held by the Muslim Ummah of North America. Yesterday, there was a small but very heated demonstration, with a group of people being very opposed to a particular person being present. Obligatory placards, shouting and police cars; you know the deal.
I still haven’t been able to work out what this was about. If I find out more, I’ll post it.
I’d been looking for a backup solution for a while, and yesterday I found it in the very small shape of the Linksys NSLU2 – Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives. There’s been a lot of talk recently about hacking these tiny embedded Linux boxes, but I just want to store stuff from my Linux machines and Catherine’s eMac.
I bought it, an external USB2.0 3.5″ drive case, and a 160GB Seagate driver yesterday from Canada Computers on College St for under C$350, including tax. It took about half an hour to assemble it, install it, and format the drive from the web interface.
I find it’s easiest to make named users — and tell the unit to make a subdirectory for that user — than fiddle about with other methods of making shares. You’ll also need to enable smbfs (File Systems → Network file Systems → SMBFS support in your kernel config) on your Linux machines.
I have created three shares: scruss (for me), craine (for Catherine) and mp3 (for our shared MP3 collection). I have created relevant directories from /mnt, and chmoded them to the appropriate user. These are the lines I have added to my fstab:
//squirrel/scruss /mnt/smb_scruss smbfs username=scruss,password=******,rw,users 0 0 //squirrel/mp3 /mnt/mp3 smbfs username=mp3,password=******,rw,users 0 0
I renamed the NSLU2 squirrel to fit in with the Canadian rodent theme I’ve got going with the other machines around here.
With Catherine’s eMac, I’ve found I have to use the OS X 10.1 / .nsmbrc method. Once you have the shares defined in the .nsmbrc file, you can call them up by doing Connect to Server and specifying something like smb://netbiosname/share, like smb://squirrel/craine.
The NSLU2 looks like it will be rock-solid. It has a couple of quirks — it formats the drive in Linux ext3 format, it will shut down at the slightest hint of a power glitch, and it’s rather slow — but I can put up with slowness if the data’s secure.
Okay, WordPress works now. I’m keeping the old MT archives for now, as there doesn’t seem to be a sane way of getting Apache’s mod_rewrite to work properly here. I suspect PEBCAK, probably, with intensely arcane rewrite rule syntax as a mitigating factor.
You’ll notice that the blog looks different. I’ve changed from Movable Type to WordPress. The latter is free, and looks more fun. All I need to do is work out how to reindex my archives.
To avoid the rain, and in order to become sufficiently caffeinated for work, I ducked into a Tim Hortons and opened up my Toronto Public Library book, Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead.
I thought I heard my phone ring, and in reaching for it, I upended my almost-full medium black coffee all over the book. Horrible mess, pages stuck together, much nastiness.
This evening I dragged my sheepish carcase into the local library to explain what happened. The only way I could pay for a replacement book was to “lose†the book. I have to say, it reads pretty well for a “lost†book, but the smell of cheap, over-roasted coffee isn’t so great.
My Nikon D70 makes images that are too large for the web, so I have to scale them down. Most image scaling routines use simple linear interpolation, which can lose a lot of detail, but some packages use cubic scaling. This keeps most of the detail.
I was looking for a scriptable cubic routine, and I found it in Image::Magick, aka perlmagick. The syntax is simple:
$x = $image->Resize(geometry => '50%',
filter => 'Cubic');
I used this routine to resize my 2004 Ontario Renfest pictures.
Sympatico finally fixed my DSL problems last night. It seems that my account was set to fast mode, when the cheesy old copper we have around here really needs interleaved mode, which trades higher latency for error-correcting operation.
I’m happy now, but why did it take two calls — the second of which I was on hold to the Bell DSL centre for nearly 20 minutes — to sort this simple problem?
I want to print some of my D70 pictures, so I asked the GTABloggers what they used:
I’m looking for a non-proprietary upload system, so Ofoto is out. I’d like to try photocentre.ca, but I know no-one who has tried them.