I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
I’ll never screw with Terminal commands I don’t understand.
*Whew.*
Take Two. I have OSX running on the iMac now, and along with about a gazillion other things I’d like to do with it (an iTunes server, internal/external file serving, scheduled backups, iPhoto libraries), I downloaded and installed a dyndns client (link) so that we can share files from the house. I tried this a year or so ago, and had no luck (OS9.2 on the 8500) so I’m hoping this will work more seamlessly on OSX. I currently have some issues with port mappings in the router and the firewall in OSX, but should be able to iron them out tonight.
Somebody scheduled some freezing weather for the first day of October, and I don’t appreciate it.
You Kids Get Off My Lawn! Dept. Memo to the guy who’s been parking his Volvo out in front of our house with the ‘For Sale’ signs on the window for the last two weeks: the house isn’t empty anymore, pal. Move it along or I’ll call somebody to tow it. Thanks. How about I park my Scout out in front of your house for a few weeks? Bet you’d love that.
??? Dept.: What the hell is this dick doing NFL commentary for? For the unenlightened, here’s some suggested reading.
NBC Sucks. Nice of the Leno folks to refer to Howard Dean as the ‘Presidential Wannabe’ in their promos last night, and helpfully booking him after the oh-so-important Catherine Zeta-Whatever. This morning Katie Couric, the poster girl for pink fluffy pom-poms, went after him like a pit bull in heat. I thought I was watching MSNBC for a minute. Interesting to see impartial journalism at work. (note: I don’t know anything about Dean or his politics, but it’s pretty obvious the suits at NBC have cast their ballots.)
Stumbling around the internet looking for some information about greenhouses, I found the International Greenhouse Company, whose website looks strangely like another website I’ve been at recently…
Anyway, we’re looking at our first frost tomorrow night, and we have a bunch of plants that need to come inside before then. Given all that’s been happening with the inside of the house, I haven’t done much with the greenhouse yet, and that includes figuring out what’s broken on the heater, how the irrigation system works, or if there’ s a working thermostat. I’d love to be able to use it during the winter, but we’re going to have to wait to see how much the house electricity bills are before we start heating the outbuildings.
The secret to installing OSX and OS9 on the same drive seems to be either partitioning the drive and putting one OS on each system (what I did on the Powerbook, here) or installing OS9 and updating it to 9.2.2, then installing OSX and updating that. Big fun, people!
In other geek news, Macintouch put me on to this new service provided by XLR8, who has some affiliation with the old Daystar Digital corporation (now defunct, I guess…?) and who are making a G4 upgrade for Pismo Powerbooks. Back in the day I bought a Daystar upgrade for my ancient Mac IIcx, and took the nervous step of boxing my motherboard up and shipping it to Georgia to have them pull the creaky 68030 chip and drop in a 40mhz 68040. All went off without a hitch, and Norman ran sturdily for another year and a half until I bought my 7100/80. I’m obviously going to wait to hear what experiences people have with this service, but $330 is a small amount to pay to keep this machine up to date and continue to boost the return on investment. Time will tell.
Some fun killtime reading: mugshots.com.
Jen would also like me to clarify that she tried to buy the table from Phyllis several times. Sorry for the confusion!
Make The Bad Man Stop. Each morning, as my brain begins its startup sequence, I wind up with a strange song stuck in my head. I’ve been telling Jen what some of these are, and today I remember this morning’s featured track: Turn Me Loose, by Loverboy. The songs usually are embarassing, schmaltzy, and repeat themselves until I can make it into work and get the headphones on.
After that weekend, I’m pretty beat. I ate about three pounds of Jen’s homemade lasagna last night and had two glasses of red wine, and slept the sleep of the dead. There’s nothing like an honest tired. I posted a new series of photos with some before/after shots of the upstairs bedroom, and some selected shots from around the house.
Hmm. Apple just released a new series of iPods, so now the offerings are 10, 20, and 40GB. The 20 might just be the one for me, if and when I can afford it. Drool.
If all goes well, tomorrow Verizon should be flipping the switch on our DSL service, so we’ll have broadband at the house. It’s been a very strange experience to go without it for the past three weeks, sort of like losing cable. If there’s a question about a movie (“Who’s the guy who plays the bad guy in this piece of crap?”) or about one of our appliances (“How the hell do we make this thing stop beeping?”) or how to garden in something larger than a clay pot (“What the hell do we do with this stupid bush?”), the Cat-5 umbilical is not available. What did we do before the Internet?
So I started putting the assorted debris of my life into boxes the other night; starting with the office upstairs I took all the stuff off my shelves and arranged it neatly into two boxes which each weigh about as much as an import car. Moving is fun because you start to enforce the 5-second rule—when you hold some piece of crap over the open box and decide within five seconds whether you care enough about it to carry it down a flight of stairs, into a box truck, across town, and back up a flight of stairs, or to chuck it. Chances are, you’ll say no. Which means you gather a pile of stuff in front of your door which either waits for a trip to the dump or Goodwill. And then you get to where you’ve moved to and can’t find that thing you need because you 5-seconded it and now you have to go out to get a new one. (Can you tell I’ve done this before?)
I got my collection of tube radios packed tonight, along with antique cameras, pictures, and pretty much anything else not bolted to the floor in the living room. (Note to my friends who have agreed to help move: I’ve kept the boxes light. Really.) Next up are the assorted loose items in the basement, and then I’ll work upstairs to the bedrooms.
In other news, it looks like AppleScript, which I was able to learn and use in 15 minutes on OS9, is crippled in OSX. All I want to do is build a small script to update a file remotely. From all I can find so far (and from the Finder Dictionary), Copy isn’t even supported in OSX. And the Finder isn’t scriptable using drag-and-drop. Dammit. I don’t have three weeks to devote to learning the stupid language in the first place.
- No, assholes, games do not sell movies. Your last movie sucked. People don’t want to get burned twice, especially when you charge $9 a ticket for this crap. Make a better movie, and people will come.
- OSX seems to be slowing down every three or four days as I put it to sleep and wake it up each day. Photoshop lags, Eudora takes up cycles to think, and all the apps seem sleepy. Anybody else noticed a problem with X and PowerBooks?
- Buymusic is doomed to fail if their music service is anything like their customer service. Oh, and all those songs might not be legally available anyway.
- Come on, people, vote this guy out of office. What is it going to take (or what are we going to have to lose?)
</grump mode off.>
Hmm. I’m working on modifying a script to automatically update my local log file to my webserver, so I don’t have to manually copy and paste the file each time I update it. There are a few things I’d like to change (this script was initially written as a directory backup too, not a single-file updater) but I need to have more knowledge of AppleScript to do it. I wish the Finder was script-recordable like iTunes or other OSX applications. Oh, and Apple: three of your scripts for iTunes crash the application.
Still waiting. It’s hard to concentrate.
Looking at the garden this morning, I’m amazed at how everything is coming along. The portulaca Jen planted in the front bed is growing like wildfire, blooming on just about every new shoot. The sage that overwintered in the beds is now about three feet tall, and desperately in need of some tiebacks. The lantana is now beginning to show signs of health—it overwintered and almost died at work, then got plagued by aphids, and then got shocked when we put it outside. It’s hearty stuff and seems to be blooming slowly. The lavender is about a foot tall, and the tarragon that poked its head through the snow is now about the same height.
ThinkSecret has an article on the new Panther upgrade for OSX, and it looks like there’s a bunch of new functionality included. One of my main gripes is that they have decided to use the brushed aluminum for all windows including the Finder. Yuck. One of the positive notes is that my Powerbook is supported, so there’s no worry about getting left behind.
www.donotcall.gov. Sign up now! Tell your friends! Put telemarketers out of business! Just remember—the service expires in five years so you have to re-register in 2008. Now we have to start lobbying Congress to pass some kind of anti email-spam bill. And an anti text-message-spam bill.
In other-other news, Spin magazine has a cover feature on Jane’s Addiction that I will have to read. Lots of info on the beginnings of the band, stuff I never knew about. I’m curious to learn about the early days.
Happiness is. Yesterday I got home from work and didn’t want to turn on the idiot box, so I took a copy of Top Ten that Nate lent me out into the backyard with a cold beer and sat in the garden enjoying the evening air. It was about 80 degrees and slightly cloudy, the neighborhood was quiet and peaceful, and all was right in the world. Top Ten is a book based around the premise that a city full of superheroes living normal lives needs policing, and is focused on the cops charged with enforcing those laws. Alan Moore is just an incredible writer, and the book is full of his trademark humor, sadness, action, and mystery. Think of a Joseph Wambaugh novel starring the Justice League of America, and you have the idea behind this book. One of the highlights of the second book (the one I read) was identifying some of the people in the backgrounds—it’s not unusual to see characters like American Flagg, the PowerPuff Girls, the cast of Futurama, or Dick Dastardly and Mutley walking around the city.
Apple announced a bunch of new products yesterday, and while I look forward to several of the new features included in the OSX update, I’m worried that the usual cycle of change will render my current machine even more clunky. I’ve been putting off even thinking about a new laptop for a year now, but as the days go by this laptop seems to get a little slower as it runs OSX. One of them newfangled 15″ Powerbooks would be fantastic; I’m determined to at least make it to a G4 with my next system, but I don’t have the cash to get there. For now, faithful Scout here will have to do.
It’s looking like I’m going to have to crank up the A/C unit tonight; the temps are in the 90’s today and I’m sure the city will be a sticky mess. Big fun!
This afternoon I took the opportunity to drive down the street from work and wash the Scout; after a soggy spring and life under the sap-laden trees of Lakewood Avenue, she was getting pretty grubby. (and I’m sure my neighbors were sick of looking at it.) I fed the quarters into the machine, dialled the appropriate setting, and scrubbed her down as much as I could before my money ran out. After four quarters, three runs of what is called the “soapy brush” cycle (which consists of a broke-down broom generating clouds of soapy bubblegum-scented foam) made the dirty Scout a not-so-dirty Scout.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Don’t walk past my desk, stick your head over the divider, and ask me, “Guess how much (guy who left this company to go work in California for lots of money) got for a bonus?” and then immediately tell me, especially when the figure is so ridiculously high. That’s guaranteed to piss me off. And if you weren’t twice my size, I’d probably kick you in the ass for doing that.
So my buddy Nate bought hisself a pretty little Graphite iBook on eBay to watch anime on (it has a DVD player), and he needed some help getting it set up to see our network. He’s used Macs before but hasn’t been in the loop since before OSX. His wife just bought a 17″ iMac from Apple and made me really jealous (as well as an iPod, making me really jealous). He was looking around to see how to fix the one problem with the unit—a vertical line of red pixels in the middle of the screen. I stumbled across this site featuring replacement LCDs, and the old MacOpinion RoadWarrior archive.
- An Applescript or basic widget smart enough to open a local directory at a predetermined time, mount a remote mirror, check both file creation dates and update/backup files in both places.
- Another widget that runs in the background on my Powerbook. When it senses that I’ve mounted a predetermined volume (my backup volume), it backs up the volume based on file creation date.
Yes, I have Retrospect, and No, I don’t like it. I’d like to not have the massive overhead and all that crud floating around my system- I just want a simple daemon quietly humming in the background which is smart enough to back my stuff up without hosing my machine or costing $200. Is that too much to ask?
I’m always amazed at how many things I need my left hand to do- open a can of Coke, wash my hair, take off a sweater, button-fly jeans, work a stick shift, uncork wine…
There’s a new beta of Safari out there, and the Apple Software Updater helpfully uploaded and installed it on my system; unfortunately the style sheets on my log pages are now kaput. Anybody else having this problem, or is it just me?