Aiiee! Boing Boing started to send out ads in its RSS feed! It was attached to this story: RIAA drops P2P case against dead non-computer user. Suxx0rs …
Category: computers suck
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iPod Shuffle works under Linux
Very pleasantly surprised to find that Paul’s iPod Shuffle appeared as a bog standard USB mass-storage device on my Linux laptop. Of course, there’s the small matter of the metadata required to get it a Linux box to make acceptable playlist, but it’s a start.
I susect I’m being sad and old when I say I remember the COOL It Works With Linux logo scheme …
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How To Fix A Crashed & Screaming QuickBooks Timer
We use QuickBooks Timer to track our billing hours. It seems to crash with great regularity whenever you finish entering an item. When it does this, its usual two note happy acceptance chirp turns into a squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that goes on and on and on …
I’ve found a way of fixing this without rebooting:
- Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, and call up the Task Manager
- Select QuickBooks Timer, and ‘End Task’ (it may take several tries)
- Open a command prompt, and hit Ctrl-G, then Enter
- After beeping, and complaining that ” is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file, the beeping will stop.
This has been a public sanity announcement.
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got it bad
That retrocomputing itch … sometimes a guy just gotta rediscover the Commodore Amiga of his youth.
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If Burlington = 95, Toronto = ??
143; if you’re Environment Canada’s Weather Office, that is.
Completely against the concept that Cool URIs don’t change, the Weather Office appear to have arbitrarily changed the URLs for their 5 day forecasts. In the old days, if you knew the local airport code, you could find the weather report, for it was at (f’rinstance): http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/forecast/city_e.html?yyz. (And yeah, I grew up with siblings obsessed with these guys, so I’ve known Toronto’s airport code of old.)
Now the same page is at http://www.weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/city/pages/on-143_metric_e.html, and for Burlington, it’s …/on-95_metric_e.html. It doesn’t make sense, does it?
Canada has weather that can kill you. Somewhere, someone will have scripted a page that scrapes the Weather Office’s data, and so somewhere I’m sure there will be a weather report that’s not updating. I can see no good reason for this change; I’ll see if Environment Canada has one.
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Meddal: Linux in Welsh
For all your Brythonic computing needs: Meddal
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Oh yeah, and what does *this* mean?
Windows says, “click here to begin”. Begin what? The insanity? A nice wee story about elves and flower fairies? Making embarrassing smells in public places? -
No tourism for you
The Eye On Tourism kiosk in Union Station seems permanently crashed. It only used to seem to crash if anyone looked up Sudbury … -
Bob The Angry Flower RSS Feed (beta)
Bob The Angry Flower RSS Feed: http://scruss.com/btaf.rss
This is very beta, extremely hacky, and only updated once a day. It does hit Stephen’s site quite hard when it’s run, so what you’re seeing is static output from a cron job.
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Rocker on Code Optimisation
When the code stops producing digestive reactions in others, stop refactoring.
— Alan Rocker
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thinkpad t21, linux 2.4.28-gentoo-r5, and ACPI
If you find yourself running this kernel, make sure you remove all ACPI support from the kernel if you want to use the onboard 3Com Tornado 3c556B CardBus ethernet adaptor. You used to be able to get away with the acpi=off kernel parameter with 2.4.26-gentoo-rn kernels, but this doesn’t work any more.
This has been a Nerd Public Service Announcement.
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i r00l (a bit)
from my Kingdom of Loathing character:
PvP:
Ranking: 388
Fights Won: 119
Fights Lost: 119An Adventurer is Me!
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99 years out of code: Y2K was so five years ago
As seen on bottled water in a Holiday Inn Express: Produced 1904, Use By 1906. Either some grand conspiracy has kept the Edwardian invention of PET bottles and computerised inkjet printing out of the public eye, or somebody somewhere hasn’t quite got their date printing right. -
DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide
This is neat: DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide. Thanks for the indirect link, Emma!
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m4p2mp3 – helper to turn an iTunes protected m4p to an mp3
m4p2mp3 — helper to turn an iTunes protected M4P to an MP3, so I can play music I have bought on my MP3 player. Probably runs best on a Unix-like OS.
You will need Perl, some M4Ps, mono, FairKeys, DeDRMS, faad, and lame. You’ll need to edit the script to say where the DeDRMS.exe file is. You’ll need to have run FairKeys to pick up your account details from Apple’s server.
Does the conversion via WAV, so you’ll definitely lose something. As written, MP3 file sizes are about 15% larger than the M4P. Doesn’t handle invalid MP3 genres gracefully at all; there is the beginnings of a mechanism to do this in the code, though.
This script doesn’t know anything about decryption, and thus contains no code to circumvent DRM.
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Just their two cents …
I see that Froogle has started to place value on people’s opinions:
Handspring Treo 180 Review Comments – The Gadgeteer Bulletin Board
$0.02 –Add to list -
now that’s what I call an URL!
Yes, there really is a HugeURL.com. Here’s one for this blog:
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aarggh! delivery.ca and pizzaville.ca suck monkey bum!!
We like Pizzaville pizzas. We are shy, and can order them online at delivery.ca with no human interaction.
We ordered our favourite pizzas tonight, and waited. And waited. And waited! And waited!! So I call them. After getting hung up on once, they explain that the store we order from is closed, and so we can’t get deliveries. They claim that they called us. We don’t think so.
This is, frankly, crap customer service. We’re going elsewhere. The pizzas from 241 may taste of cardboard, but at least they deliver.
Oh yeah, and delivery.ca seriously endanger your credit card information by sending your data unencrypted to the server. I’d make that illegal, if I could. It’s the dumbest thing ever.
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Aria + FlashGot = Linux Firefox Download Happiness
If you install the Aria Download Manager and the FlashGot Firefox Extension, you now have a painless way of managing multiple downloads. It makes an even better linux allofmp3 downloader than the previous suggestion.