Yearly Archives: 2009

Battle of the monitor and the… monitor?

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I’m not sure I understand the point of wide screen monitors.  With my useage patterns, about 25% of the screen is wasted, over there, off to the side, full of white space.

Most of the time, I find myself wanting more vertical space than horizontal. Especially, when writing code, or web browsing, or reading email, or running commands in a terminal. Aka, 99.9% of what I do with a computer.

I kind of miss CRT’s for that big, almost square aspect ratio. I’ve been tempted to find a wide screen LCD that I could rotate vertically. Never really been able to get a hardware/software combination that actually worked that way, though in theory, it should be easy.

I think it’s about time to put a new desktop machine together (and probably a new laptop as well).  So I’ve been thinking a new monitor setup as well. Currently got a 21″ dell.

[And of course, the Civil War nerds will point out the Monitor was actually called the CSS Virginia]

ring ring, fedoraphone!

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I managed to get one of my machines installed with a os version I didn’t want, and no way to change it. Normally, this means it’s time to koan/cobbler to get it re-provisioned. But I couldn’t log into the machine to do anything. I could of reinstalled it from a cd/dvd, but I hate burning cd/dvd’s for that. I could of written an image to usb key and installed from that, but I didn’t have any with me.

So I decided to try what Mark Cox; did and try to boot it from my phone. I more or less just followed the steps he mentioned, though I had to get some 3rd party software to expose the storage card as a usb device.

But that aside, it worked. Not the fastest way to boot, but it got the live image running so I could do a hard drive install.  Kind of cool. Wonder if there is anyway to support i386/x86_64 live images on the same card?

annoying noise

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If there is one skill I have with regards to music, it’s that I make can make some really annoying noises.

While driving home, I started thinking about what would be the most annoying musical instrument one could build. More specially, more or less “acoustic” instruments.[1]

The ideas that came to mind were mostly about building wind instruments, and attaching a large number of them to a compressed air source. Kind of like a set of bagpipes, but far more annoying.

A large pressure chamber with say, three dozen slide whistles attached to it. All slightly out of tune. Or a large number of siren whistles. Or both. Maybe a few dozen cheap penny whistles. Or a hundred kazoos.

Something else to put on the list of things to build.

[1] and not including things that are just brutally loud, like a klaxon, or steam whistle, or a Hemi powered siren, or an orchestra of pulse jets, or maybe a fog horn.

in other words

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I was having a discussion  with michael over lunch, about other words for “thesaurus”. I could swear I saw one used somewhere that was along the lines of “omnilexigraph” or the like.

Couldn’t find anythough, so I created one. It’s “lexibus”.

Usage example: “‘fabiform’? Thats not a real word! It’s not even in the lexibus!”

fire, spam, rain, etc

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I managed to get a picture of my gloved hand holding a oxy-acetylene torch and cutting through a metal plate into the Durham Herald Sun. It was an article about the Durham Tech Shop and was taken during the oxy-acetylene class. I’d post a link to the article, but the Herald Sun’s website seems to be from somewhere in the past.

Tech Shop Durham seem to be making progress getting things setup for the opening, but there’s still a lot to do. It take’s a lot of work and time. It certainly took us longer to get Rod-O-Rama setup and ready than we expected, and Tech Shop is much bigger.

I’ve noticed on my blog, that I get more requests to update the spam protection plugin than I get actual spam. I’m not sure if this is good or bad.

If you get a chance, take a look at Not Yet Rain. It’s the website for the Not Yet Rain documentary about womens reproductive health in Ethopia. lintqueens been working on getting the site launched for a bit.

it will blend

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Spent most of Sunday trying to learn how to use Blender (Blender the 3d modelling app, not the home appliance. I’ve already gotten my KACBO [Kitchen Aid Certified Blender Operator certification]).

I knew it was a fairly impressive app, just from seeing what the kids did at the Red Hat High blender course a few years ago.

It’s not the easiest thing to learn how to use, especially since I haven’t really tried any 3d apps in about 10 years. The last time I tried it, it was all CSG based apps for building models for POV-RAY. Blender is mostly a mesh based modelling tool, like most modern 3d apps.

The main motivation being a combination of sites that offer web based 3d printing like shapeways.com and the possibility of Techshop Durham getting a 3d printer in the future.

I only made it through a couple of the tutorials so far, but it’s been fun. Just need to figure out something cool to design and print.

gum

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I posted a small script I use to help manage the git repo’s of func to github. It’s named gum[1].

The basic idea is you include a gum.conf config file in your repo, that defines where you can find all of the repo’s and branches of the project in question. It’s got a couple of commands to add list the repo’s, add a repo, or add all of the repo’s. It always names the branch in the form remotename-branchname.

I wrote it since it seemed I would end up with a different version of the git repo on every machine I used, and I got tired of tracking down remote and branch names to add them to each src checkout I was using.

[1] mainly to annoy skvidal ;->