We Saw a Chicken …

Category: computers suck

  • two cheers for sandisk

    SanDisk used to have terrible packaging for their memory cards, but no longer. Now they use a small, simple cardboard box with a PET insert. Not perfect, but much better; no knives required!

  • first bad rockbox build

    Today’s daily build of rockbox caused my iRiver to crash. It’s the first time it’s been anything other than perfect.

  • NerdTV

    Has NerdTV gone the way of all flesh? The main page has been stuck on Doug Engelbart for more than a month.

  • 2.0

    I’m running WordPress 2.0 now. You shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

  • no work shall be done

    Chuckie Egg
    Harvey Headbanger

    Oh dear, I’ve just discovered Arnold, the Amstrad CPC emulator for OS X. The CPC was my first home computer, and I have fond memories. What with that, and the ftp.nvg.ntnu.no games archive, I’ll be as happy as a pig in glabber.

  • the cry of blackberryschmertz

    My Blackberry mail server setup hasn’t been completed yet (it’s quite a shock to be on a computer with nothing above user privileges, I tell you). So I’m getting lots of blackberry.net messages which look a bit like this:
    BEGINETP 10
    AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!!
    ENDETP ...
    Sums up pretty much how I feel about it: AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!! AwUAAAAAAAAAAQ!!

  • Google Earth for Mac

    Yes, we can run Google Earth now too.

  • go train chkdsk

    so *that\'s* what these displays are running!
    One of the GO information signs was knowing a difficulty this morning. Looks like they’re something like a Mini-ITX box running Windows XP, but I’d rather I didn’t know that.

    At least the signs (when they work) are better than they used to be.

  • Deep Thoughts from the St Louis HIExpress

    From the wireless internet instructions at the St Louis Holiday Inn Express at S. Jefferson & Lafayette:

    Do I need to pay for it?
    No you do not have to pay anything. It is Free. Poo Management is offering it for free for all the guests for all hotels.

    It would seem that Poo Management, Inc., is a hotel franchise holder in St Louis. No, really.

  • palm crash

    My M500, previously very reliable, now seems to crash every time I switch it on.

  • go 1and1!

    I just noticed that 1and1 upgraded my hosting package to 30GB and 100 MySQL databases. Meep!

  • the disgruntled cyclops in your computer

    this perl operator is really a disgruntled cyclops

    You might see this in Perl if, for instance, $data were a reference to an array of arrays, and so @{ $data[$#data] } would represent the last row of data in the array. You don’t see it that often; probably more frequently than a real disgruntled cyclops, though …

  • Rockbox rocks my iriver

    Red letter day today: the Rockbox team have added peak level meters and on-the-fly gain control to recording on the iRiver H120. They fixed the infamous glitch months ago.

    I now have a really good little digital audio recorder thanks to the Rockbox developer community.

  • Stuffin’ it since the days of the Neanderthals

    dumb progress bar
    If Stuffit Expander were to be believed, this package would be ready to install in a little over 230,824 years. I must have a really fast computer, ‘cos it’s already installed.

  • happy desktop

    Did some upgrades/maintenance to the Linux box tonight:

    • added a DVD±RW drive
    • finally fitted the cheapo Zalman fan controller to take the edge off the CPU fan noise
    • got X11 working with the nVidia graphics card again, under 2.6.14. It was fiddly.

    Some people might wonder why I keep maintaining a 3½ year-old Athlon XP1800+. It works, and with the amount of RAM I have in it, it’s plenty fast.

  • QuickBooks timer = teh w31rd

    It’s now showing Sh12rt Date for the date entry field; what gives?

    Update: Now it’s doing this:—
    more qbtimer weirdness

    and then dying with this:—
    yet more qbtimer weirdness

  • OS bad craziness

    DSL running on top of Windows XP
    Yes, it’s really a linux box booting inside windows. Thank Damn Small Linux and QEMU for that.

    It opens up an X session, and passes through most system services — so I was able to print to my network printer.

  • you can’t hear the join

    Further to Doug’s comment, I installed Rockbox on my iRiver. While it may not be very pretty, it adds so many handy features to the thing. Most immediately noticeable of these is (almost) gapless MP3 playback. With LAME-encoded MP3s, there’s no apparent gap between tracks at all. I love it!

  • look ma, no wires!

    I’ve finally got rid of the ethernet cable that snaked across the kitchen floor to this linux box. A cheapo wireless PCI card (TRENDnet TEW-423PI, from CWO) plus ndiswrapper, and we’re laughing.

  • completely not feeling the love for the iPod Shuffle

    Shuffle mode on the iPod Shuffle isn’t random. It seems to play the same tracks in the same random order every time you restart the device. It only seems to get a new randomization when you sync with iTunes.

    Oh yeah, and it’s too wide to fit alongside a standard USB plug on an iBook. I’ll check the BestBuy returns policy, ‘cos this thing just ain’t doing it for me.