Author: scruss

the great lost opportunity

I’ve always thought that Adobe missed a great opportunity when they didn’t make their basic PDF writer freely available for Windows. Other OSs now have transparent print-to-PDF options. If you’re lucky, a corporate PC might have MS Office Document Image Writer installed, but a 300dpi monochrome TIFF can’t compare to a PDF.

Still, one can always install PDFCreator (if you have admin rights to the PC, of course). It’s a shame they decide to bundle a marginally dodgy toolbar/spyware package with it, but you don’t get that if you use the MSI installer package.

very, very old school

Mac OS 7.5.5 Notepad

As I appear to have broken Catherine‘s ability to play Crystal Quest by upgrading her eMac to 10.3.9, I need to find an alternative way to run it. I remember running Basilisk II years ago on a very old Linux box — indeed, my ancient instructions are still here: archive.org :: Installing Mac OS 7.5.3 under Basilisk II on Linux, and quite amazingly, are still useful.

I found the following helpful to get it going under OS X:

rip the carpet up off the floor

It’s moving day. We’re moving the office from North York to downtown. Very downtown, in fact; 200 University, almost my old Oanda stamping ground.

In celebration of leaving Vic Park & Sheppard, I guess I really must have one last burger from Johnny’s…

new greenery

Finatics were having their opening sale (yes, it seems that they were open before, but not officially) so I got a whole buncha plants to replace the rather gnawed/algaed ones I had.

The algae eaters were not pleased to have the tank delved about in, no sirree.

hey livejournal, quit claiming my content

Read this. Oddly familiar, huh? It would seem that LiveJournal is republishing my blog on its own site http://syndicated.livejournal.com/wesawachicken/.

The thing about syndicated publishing is that the author has at least given permission that it takes place. I gave LiveJournal no such permission. Sure, I have a public RSS feed, but I don’t expect people just to grab my whole site and publish it for their own ends. That’s not syndication, it’s theft.
They also have the gall to claim there’s a “syndicated user” wesawachicken. Again, I didn’t set that up. I wonder if I can make it implode by getting it to syndicate its own feed?

yeah, I get this too

Every few weeks someone contacts me with a proposal for what is, in effect, a perpetual motion machine. He (for it is always a he) can demonstrate to my satisfaction that, unlike all the quacks and cranks and mountebanks I have heard about, he really has solved the problem. He has a special catalyst, or a new equation, or a hotline to God, which demonstrates what all other physicists consider impossible: that energy can be created. … My only defence against these people is to ask them for an article in a peer-reviewed journal, whereupon I never hear from them again.

 — from Heat, by George Monbiot.

spiked!

Took advantage of the holiday to scoot down to The 12th Fret to have my banjo looked at. I’d managed to do a bad thing to the tailpiece (which I’d rather not talk about, thank you), and had Grant fit capo spikes at 7, 9 & 10.

While working on the fretboard, Grant confirmed that these really were model railway track spikes — or more correctly, model railway enthusiasts use capo spikes to hold their rails down!

Audacity 1.3.2 broken as designed

When I’ve spent the last 3 hours splitting tracks in Audacity, the last thing I want to see is:

audacity annoyance message

They’ve changed the way that Split works, so you now get a bunch of semi-useless ‘clips’ that you can’t do anything with. You can’t select a clip, or move them to new tracks (at least under Linux and OS X).

How apt that one of the tracks was trying to split was I Wanna Destroy You.

see, I told you ages ago

Trendy roof turbines are not as green as they look says The Observer. <smugness/>
Paul Gipe has some thoughts on this:

The last one has a couple of pictures I took when we were in Scotland.

bleh

I will state for the record that the 401 was absolute bleh driving out to Goderich tonight. Snow tyres don’t like rain.

all the stars came crashing down

Saw the Decemberists at the awful barn that is the Kool Haus last night. The place was fairly busy, but not full. A scalper offered me a derisory price for a spare ticket, so I don’t think they sold out.
They were pretty good; great in parts, kind of tired and meh in others. Naughty Chris Funk lit up on stage; that’ll mean a fine for the venue. That’ll teach him not to play banjo on stage.
Sensitive wee Scottish folkie Alasdair Roberts supported. He was good enough for me to buy the CD.