Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/28/chabot-mirrors-and-flickr/
In honor of Joe’s Birthday, we visited the Chabot Space Center in Oakland on Saturday. It is a pretty nice place, for a planetarium. They have some large telescopes set up out back, and it is really more of an observatory that has sprouted a planetarium to entertain kids and other members of the public. Yayoi wants to go back some night and peer through one of the telescopes . . .
Anyway, being an observatory, they are naturally intrested in mirrors, and have an exhibit on this topic. As you can see, we had a bit of fun with our reflections in one of the demonstrations. Another thing that was totally interesting is this video camera they have set up with a variable delay between the top of the screen and the bottom of the screen. Some sort of illustration about how images get distorted when you have to deal with how slow parts of the image may get to you. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/03/17/happy-1111111111/
<recursive> mmagin@dt ~% date +’%s’
<recursive> 1111094490
<recursive> getting very close to 1111111111
<Nimbex> 1111094473
<recursive> hmm
<Nimbex> I need to run ntpd on neb.
<SmooveB> recursive: damn, that’s in like 4 hours
<dman> I’ll be around SysAdmins this evening.
<Nimbex> And I bet you forgot to register a domain for it this time, dave!
<Ark> SmooveB: I thought it was tomorrow
<recursive> jwz’s LJ says: 1111111111 = Thu Mar 17 17:58:31 2005 PST
<Ark> wacky
<dman> 0-13:23 djh@mito ~> date -r 1111111111
<dman> Thu Mar 17 17:58:31 PST 2005
* dman sets up a blog entry for 17:58
<Ark> what a great and arbitrary number we have a boner for
Yes, children, two minutes before 6PM Pacific it will be 1111111111 seconds since the start of the Unix Epoch, which commenced at 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970. A couple hours later, and I’ll be at Apple HQ in Cupertino, to hear about LDAP.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/27/howto-convert-streams-mp3/
I am an NPR junkie, and my new place gets awful reception. And for a long time I have admired TiVo and wondered if my life might not be better if I had a DVR for NPR programs. Add to that KQED’s obnoxious plugin/popup window and the fact that I use an older version of RealAudio to avoid Spyware, which stutters and rebuffers all the time, and I have enough motivation to rig up something different.
I have rigged up a simple system to schedule rips of programs broadcast on the KQED audio stream in to easily manageable .mp3 files. If I had one of them iPod thingies I could even listen to the radio programs on the bus. I might even get around to warezing this to interested friends via BitTorrent and CSS, which would leave us another technical explanation. (more…)
9 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/22/faq-stream-kqed-freebsd/
If you want to listen to KQED using FreeBSD, install mplayer:
mplayer mms://wmbcast.kqed.speedera.net/wmbcast.kqed/wmbcast_kqed_jan032006_0957_103495
UPDATE: I just discovered the -playlist feature. So, this works even better:
mplayer -playlist http://www.kqed.org/w/streamingfiles/kqed_wmp.asx
I have also figured out how to convert the Windows Media Player stream in to mp3 files, and may set up a system to “record” programs on a regular schedule, at which point I can listen to public radio as I would watch TV on a DVR. (Radio TiVo!)
If anyone might be interested in getting in on a non-RealAudio “NPR audio archive” via a bittorrent setup, I’d love to hear from you.
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/16/skype/
Skype is an Instant Messenger client with a twist — if you hook up a microphone you can CALL each other. Like a telephone, only you can see if your buddy is online before you interrupt them. The audio quality is very good, and clients are available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. The Linux client works on FreeBSD.
Even nicer, you can dial out on Skype, for exceedingly low rates. It costs us about 3c a minute to call Japan, though we’re going to get Noriko-san on Skype soon enough, and then the calls will be free.
If anyone wants to try it out, you can ring me at dannymanTM.
To answer a question you may have on your mind, Skype is not a telephone, so it is different from a VOIP service, where they send you a telephone that you hook up to your broadband. Instead, Skype is a way of making telephone calls from your computer. Unfortunately, people can not yet dial in to someone using Skype.
For me, though, it is as if the Internet has come full-circle: we used to have to find a cheap local number to dial in to the Internet on our existing telephone. Now, we are finding cheap services to make telephone calls on our existing Internet connection. Yow!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/02/04/referer-zeitgeist/
So, take a look at backlinks. It is kind of a mess, culled from my web server’s Apache log, but gratifying to browse. Apparently, I am the top hit on Google for such things as:
I owe such “fame,” I think, in large part, to WordPress’ clever habit of putting title keywords in to the URLs of my posts. Google seems to lend a bit more credibility to URLs that match keywords as opposed to goofy URLs. “What’s in a name? Would a Rose, by any other name …”
Anyway, another thing you’ll see in there is some spam referers that companies will wrap in to HTTP requests with the expressed intent of appearing on a public “backlinks” page to boost their own Google ranking!
I have been thinking to hack up a little log-file parser that pulls the referers out, and checks on them to make sure they actually link to the pages they say, and if the referer is a search engine, to check the results on that search engine and report the ranking. It is nice to:
- Know what keywords are bringing you traffic.
- Filter out the referer spammers.
And, thinking 1.1, it would be neat to track this data by week, or month, and see gaining keyword hits, and declining keyword hits. A personal site “zeitgeist” if you will.
Has anyone ideas on implementation, or if it has already been implemented, or other features that would be nice, or how best to arrange the results? Drop me a line or comment here. Thanks!
-danny
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/24/freebsd-howto-gmirror-system/
A new feature of FreeBSD 5.3 is the ability to set up a software mirror of your system disk. This allows you to boot off either of a pair of hard disks, which will then function as a RAID1, which will ensure system uptime in the face of a single disk failure. (more…)
41 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/05/freebsd-howto-ndisulate-windows-drivers/
This is the second time I am going to use NDIS to allow FreeBSD to load the Windows drivers for a Dell laptop to access the built-in wireless. As this is my second time, it is good to make my own crib sheet of what I have to do, so I can do it even quicker next time, and because you, the reader, might find yourself here thanks to Google.
In both cases that I have done this I have been starting with FreeBSD 5.3. According to this crib sheet, you need to be fairly current with 5.x to do this. That crib sheet is also my main source of reference.
If you have already done this to your system and find yourself having to re-do NDIS after an upgrade, you may find my “rendis” script handy.
If you have already done this to your system, and are tracking -STABLE I have read that you no longer have to follow these steps, but merely run:
ndisgen (more…)
36 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/30/google-groups-gripes/
I don’t like the new Google Groups. There’s a smaller reason and then there is a bigger reason.
The smaller reason is that the “old” Google Groups has worked well for several years. The new Google Groups, it is a wee bit harder to navigate, but even more than that, it is frequently broken. See http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?q=gmirror — as of this writing, 9/10 of the hits from this search yield a message that says:
Topic not found.
We’re sorry, but we were unable to find the topic you were looking for.
Perhaps the URL you clicked on is out of date or broken?
Yes, perhaps google Groups is broken. I e-mailed them about it yesterday.
But this points to the bigger reason, which is that I use Google because it is the best search engine, hands-down, and it is the best search engine, because they focus, not on the “interactive portal” thing, like Yahoo!, but on search. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/28/two-wordpress-plugins/
I was stumbling around the Internet this evening, and stumbled upon two neat plugins:
- Related Entries Plugin
- Does some magic to link to “related posts,” as you can see below. So far, it seems mostly to amount to navigational funness.
- Spam Stopgap Extreme
- A quick little hack that involves MD5 hashing, and JavaScript. Will purportedly kill off all spambots. We shall see, but unlike a lot of the anti-spam solutions, this thing wsa a trivial install.
UPDATE: March 8, 2010. These days I use Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and WordPress’ built-in Akismet Anti-Apam system.
-d
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/28/howto-mpg123-random-mp3s/
Assuming your mp3 collection is in $HOME/mp3s:
find $HOME/mp3s -name '*.mp3' | mpg123 -Z -@ -
The find command generates a list of .mp3 files in your $HOME/mp3s, and that mpg123 command says play songs randomly (-Z) from the list (-@) that I am feeding you via stdin. (-@ -)
To skip a song you are not enjoying, press control-C.
-d
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/12/07/frebsd-laptops-windows-backups/
My fancy new Dell laptop and FreeBSD are a bit of an odd couple. I haven’t tried yet, but apparently I could get the trackpad, nub and mouse keys working through something called “Project Evil” that supports Windows drivers under FreeBSD. Entering suspend mode causes the computer to reboot, this in part because apparently Dell has messed up their implementation of standards-compliant power management, but whatever. (more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/22/howto-map-an-ip-to-an-asn/
whois -h whois.cymru.com <IP Address>
Thanks due to a colleague at CacheNetworks.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/20/field-report/
Walnut Creek 20/Nov/04 — Highs and lows in the rugged terrian around Mount Diablo. I took a new job in San Ramon, which is known for being a nice, quietly dead town. Fifteen miles up the road is Walnut Creek, where Yayoi and I have selected an apartment very close to the BART.
When Yayoi came out, everything was beautiful. I rented a car from Thrifty but they cajoled me in to spending a little extra for a convertible. Normally, I might frown at the excess, but what better way to welcome my new bride to California? She has school and can not join me out here ’til December, but she was able to spend a few days out here. The first two days I had to work, and she trudged around Walnut Creek in the rain evaluating housing options. On the weekend it cleared up and we decided on a two bedroom place with a pool and a hot-tub for the modest rent of $1200.
Then, as the sun was shining on the newly verdant hills, and the leaves were turning colors, we hopped in the convertible and drove to the top of Mount Diablo. We surveyed the land as man has surveyed this territory for hundreds of years, if not more, from the tallest peak in the land. It was quite the honeymoon, for it is about a week after we were married that I had landed this job in California. (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/01/freebsd-user-timezone/
I just stumbled on this. My e-mail server is in California, but I am in Chicago. However, I launched my current screen before we ran tzsetup on the server, so my IRC window and mutt were displaying times in GMT.
Now the server is displaying times in Pacific time. Yet for my login shells it is displaying in Central time. How? (more…)
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