Category Archives: Technical

My collection of hardware, and what it’s up to.

i have no facebook login and i must scream

“We need to give this effect a name. I suggest ‘Idiot Storm’.” (BabylonDrifter at comment 283 on the great Facebook Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on February 18, 2010 – 3:32 am | Also posted in Life |
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Mirroring online

I’ve just discovered the Journalpress plugin for WordPress, and plugged it into Stringybark and Greenhide, so it will mirror everything Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on January 7, 2010 – 12:01 am |
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quote of the day

“Training wheels are a best practice—for learning how to ride a bicycle. They’re not a best practice for riding the Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on December 28, 2009 – 6:30 pm | Also posted in Quotations |
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intel macintosh minis, bah humbug

I just dissected an August 2006 Mac Mini named buffy, to rescue the hard drive after what its owner reported Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on July 22, 2009 – 12:25 am |
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SID metric of the month

“Malware code is often written very simply and quite securely, server administration isn’t nearly as good.” (Peter Gutmann, professional paranoid, Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on March 15, 2009 – 7:13 pm | Also posted in Quotations |
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transferring mail from andrew to google

Because I’d like a firewall-proof interface, and want to dispense with andrew. I’ve installed uw-mailutils on andrew, for the mailutils Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on March 1, 2009 – 9:21 pm |
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dfont FTW

For the edification of the next person to need to export a font from an Apple .dfont bundle: the relevant Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on February 18, 2009 – 1:11 pm |
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tinkering

The ceremonial aptitude update this week yielded just two packages to upgrade, passwd and login. Did install lftp 3.6.1, though… Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on December 24, 2008 – 10:47 am |
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crossposting to LiveJournal, 2008 dance remix

Brad the Blog Boy is alpha-testing a remix of the LiveJournal CrossPosting plugin for WordPress. The original author last updated Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on April 2, 2008 – 7:49 pm | Also posted in Other | Comments Off

drupal doesn’t like to delete users, bah, humbug

Nevertheless, when miwatj.org (the Miwatj Health Aboriginal Corporation‘s ostensible new site) turned up neglected and overrun by post and comment Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on February 6, 2008 – 8:48 pm |
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VLC for Apple computers

There’s a cross-platform player of VLC and like media available from the VideoLAN project. I’ve installed it on erzulie, but Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on January 30, 2008 – 9:41 am |
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GNU readline for erzulie’s system python

Turns out the Python they ship with Leopard has BSD readline linked in, rather than GNU readline. I ran into Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on January 28, 2008 – 8:33 am |
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case-sensitive HFS+ volumes: what a good idea

This happened, for the twenty-fifth time. I applied the indicated fix (using sudo). And finally, Software Update is blessedly silent Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on January 27, 2008 – 4:50 pm |
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barthelme

Barthelme is a fluid WordPress theme of two columns from plaintxt.org. I’ve upgraded puntbow.net.au to use it. Good, huh?

By horatio Posted on December 24, 2007 – 11:22 am |
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Combining PDFs on OS X

For future reference, the definitive way to combine PDFs on a Macintosh is CombinePDF. I’ve installed it on erzulie, and Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on December 10, 2007 – 11:49 am |
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online help desk for puntbow.net.au

The Zendesk issue-tracking service comes in sizes, extra-small through XL. The one-man XS size is free, so I’ve gotten myself Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on November 3, 2007 – 2:06 pm |
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quote of the day

“Doing loops with tail recursion is wonderful, except when it’s not.” (Tim Bray, having an Erlang moment)

By horatio Posted on October 10, 2007 – 8:57 am | Also posted in Quotations | Comments Off

EC2

Amazon has an Elastic Compute Cloud for hire. As many Xen instances as you’ve the budget for, with a web-services-ish Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on September 5, 2007 – 8:22 am | Also posted in Scrapbook | Comments Off

tinkering with glibc on andrew

Thirteen ebuilds to update this week, plus portage. One of ‘em’s glibc-2.6, which was up for update last week (along Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on August 4, 2007 – 6:05 pm | Comments Off

almostedible.com.au

The first chunk of art for www.almostedible.com.au has arrived, so perforce I must take a moment to bolt together the Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on June 28, 2007 – 7:14 pm | Comments (0)

MapInfo interchange

Found the MITAB library which reads and writes MapInfo interchange format and TAB format. Once it’s in interchange format, ArcInfo Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on June 26, 2007 – 2:15 pm | Also posted in Scholarship | Comments (0)

fglrx behaving again on kelpie

Downgrading xorg-server to 1.2.0-r3 and then restarting the xdm service on kelpie seems to’ve done the trick. Admittedly I’m sitting Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on April 29, 2007 – 1:10 pm |
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kelpie.smi.uq.edu.au

…is the name of the Sabayon Linux box on my desk. It’s for light computational modelling and hacking on same. Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on April 26, 2007 – 9:17 pm | Also posted in Scholarship |
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OS X is a Unix, alright

“UNIX IS user friendly, its just picky about who its friends are.” (anonymous) I’ve put www.r3.net.au back on buffy instead Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on March 23, 2007 – 9:51 pm | Also posted in Quotations | Comments (0)

notes to self

A beloved cat is always a good conversation starter. Carlo is over here, being carnivorous. Nadiah is over there. Never, Continue Reading →

By horatio Posted on March 20, 2007 – 9:20 pm | Also posted in Life | Comments (0)