We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • WordPress 2.7.1 Upgrade Failed on 1and1.com?

    bassmadrigal has the solution if WordPress automatic updates don’t work under 1and1.com hosting: WordPress 2.7.1 Upgrade Failed.
    All you need to do is add the line:
    AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
    to your .htaccess. Joy!

  • sheevaplug

    I ordered one of Marvell’s SheevaPlug Development Kit; wonder when it will arrive? It will make the best mini-server I could ever wish for.

  • the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from

    I have a suspicion that, while I Want My Green Plug and their associated blog One Plug. One Planet want to replace all power adaptors with theirs, all that will really happen is that:

    number_of_power_adaptor_variants = number_of_power_adaptor_variants + 1

    I’m not wild about their idea for DC power strips. The I2R losses would be huge.
    Also, dealing with the world of input voltages and frequencies, not to mention the many plug variants, would make the thing huge, heavy and expensive.
    But the fact is, there’s already a standard low voltage power adaptor: the USB mini-B.

  • how does he do that?

    Someone asked how the automatic podcast works. It’s a bit complex, and they probably will be sorry they asked.

    I have all my music saved as MP3s on a server running Firefly Media Server. It stores all its information about tracks in a SQLite database, so I can very easily grab a random selection of tracks.

    Since I know the name of the track and the artist from the Firefly database, I have a selection of script lines that I can feed to flite, a very simple speech synthesizer. Each of these spoken lines is stored as as wav file, and then each candidate MP3 is converted to wav, and the whole mess is joined together using SoX. SoX also created the nifty (well, I think so) intro and outro sweeps.

    The huge wav file of the whole show is converted to MP3 using LAME and uploaded to my webhost with scp. All of this process is done by one Perl script – it also creates the web page, the RSS feed, and even logs the tracks on Last.fm.

    Couldn’t be simpler.

  • sometimes you just have to …

    smiley spreadsheet
    smiley

  • frag

    I really don’t know how a Windows system disk can get this fragmented:
    fragmentation

  • 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:

    a_handy_guide_to_fixing_broken_urlsBasically, 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

    scruss handwriting font

    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)

  • Unix Timestamp 1234567890

    unix_timestamp_1234567890.ics

  • CHDK on Canon PowerShot SD790

    CHDK works, kinda-mostly:

    chdk on canon powershot sd790

    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.

  • i really do remember when all this was fields: fresh sweet cron

    fresh sweet cronAt the corner of Warden & Steeles, there was a little farm. It’s gone now. I think they were better at growing than spelling.

  • emacs: replacing newlines

    Jeremy says it’s C-q C-j, and that works for me.

  • Stewart & His Constant Search for Patterns in Randomness

    Three consecutive tracks in today’s the automatic podcast from “& His” artists:

    1. May Flower — Mike Shaw & His Alabama Entertainers
    2. Call On Me — Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
    3. Reset — Casper Fandango & His Tiny Sick Tears

  • 20000th track

    My music archive just hit 20K. The lucky track is Momus‘ I was a Maoist Intellectual.

    Momus is giving away his albums that he did for Creation as an advent calendar. So far, he’s released The Poison Boyfriend and Tender Pervert; more to follow.

  • the little computer that should

    My home server went phut last week. There was a brief power outage, and everything else came back on — except the server. It was a three year old Mini-ITX box, and I’m casting about for ways to replace it.

    To serve my immediate music serving and podcasting needs, I have pressed The Only Computer That Runs Windows into service, running Ubuntu using Wubi. Unfortunately, I do still occasionally need to run Garmin Mapsource, which only runs on Windows, and also The Only Computer That Runs Windows is also rather too nice a laptop to be sat doing server duty.

    I have some options:

    • Get a new motherboard for the mini-itx box. Via still has some crazy ideas about pricing (over $200 for a fanless C7?) but maybe I’ll go for Intel’s snappily-named D945GCLF, which looks okay for what I need and is only $80.
    • I could resurrect the old Athlon box I got in 2002, but it’s big, loud, and its components are probably near end of life. Also, why disturb a mature spider habitat?

    What I was really looking for was one of those tiny fanless internet appliance boxes that were so 2007 (like the Koolu and the Zonbu, both of which have moved on to other things), but such units, without the tied storage service contract, are upwards of $500.

    My needs are simple:

    • run Firefly to feed the Soundbridges;
    • generate the automatic podcast every day, which realistically means a linux box with Perl, sqlite and the like;
    • have something to ssh into when boredom strikes the need arises. Perhaps unwise having an open machine sitting directly on the internet, but only the ssh port will be open.

    I really also need to get rid of all the computer junk in the basement. It now includes two fritzed mini-ITX systems and the world’s slowest PostScript laser printer. Such fun.

  • AWS OpenWIND

    AWS OpenWIND is a free wind farm design tool. It’s from people who know what they’re doing. I’m intrigued.

  • my browser knows about toronto highways

    Thank you, I’m here all week …

  • glaikit: n., chiefly Scottish

    that’ll teach me to mess around with photo booth and Catherine’s iMac.

  • I don’t like prunes, but I do like prune


    Just spent a pleasant morning munging gps data and photos using Prune. It has allowed me to edit a complex GPS track, add many photos, correctly correlate them to GPS locations, and save it all back out in a variety of useful formats.

    I see that the author is talking about producing a native KDE version. Noooo! I like my Java. It runs everywhere.

    (Incidentally, I see that with the recent software update, the Blackberry Curve will now geotag images from the camera. It’s now a really good “I was here” device – coming close to the “Utensil” that Robyn Hitchcock spoke about years ago.)