You know, sometimes the right tool for the job makes problems remarkably simple to solve. For a lot of my small computer problems, the right tool is sed. I remember the first time I encountered it, and I estimate it’s saved me around an average of about an hour a week since then–which works out to something like 117 working days.
(0 Comments)Posts Tagged ‘deep geekery’
Fixing The Asides
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009Hey, did you notice the “aside” formatting is working again on that last post?
You might remember my saying, way back when, that I had noticed that the upgrade to WP 2.8 had broken AsideShop, the plugin I used to do styling for my “aside” posts (Oh yeah, this is going to be some deep WP [...]
Book Porn
Thursday, August 13th, 2009Yesterday was a marvelous mail day at the McLaren household. Through a confluence of mail karma–or possibly because our mailman seems to be skipping a day whenever he gets bored with the route–I had several books arrive from several different publishers. This will consequently be one long post full of book porn. If you’re not [...]
A continuous moving on
Monday, August 10th, 2009Have I previously discussed my enjoyment of the word flux? I don’t think I have.
In fact, I like the word enough that I’ve just officially adopted it for the next year at Adopt-A-Word.
As the word’s new guardian, I will, of course, be traveling the web to ensure the word is not misused, or under-used.
(This is [...]
Deep Geekery: DD-WRT
Sunday, July 26th, 2009So, because of the recently discovered vulnerability in DD-WRT, I figured it was time to update the firmware on my router.
Yes, I know that since I don’t allow remote configuration of the router I was somewhat protected from the threat, but I was due for an upgrade anyway.
However, I do have to ask myself [...]
A Monday Night Gallimaufry
Monday, June 22nd, 2009Let’s see if we can close some of the myriad tabs I’ve opened in the process of trying to catch up with everything that happened in the non-work world while I was off spending time at the Melbourne office:
I’m quite impressed at the 16-year old (from the city where I did my university days) who [...]
Can’t Win, Can’t Break Even, Can’t Get Out Of The Game
Friday, May 8th, 2009You know what you never want to see? Ever? This:
That’s a particularly nasty variant of that old companion of people who do computer things for money: the BSOD. This one usually means one of three things: you have a virus on your Master Boot Record, the drive with your swap partition on it is [...]
Software Thinking
Friday, May 1st, 2009Most mornings I try to check out the interesting new links on the particular categories of Reddit that interest me.
For the most part, I don’t bother with the comments–they are generally noise, not signal.
However, the best computery thing I read last week, and possibly for a significantly longer window, showed up in one of those [...]
What does it say about me that when I read a piece on scientists attempting to create human/animal hybrids in order to harvest stem cells from animal eggs, that my immediate reaction is “Oh noes, they’re going to make the cat girls and some skeevy people will be way too excited about it”?
(0 Comments)Mean Tricks To Play On Yourself #345: Install Linux on a laptop with only wireless connectivity (i.e. not just not plugged in, but nothing to plug in to), where that connectivity is provided by a Broadcom-based wireless adapter. Level 2: Once you have that working, enjoy it for a while, and then do a distribution upgrade, so that it will break and you can have that fun all over again. Level 3: Repeat with every distribution upgrade.
(0 Comments)Nerding It Up Tinfoil Hat Style
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008So, a few months back I was thinking about an upcoming trip to Boston. A trip not unlike the one I’m on right now, albeit shorter and without the 9 day, all-day meeting marathon.
Anyway, I was thinking about this trip with particular reference to the USA’s apparent new policy of having border guards copy data [...]
A few geeky bits
Sunday, April 20th, 2008OK, let’s do one of those patented link posts to clean out some of these open tabs…
Let’s start with Mario.
As far as programming goes, I’m a kernel guy–an engine guy. I don’t do UI, and trust me, you’re happy I don’t. I make it work under the covers. As such, I often deride and disparage [...]
I am a child
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008So we’ve pretty much established that I’m 35, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m basically still a child.
When I see something like the page of “revenge” items at Spymall, I just laugh like an evil ten-year old, and spend time coming up with ill-advised scenarios in which I could use that stuff. (And I [...]
CSS is driving me nuts
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008Aarrgh. My lovely blockquote CSS, with the indent and the nice vertical line works great all the time EXCEPT when I have an inline image on the left. For some (probably arcane) reason, in that case the margins/padding and border seem to “disappear” under the inline image. You can see the problem below.
I’ve know about [...]
The perils of the dark side
Monday, November 12th, 2007So, if you are the sort of person who has a fair bit of interaction with the shady computer underworld–you know where to find a download of anything, or a way to find a crack or a serial number for anything, etc, it is almost unavoidable that at some point you’re going to step into [...]
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