Month: January 2005

I could write for salon

Me, on 1/11/05:

(14:02:03) Owen:http://www.apple.com/macmini/
(14:02:06) Owen: on the site now
(14:02:42) Owen: so the ipod is revealed as a "gateway apple product" which leads to harder products like this
(14:02:50) Owen: and then of course people will buy the dual g5
(14:03:21) Ryan: what do you mean by harder?
(14:03:31) Owen: sorry I was making a drug analog
(14:03:31) Owen: y

Salon, 1/31/05:

“What if the iPod’s just a gateway drug?”

I’m glad other people also thought of this — and expressed it better.

Free Software on TV

Char noticed this on the Daily Show:

Note the upper left corner of the window — it’s gnome minesweeper on redhat, not Windows minesweeper! Char suspects it’s for copyright reasons, because it’s free to use a screenie from gnome, whereas with a Microsoft product they’d probably have to jump through a bunch of hoops.

Anyway, I thought it was cute.

Peter’s b-day

My brother Peter celebrated his 21st birthday with the fam last week, and
I took some pictures. Peter should update his website more often.

[600×800][1200×1600]
The birthday boy, in a very underexposed photograph. I love the grain actually

[800×600][1600×1200]
group shot

[800×600][1600×1200]
The (nuclear) Williams Family

A photo note, I notice that with so many damn pixels available, I’m not afraid of cropping images to make them look better. The one of Peter, for instance, is cropped from a horizontal shot, but the full size image is still 1665×2498 — bigger than my older digicam can do.

hey did you remember vphoto for vertical photos?

new headless mac

“Mac mini”

Thanks to some guy on irc.

edit: normally I don’t drool over new mac products, but this will save our company a ton of money if we can just buy these things and have a stash of monitors instead of plunking down 800$ for new emacs all the time.

edit: specs:
1.25 Ghz G4
40 or 60 GB hd
256 ram standard
firewire, usb2, digital and analog video out (probably is vga, not svideo)
combo drive

no keyboard, mouse, or display
499$ to start

edit: ok I’m done, it’s up on the actual site

flashing firmware without windows

I was having trouble getting my dvd burner to burn at maximum speed (8x) so I decided to take a chance and flash my firmware. I didn’t destroy my drive, but the upgraded firmware didn’t change anything so it’s kind of a letdown. I’m posting my method here for future reference.

Usually bios flashing is done from a floppy, but I have a modern laptop so I have no floppy. Flashing can also be done from a cdrom, but it’s a very bad idea to flash your CD drive from the CD drive!

My solution involved creating a small, ten megabyte vfat partition on my hard drive. If you don’t like the sound of that, stop reading. This is not a howto, just a set of notes. If you blow up your computer with these instructions, it’s not my fault.

1. burn a freedos cd as-is.
2. /sbin/swapoff /dev/hdaX to turn off my swap (oh yeah baby)
3. using /sbin/fdisk, delete my swap partition
4. recreate my swap partition, but leave off two of the blocks or so (about 10-16 megs)
5. create a partition of type 0xb (windows 95 32bit)
6. reboot to init new partition
7. /sbin/mkswap /dev/hdaX’ to reinit my new, slightly smaller swap
8. /sbin/swapon /dev/hdaX’
9. /sbin/mkfs.vfat /dev/hdaY to create new vfat partition
10. mount the vfat partition, copy the freedos command.com there (just in case) and all of the flashing utils / images
11. reboot with freedos cd
12. boot option 1, and then “safe mode”
13. change to c: (voila, now we are on the HD!)
14. run c:\command.com just in case (now we aren’t using the cdrom)
15. do flashing shit
16. reboot and pray you still have a cdrom

I think that’s everything.

Firefox as your default browser

I am trying to make the switch to firefox from galeon because of an extension I can’t live without, and I was having trouble when I set firefox as my default browser. When I opened links from other applications, they weren’t popping up in new tabs despite the preferences I set. So, I wrote a little script to correct the behavior:

firefox --remote "ping()"
if [ $? = 0 ] ; then
	firefox --remote openURL\("$1",new-tab\)
else
	firefox $1
fi

I saved this as firefox.sh, and set my default browser to firefox.sh

(Note, I am not using Tabbed Browser Extensions because it’s buggy, bloated, and holy fuck does it have too many options.)