Of course you can: it’s the laptop right behind the monitors. That’s more than our IT group could, though; they didn’t upgrade my computer ‘cos they couldn’t find it …
Category: computers suck
-
manifold: ur doin it wrong
This is supposed to be a nice site map, but Manifold GIS has this impenetrable and counter-intuitive user interface. No wonder it has such an active user community; they’ve all paid for it and are desperately trying to get some value out of it.
-
iRed Lite – Takes Apple Remote Further
iRed Lite is just the thing if you’re rushing to put a presentation together, and you want to use your Apple Remote to flip the slides -
wrong in every possible (good) way
I found my bricked Sandisk Sansa E250 in a pile in the basement. I thought I’d give it one last try to get it going. After much faffing about, I found that applying this fix – Corrupted version.txt/Fw update not working in recovery mode? The solution !!! – Sansa e200 FAQ – abi>>forums (which resulted in a failed boot saying something about an mi4 not being found) followed by Recovering a bricked Sansa had it working with the fairly awful Sandisk firmware. So it was off to Rockbox for the latest version.I have to say, Rockbox 3.4 is pretty neat. They’ve now got proper USB reading/writing/charging, so that you never have to see the clunky Sandisk UI again. When plugged in, the player acts as a USB keyboard for controlling your music. Apparently the E250 can now support MicroSDHC cards, which it couldn’t before. But best (and least useful) of all, is that you can play 3D Deathchase and other ZX Spectrum games on it …
-
cheap databases for Mac
- Not super cheap, but pretty: Bento, from FileMaker: http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/index.html ($50)
- Pretty cheap, not so pretty: Menial Base: http://menial.co.uk/software/base/ (£10)
- Free, fairly ugly, runs inside Firefox: SQLite Manager: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5817
Apparently they all use the wonderful SQLite, too.
-
wordpress visual editor not working?
If it always doesn’t work, go to Users -> Edit Profile, then check ‘Disable the visual editor when writing’, then update profile. Now go back and uncheck ‘Disable the visual editor when writing’, and resave your settings.
This worked for Catherine under 2.8.5. I’ve never had this problem myself.
-
renaming files to include datestamp
My Marantz PMD-620 has a reliable internal clock, and stamps the files with the time that recording stopped. File times are remarkably fragile, so I wanted to make sure that the times were preserved in the file name. Perl’s rename utility does this rather well, as it allows you to use arbitrary code in a rename operation. So:
rename -n 'use POSIX qw(strftime); my $mtime=(stat($_))[9]; s/.WAV$//; $_ .= strftime("-%Y%m%d%H%M%S",localtime($mtime)); s/$/.WAV/;' *.WAVwhich, for files 1007.WAV and 1008.WAV recorded last night, results in:
1007.WAV renamed as 1007-20091024192436.WAV
1008.WAV renamed as 1008-20091024193438.WAVTo actually rename the files, remove the
-nfrom the command line. I left it in so you couldn’t blame me for b0rking up your files if you typed first, thought later.There are probably smarter ways to handle the file extension. This works for me. Perfection comes later.
-
AddressBook 4.0 Help: Importing and exporting vCards
vCard Splitter used to be teh way to split up the huge vCard file that Apple Address book creates. But it doesn’t work under Snow Leopard, but I discovered this tip from Apple: To create multiple vCards at the same time, hold the Option key when dragging multiple cards out of the Address Book window.
To export all your contacts as separate vCards, select them all, hold down ‘Option’, and drag them to a folder in Finder. It would really help if this wasn’t the Desktop folder, unless you like major cleanups … -
the old familiar way
$ telnet cix.compulink.co.uk Connected to cix.compulink.co.uk. Escape character is '^]'. CIX Conferencing System login: ...... CIX Version 3.4.3 of Aug 12 2005 running on Fri Sep 18 14:24:48 2009 Copyright (c) CoSy Conferencing System, University of Guelph, 1984 Portions copyright (c) Compulink Information eXchange Ltd, 1985-1999 You are on line: 5 Nickname? (Enter 'new' for new user) scruss Password: Checking your conferences You have 1 mail message(s) in your in-basket. There are 1 unread mail message(s). You are a member of 1 conference(s). Main:mail xdusraojwuvup 371170 . Thu Sep 17 23:42 2009. Just to be invited is a privi Mail:send To: scruss@......... Enter subject: You've had this e-mail address for 20 years Enter message. End with '.' >How does it feel to be that old? > > Stewart >. send/action: Sending..Memo 376095 sent Mail:quit Main:bye There is unread Mail, do you really want to quit ? (y/n)? y scruss, you have been online 2:12 on line 5 Goodbye from CIX !!!HANGUP NOW!!!
-
She’s so beautiful the love of my life. We drove into the sea …
earthsurfer is the first computer application for years – perhaps decades – that has made me go “Wheeeeeeeee!” It’s a port of Monster Milktruck! to use the Wii Balance Board on the Mac through Bluetooth. It has no use whatsoever, but it is inordinate amounts of fun. -
Light cyan and light magenta
To echo Thomas’s post about HP light ink usage, my C5150 definitely uses them:
I think I’m on my second light cyan and magenta, while I’m on my fourth regular cyan and magenta cartridges.The one thing I have learned not to do is buy the six cartridge photo pack. While it looks a bunch cheaper (typically, $45 for six cartridges + 150 sheets of photo paper), the bundled cartridges have a much lower capacity than the singles – maybe 1/3 less. So you don’t really save anything, create more waste, and end up with far more photo paper than you can use.
-
Hotlink protection of images with .htaccess
Since discovering a few of my images hotlinked on other sites, I now have Hotlink protection of images with .htaccess. We’ll see what happens …
-
I’m crap at tracing
I’m getting slightly better with my drawing tablet, but have a long way to go. -
my beautiful neighbourhood
Here’s a bike ride around my neighbourhood rendered in QGIS using Bing Maps imagery via OnTerra Bing Maps WMS Service:
(via)
-
I need to be a part of your emergency plan is not
… is what Translation Party makes of “lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”.
-
major annoyance – gone!
If you are annoyed by this:
right-click on the Windows Trash, select Properties, and you can kill that confirmation window once and for all:
. -
downtime
Stewart would like to apologise to both listeners of the automatic podcast for the two week downtime. We lost power, and the server’s network connection didn’t come back up properly. All is restored.
I wish I could have captured the sound of all the pudding cups on the plane popping in quick succession as we gained altitude today.
-
no no related posts
I’d tried, and failed, several times to install the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin for WordPress. This time, I actually dug around the forums a bit to see why it wasn’t working, and now it’s fixed.
YARPP requires MySQL version 4.1 or later. Partly due to the age of my blog, I still had my WordPress database at 1&1 at MySQL 4.0. They now offer MySQL 5, and any new databases are created under the newer version. As I’ve used less than 5% of my database allocation, it was a simple job to create a new database, backup the old one, restore it to the new database, then point my
wp-config.phpto the new DB.(If it still doesn’t work, view the source to your Settings→YARPP configuration page. Error messages are helpfully, if cryptically, embedded in HTML comments.)
I’ll probably still get a few “No Related Posts” appearing until the cache fills, but that should go away soon.
(from 
