Category: computers suck

Renfest ’04

Hawk Landing
(links to my Renfest gallery.)

I went to the Ontario Renfest twice this weekend. On Saturday it was with Chris, Andi, Blair & Norvin (who was taking a little time off from promoting Zenon Membrane Bioreactor technology). Yes, there was merriment, in both liquid and meat form. Oh, and Zoltan the Adequate was indeed more than adequate.

I went again on Sunday, after picking up Catherine from the airport. We mostly went to see the owl at the Canadian Raptor Conservancy flight display.

I think we’ll definitely go again next year. Huzzah!

My race of Atomic Supersquirrels will destroy them all!



(Photo Credit: Brian Gavriloff, Edmonton Journal)
Yes, I’ve been using mind-control techniques on squirrels to get them to erase the environmental and sartorial stain known as golf from the face of the earth.

Or alternatively, it’s just a picture from a silly-season story about Edmonton squirrels stealing golf balls. You decide. Remember, there is no conspiracy.

Bad, Naughty Sympatico

Sympatico are hopeless. Not merely can they barely keep a DSL carrier open for a few minutes at our house, but they also have crazy support policies.

They only way that they will support me is if I lug Catherine’s eMac downstairs, and have it hanging straight off the DSL modem. They won’t support any of my linux boxes, and they won’t consider talking to me if I have the Linksys router in place. The fact that I can see their modem losing carrier and trying to resync even when there’s nothing connected to it doesn’t seem to matter to them.

And for this aggravation, I pay $60 a month. Their technical support seems to have got a bit more evil since they partnered with MSN. I think I’m in the market for a new service provider.

simple cheapo CF card adaptor and Linux

As I’m about to go (almost) entirely digital, I’m looking for ways of reading CF cards on my Linux-based ThinkPad. I was in Henry’s clearance store yesterday, and they had PCMCIA CF card readers for $10. I’ve found that it works well, though it took me a while to get it going. Here’s what I did:

You will need to install Card Services for Linux, if you haven’t already. After that’s done, you can check which cards are installed with cardctl ident:

Socket 0:
  product info: "Wireless Network CardBus PC Card", "Global", "", ""
  manfid: 0x0097, 0x8402
Socket 1:
  product info: "LEXAR ATA FLASH CARD     ", "STORM  ", "ST BM"
  manfid: 0x4e01, 0x0200
  function: 4 (fixed disk)

Ignore the Socket 0 output — it’s my wireless network card. The adaptor in socket 1 does contain a Lexar CF card; you’ll get a different message if yours is a different manufacturer.

If you don’t get this, it’s likely that (somehow) your system isn’t preloading the ide-cs module; check the /etc/pcmcia/config file, and read the various pcmcia-cs manual pages.

If you check the output of the kernel messages (with dmesg, or your tool of choice), you should see:

hde: LEXAR ATA FLASH, CFA DISK drive

You’ll want to make a mount point for this disk, so mkdir -m777 /mnt/flash. Then you can edit /etc/fstab, and add:

/dev/hde1 /mnt/flash auto noauto,user,rw 0 0

From now on, you can access your camera’s CF card from /mnt/flash. No messing around with USB required!

when clichés attack

a2a.png
If I ever hear the expression apples to apples comparison, I am likely to explode. What probably started as a humorous twist on comparing apples to oranges has become a prop to every middle manager. It has definitely jumped the shark.

lion theft on the boulevard

kenmark_lion.jpg
Somebody stole our lions! We had two — admittedly rather scabby — concrete lions outside our house, and this morning they were gone.

It’s not the fact that they were anything to write home about, but they were our lions. We kinda liked them there. Now they are gone, how will people find our house?

e-mail contact

Since someone gave me a Gmail invitation, I’ve decided to use it as my website feedback address. You’ll find the address on the sidebar (if you’re reading from the main page), or it’s the inevitable scruss at gmail dot com.

I may not check this very often, but I will do so at least weekly. The Gmail user interface is pretty good; some clever use of JavaScript there.

iRiver standard cable, yeah!

I may eventually stop raving about the iRiver H120, but not any time soon.

One of the only annoyances I have with the H120 is that I’m nearly always leaving the USB2.0 cable for it at home. I was running an errand in a nearby computer store, and found that they had a USB2.0 to digital camera cable. It looked similar enough, so I bought it.

And it works just fine. Maybe I’m too used to old and weird proprietary cables from the past.

Anyway, if you want a spare/replacement cable for your H120, you want a “USB2.0 A to Mini USB2.0 5 pin” cable.

It’s gettin’ so you can’t say thank you no more

It’s my birthday today; call me Jean-Baptiste (a fête worse than death) …

Anyway, I wanted to thank my folks for sending me a card and a gift certificate, so I sent this message:

Subject: thank you!
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 06:53
To: Mum & Dad

I got the Amazon certificate and the card — thank you so much!

Best Wishes,
Stewart

What did I get a few minutes later?

Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mail-in.freeserve.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 Error: Message content rejected

That’s right; I triggered a virus filter. So all because of bugs in an expensive operating system that I don’t use, I can’t say thanks to my parents.

linux allofmp3 downloader

I use — and quite like — AllofMP3.com. While it’s good that they don’t require special software to download the songs, clicking and saving each link on a page is a pain.

If you save the download page basket.html, you’ll be able to run the following one-liner to get all the files from it:

  tr ' ' '

Update: Well, as you can see, the above code is all munged, but it’s moot since allofmp3 is basically dead and gone. If the service still works, one of the wget tricks in the comments will work as expected.

freecache doesn’t

You might have heard about freecache, a method of cooperatively cacheing web content so it doesn’t eat your bandwidth. I thought this would be just the thing for the MP3s of a show by The Decemberists, ‘cos I’ve only got 5GB/month.

Imagine my dismay when I get a note from my service provider saying that I’ve used 90% of my allocation in a couple of days. The freecache proxy doesn’t do a thing, just redirects back to the original links. Bah.

I’ve had to take the files down for now. Maybe they’ll be back later.