Author: scruss
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Ken Reaume gives away his early discography
Ken is no longer performing under his given name, and has decided to give away his early recordings, Hope in Another Place and Ken Reaume. They’re good.
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frag
I really don’t know how a Windows system disk can get this fragmented:
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out on my bike
my awesome bike 
where the cheesewagons sleep 
a lovely day in the hydro corridor -
rather a new wearer of clothes
So my quest for the Sensible Bicycle is over; I found it. Or rather, it found me, for bicycles have lives of their own.Curbside Cycle had a sale. They also had, for reasons known only to the manufacturer, been sent just one of their top-of-the-line Batavus Crescendo Deluxe city bikes. I took it for a test ride in the ice and slush of the Annex. It did everything just right.
Here’s how it measures up to the checklist I wrote about in 2004:
- Fully enclosed chain — yup. Batavus have a really clever clip-together sectional polymer chainguard.
- Full mudguards — for sure.
- Hub gears — 8 speed hub gears, no less.
- Dynamo lights — a front dynamo hub, no less. Slight marks off for a battery rear light, but it does make the wiring simple.
- Proper carriers — a really nice alloy one, with built in pump and elastic strap.
- Anything but rim brakes — roller brakes, in the hubs. I was initially sceptical of their gentle action, but they can stop you to almost the limit of adhesion of the tyres, so they do work well.
The one thing it does have, but I didn’t think I’d need, is suspension. It irons out the uneven Scarborough spring roads rather well.
I love the manual; it’s written for sensible riding. Basically, most advice is given as Talk to your Batavus Dealer. The similarity to a modern car manual is striking; just you get on with riding the thing, it implies, and we’ll worry about fixing it. Tellingly, the English language section is the back; these bikes are much too sensible to waste on those silly Anglos.
I’ve barely walked the length of myself in the last few months, so in even short distances my legs let me know about it. It’s freezy out, but dry and bright – I must go out on my bike again.
(the title’s from that early eco-geek, and it’s the other half of the widely-misquoted:
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit?
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden
For me, it’s perfect; not merely do I not require new or special clothes to ride it, but I have become a new wearer of clothes by it.)
If you need to find me, you know where I’ll be …
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the glowing-eyed teddy bear of DOOM!!!!!!!!!
Actually, I disturbed a raccoon. -
acme of acmes
Acme Burger‘s second location at Bloor near Bathurst is just as awesome as the Queensway one.
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How to select broken URLS from e-mail
(without resorting to TinyURL.com, xrl.us or is.gd when posting …)
Some mail clients wrap URLs in a way that breaks their ability to be clicked on. Trying to explain a method to fix this is tiresome, so here’s an animation that explains it:
Basically, it helps to select the URL from the end to the start. Once you’ve got all the text, copy it, and paste it into your browser’s location bar. -
timed screen grabs (with mouse pointer) on OS X
The following shell script will, after a five second delay, save a screenshot every second for the next minute:
sleep 5
for f in $(jot 60)
do
screencapture -wC $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%).png
sleep 1
echo $f
done -
no zapf, dingbats aplenty
Well, yes, according to YourFonts.com. You write into a special template, scan it, upload it to their website, add your signature and bank details, and you get a TTF of what you wrote. Next time, I’ll be a bit more careful with baseline alignment.
I might mess with the alignment and kerning in FontForge, but otherwise I like it.
(via Cool Tools)
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an idea whose time has not come, and probably never will
I give you – the gummy-bear grill:
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clifton hicks
I really, really like Clifton Hicks‘s new CD.
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stewart’s rule of home networking
Three hours of frustration trying to configure a balky wireless router is better spent with a 15m Cat-5e cable fished through the cold air return.
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CHDK on Canon PowerShot SD790
CHDK works, kinda-mostly:
All I’ve really tried is raw imagery, which creates DNG files of some hugeness.
Ixus90 / SD790 Porting/details thread has more (you need to log in to see the firmware files). It’s not ready for general usage yet, but shows promise.
