We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • disnaeland

    Conclusive proof (if any were needed) that Scotland invented Unicode:

    didnae

    isnae

    wasnae

    If you try to display a UTF-8 apostrophe on an ISO 8859-15 system, you get a reasonable representation of didnae, isnae and wasnae.

  • few people will understand this

    zx_printer.png

    zxcolours.png

  • 18 things I’d rather have than an iPhone

    In response to Jill’s post to fegmaniax:

    1. Batavus Personal Bike
    2. Lagouille pocket knife
    3. The Muppets Series 2 on DVD
    4. a better film scanner
    5. a Bill Rickard banjo
    6. Danelectro guitar (like Syd’s)
    7. “Unicorn Power” t-shirt
    8. duplexer for my inkjet printer
    9. titanium spork
    10. a ream of Blue Angel printer paper
    11. A4 feed tray(s) for my printer(s)
    12. Sumo Lounge beanbag
    13. silent Mini-ITX motherboard
    14. bluetooth GPS
    15. Fixpencil
    16. Vivitar 285HV flash gun
    17. Pelican case for the RB67
    18. nylon-strung old Harmony banjo.

    I was trying to get to 100, but I guess I’m not that acquisitive.

  • overfed

    We had a power cut last night, and my Gregarius aggregator on the basement server really didn’t appreciate it. I think it was doing something to the sqlite database that holds the feeds when the power went out, so I lost all my configs and had to trudge through hundreds of old items.

    It could be worse; you could be stabbed! (as Mark Taylor always used to say).

  • GPS Central: in stock, with a silent “not”

    For the upcoming midwestern trip, I’d ordered some Mapsource maps  from GPS Central to help navigate across the mitten. They said they were in stock; indeed, they still do at time of writing:

    gps central

    I was very disappointed to get a note today saying that they were really out of stock, and they can deliver after the time I need it. GPS Central had previously been great, but they let me down by misrepresenting on their website. I cancelled the order.
    Prairie Geomatics came to the rescue. They’re shipping tomorrow, for the same price (and cheaper shipping). I spoke to a real person to confirm.

  • now it really works

    While I said quite early on that I had Ubuntu Feisty running in 64-bit, it wasn’t until today I got things really how I liked it. My earlier Perl problem was due to a broken gcc setup; all is happy now, and all the modules I’ve ever used are built and running as expected.

    The one thing I’ll probably never get going is Citrix Metaframe presentation client. There’s no AMD64 package for it. I’m hardly heartbroken, as I still have two machines on which it runs just fine.

  • my neighbourhood, according to CanVec

    my neighbourhood, according to CanVec and QGIS

    Canada has recently released most of its geodata for free – Go Canada! I was particularly interested in CanVec, the large vector topographical set. I downloaded the set for Toronto and environs, and slapped it into QGIS. With nearly all the layers on, my neighbourhood looks like the above.

    I didn’t find any labels, or much in the way of documentation for this huge data set. It would be a shame if good metadata weren’t available, for it adds real utility to the map data.

  • proj: your cryptic geographic friend

    I do a lot of work with UTM survey locations, and quite often I want to have them stored in my GPS. I used to rely on a powerful but oh-so-clunky Windows application called Corpscon, but I really didn’t want to be limited to Windows machines, and Corpscon really only works for North America.

    And then I discovered proj. While it has a pretty hideous command-line syntax, the output matches Corpscon to the sixth decimal place. Say you had a waypoint stored (for Southern Ontario, UTM Zone 17, NAD83) like this:

    4843744 443025 Goderich

    that is, UTM northing,easting, followed by label.

    To convert this to geographic coordinates, you’d invoke invproj (which goes from UTM to geographic) like this:

    invproj -E -r -f "%.6f" +proj=utm +zone=17 +datum=NAD83

    and it would spit out:

    4843744 443025 -81.707611 43.744546 Goderich

    Columns 3 and 4 are the geographic coordinates – 43° 44′ 40.37″ N, 81° 42′ 27.40″ W in more familiar notation – which is in fact a location between Brock St and Newgate St in Goderich, Ontario.

    With a Unix box, proj and gpsbabel, I’m set for all my coordinate conversions.

  • a nerd whee!

    The USB data transfer works flawlessly from the GPSMap 60CSx to GPSBabel.

  • now feisty – and 64 bit!

    I reinstalled Ubuntu completely last night, and took the opportunity to go to AMD64 mode. I had to sacrifice the cheapo ndiswrapper wireless card, so am now running a switch off the wireless bridge. So it works now!

    It looks like Perl really doesn’t like 64-bit. CPAN‘s having difficulty building.

  • not so feisty

    Ubuntu‘s servers are currently failing to cope with the demand for everyone trying to upgrade to 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” all at once.

  • how can you have less than one unread?

    blackberry negative mail

    My blackberry is confused. It really thinks it has -1 unread messages. This creates all sorts of philosophical questions, most of which I’m not equipped to handle.

  • captcha that would’ve been quite trendy in the 80s

    croufraj - the new sense of now

  • that was (fairly) easy

    Upgraded Ubuntu from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft last night … and it was surprisingly painless. Sure, it took all night to download, and it did require me to fiddle about using the wireless access point as an ersatz eth0 to get ndiswrapper happy, but I’m not complaining.

    I’m still not running in 64 bit though, as I don’t know if there are drivers for some of my cards in AMD64. It’s not a priority, though — everything’s adequately fast as is.

  • headless

    I’ve finally re-resuscitated the Thinkpad T21 into a basement server. Quiet it isn’t (its fan cooler and hard drive are loud), but it just works. It used to run OpenBSD, but now it’s running Ubuntu Server. I really tried to like OpenBSD, but it was a bit too spartan for my tastes.

  • a small form of happiness is

    … a USB key with the irritating U3 software uninstalled.

    Seriously, U3 is a major annoyance if you:

    • use Mac
    • use Linux
    • work on a PC with locked-down permissions
    • work on a PC with a one-letter drive gap (like having D: and F:, but no E:); U3‘s read-only system will appear in the gap, but your data won’t be accessible.
      (It’s not really U3‘s fault. The fact that Windows still has drive letters amazes me; why don’t they go for the whole 70s thing and have punch cards and gargantuan 5MB hard disk packs?)

    All four of the above apply to me, so u3 uninstall.exe is my friend.

  • Ephemera

    Ephemera – images I’ve found along the way. Some are copyright, some offensive, but for some reason, I kept ’em.

  • acned, yet inscrutable

    acned yet inscrutable

    (it’s actually the USB connector from my Kingmax Super Stick …)

  • better not the other operator

    Intel has a new ad campaign: intel.ca/multiply. Better than divide, eh?

  • a pox on nonstandard USB cables and those who would create them

    I’m trying to get all the bits of my Sony Cybershot P100 kit together, and I can’t find the dad-blamed USB cable. It’s a weird connector, and two reputable camera dealers have cried ixnay on the vailabilityay. So I have to find it.

    I have already turned the house over looking for it. Yes, I know that the recipient could just use a card reader, but it wouldn’t be so good.

    Gah! Things! They’ll get you in the end.