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Schweet. There is a font called Navelfluff. It’s nice and fuzzy but boy it must be heavy as a vectored font. In fact, there are two variants of the font, one with much fuzz and one with even more.
The font family is priced at 75€, so it’s not like i’m going to purchase it. A sample text “Navelfluff” would be nice though for a blog header 
Tags: font, meta, navelfluff
My geek cred has arisen substantially. Or to say the least, my geek cred has potential for heroistic levels, if only the newly installed battery in my wife’s iPod will work as advertised. But after our digibox (set top box, receiver, recorder thingy) lost its operative edge which i haven’t yet been able to restore, i do need an addition of karma.
It was no more than a week or two ago when my dear wife lamented the fact that her iPod battery had really run out of magic. She could charge it all night but it wouldn’t play for the bus ride to work. She even contacted a Mac retailer and could n0t believe it when she heard that buying a new iPod would probably be cheaper than having it fixed at their establishment.
Cue geek husband.
A quick browse on eBay led me to HKinventory. One iPod battery cost me less than a fiver. Shipping included. And a mere week later, the battery was neatly delivered in a padded envelope.
It was a bit unnerving popping open the hermetically sealed designer thing (i was about to say cracking open but that never happened… fortunately), but finding familiar looking components inside replaced the mystery with a more familiar feeling. Changing the battery took me maybe fifteen minutes and i even got the whole thing rebuilt without any extra bits left when the casing was closed. Nice.
The most unnerving bit was actually plugging the thing into the charger to see if the thing still works, and the most satisfying bit was seeing that it did charge.
But that wasn’t the strangest bit.
Because with the battery came a small bag of colourful … pripples.
Just add water
I don’t have the bag left, but the instructions said i should submerge these into 4 dl of water (a cup an’ a half, if any reader from the stateside should see this) and wait four hours. It didn’t really say why, but hinted something along the lines of eternal happiness and a good life.
The pripples started to grow (yeesa) and take a fuzzy shape. Within an hour, my container had a myriad of floating colourful blobs of colour within. It was truly weird.
Which is nothing to say compared to what we had after the promised four hours of growing. This:
Four hours later
I don’t know if they’re poisonous or just weird. But i did find a small flyer with the baglet claiming that i could use this “crystal mud” to put plants into, or to drop some essential oil on it to make my home or office nice and fragrant. If those were the words.
But at a fundamental level, i’m still stunned.
Here’s a tip. Do not, ever, change your password just before going home for the weekend (or worse, for a vacation). When you’re back home, you won’t remember how you spelled it. Or at least if you’re me, you won’t.
The added bonus here is that i need to be on call for work this weekend, and i need my virtual machines on standby. But since my VMs are for Microsoft Virtual PC, a Windows platform that you can get in to would be nice. Or really, would be really, really preferred. But as hinted, i don’t have a Windows box at home that i can log in to.
So what’s a boy on a penguin trip to do? Install VirtualBox. It reads .vhd files natively, without any conversion hoop to jump through. There was a less-than-obvious error message when i started VirtualBox from the K menu, but started from the command line, i got hints on which extra bits and pieces i needed to install. A reboot later, and VirtualBox starts. It reads my VHD file with that Windows XP and the Cisco VPN client on. It starts. It notices some hardware changes (no shit, Watson) which i ignore. I suceesfully start the VPN client and gloriously connect to the customer. I RDP to their server. I feel fine.
I’m well aware that there is a Cisco VPN client for Linux too, which would have been the easier and more logical approach here, but i never really got it installed last time i tried. And half success with installing VPN drivers has caused compleat failure on the network side before, at least on Windows, so i wasn’t really that eager to retry.
But hey, Windows with Cisco VPN, running on Linux. Schweet.
I know Windows [0] has problems handle multiple monitors well. I’ve lamented the fact before that when i have two monitors that have different pixel density [1], there is no way that i can adjust Windows so that items look as big on both monitors.
I keep my laptop to the left or my external display, but the external display is my “main viewer” or primary monitor. Windows doesn’t like this. Much.
My latest discovery is that when i put a dual screen wallpaper onto Windows and set the wallpaper to “Tiled”, the left half of the picture would go on the right monitor and the right half onto the left monitor. Centering the image will show the middle half of the picture on both monitors. Stretching it (“fit to screen”) will squeeze the dual screen width image onto one screen, and show that on both displays.
Wallpaper fail.
[0] Vista, and everything that came before. I still have high hopes for Windows 7.
[1] While they have the same number of pixels, 1680 x 1050, my laptop monitor is smaller than my external display. My old laptop had a higher resolution display than my external display, so it had an even higher pixel density. I intently avoided using the word “resolution” here, since it can mean either pixel density or amount of pixels.
Tags: dual monitors, fail, monitor, wallpaper, windows
A client of ours had the following job for us: some of their workers had moved to an affiliated company with its own infrastructure. As a result, i was tasked to set up the Exchange (2003) server to forward their mail from their old addresses to their new ones. An easy task, right?
For the impatient sysadmin on the run, here are the bare bits: there is no easy and elegant way, at least none that i found. I have to do it manually, from Outlook, as the user. Which sucked. Badly.
To vent my frustration, i shall now painstakingly enumerate the methods that didn’t work. You might as well press the Next button now unless you enjoy reading about your fellow sysape’s sufferings.
Since the workers had moved to another company, i changed their account passwords and moved them to another Organizational Unit in the Active Directory.
As i didn’t know how to do this from the Exchange management interface, i started with an unelegant but straitforward approach: set a forwarding rule in Outlook. The shortest way to Outlook is Outlook Web Access. There, you can find a Settings section and set one rule to inform the sender (once) that their new email address is Firstname.Lastname@thatothercompany.com and another one to forward the mail to the new address.
I got two problems with this approach. For one, since two of the users had their mailbox sizes over Quota, their settings wouldn’t stick. And for the rest of the users, no forwarding happened. At all.
It turns out that you can set up mail forwarding from Exchange after all. Open an Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) console on an Exchange server. Locate and right-click the user. Choose Properties. Select Exchange General > Delivery Options > Forwarding Address > (tick) > Forward to > Modify.
Since the Bigger Hammer didn’t work, there was just one thing to do. Go manual. So i logged in (using remote desktop) to our admin box on site there, as the first of our four users. Indeed, the mail quota had been surpassed quite a few megs ago. So i created an Outlook data file (Archive.pst) and moved all the mail from the inbox there. It was a looooong job, i tell you. Moving thousands of mails onto an archive file on a server just isn’t the fastest thing to do.
When the inbox is reasonably empty, create a rule from Outlook > Tools > Rules and Alerts, or open the one that did stick on one or two of the accounts. Create an empty rule and apply following two things, the first of which is optional. Move the mail to a “FORWARDED” folder. And ask the mail to be rerouted, not forwarded, to the new address.
So that’s my last night in a nutshell. I want to go to bed now.
I have a small bunch of external hard drives. Some i use at work, some i use privately, and many of which i use on a single day. One drive in particular has my digital photos [0], which i connect when i want to work with those.
The problem is that the hard disk may or may not retain the drive letter from one time to the other. Especially when i’ve used the computer with a bunch of other external hard disks, which happens a lot at work since i keep my virtual machines on external media [1]. But what this does is screw up my photo management software, since it expects the pictures to be on g:\Pictures and not, like they in fact were, on i:\Pictures. To make things worse, the two-partition photo brick i had connected in fact did have a g: assigned, so i managed to import a bunch of photos to the same disk but the wrong partition.
To move the pictures within the photo management software, i did something natural which turned out to be stupid. I asked it to open another set of folders. Which the software proceeded to merge into its database, thus moving all my previous 24227 pictures from where they were to where were, except from my photo management software’s point of view. And after my next reboot i’ll probably have to do it again.
The particular problem would of course go away if i didn’t do personal photo management on my work laptop, but i’d still get insulted by Windows each time a virtual machine has disappeared from the catalogue just because the drive letter designation has changed. The point still holds.
So i suggest to you dear Windows developers: give us users a simple way to identify our hard disks by a label instead of a drive letter. To keep things in tune with ye olde drive lettering scheme, the drives could be accessed as <label>: in addition to the old <letter>: and i could finally find my digital photos on the photos:\ drive, regardless of which drive letter that drive would happen to be mapped to this time.
Tags: windows
I bought the Cisco Routers for the Desperate book in PDF format (waiting for clearance from the publisher that i’m actually allowed to create a hard copy from it), as recomended by the Tao of Security weblog i subscribe to. The book starts with the following dedication: “To all those poor bastards who are awake at oh-dark-thirty trying to get their router working.”
The book starts with a pretty accurate scenario description of When the Router Breaks:
People panic. Pretty soon, everyone’s running around as if they have a drunken badger loose in their undies. While that can be amusing to watch, it doesn’t get the Internet fixed.
I think i’m going to enjoy reading this one.
Tags: book, cisco, networking, sysadmin
I read a response to a Phorbes analysis on What’s wrong with Nokia by C-M Dumell and another one here. Basically Forbes have a crappy text saying that Nokia doesn’t Innovate which Apple does and then goes to shoot themselves in the foot (repeatedly) by saying stupid things they got wrong.
Or so i think. I didn’t read the article (that never stopped me from opening my mouth anyway). But it got me to write this, which i’ve been thinking about for a long time. And it boils down to what i’ve been thinking about Nokia and yet never whould have believed to actually be true, which is the following statement from Tomi Ahonen:
Innovation has nothing to do with usability.
Grakk.
This, pretty much encompasses half of the problem. It is horribly narrow-sighted.
The other half of the problem is manifested in statements from Colin Gillis from Brigantine Advisors in New York, like
They’re [Nokia are] going to need the types of devices that people can use to download applications and the kind of devices that people can be interactive with, the types of devices we’re seeing out of Apple.
I find it bemusing to listen to podcasts and reviews about what smart phone computing should be in the future when all these features have existed for i don’t know how long on handsets i’ve been using for ages. Like the noveau ability to add applications to your phone. Yee-haw. I had this with the “Fisher-price” 3650 (and yes, it was blue). It’s practically been a requirement for me since. And that applications should be easily accessible through application stores and installable over the air. We had the old-skool Nokia OVI long before Apple got their App store. Sure, Apple got the touch screen first, but Nokia got GPS, VoIP, WLAN, 3G, MMS, multitasking, PC synchronization, Exchange synchronization, cut-and-paste, a media player, “tethering” so i can use it to connect to the Internet, and user-replaceable batteries before Apple (and a few other gadgets like a flashlight, a golf stroke analysator and a bike computer, just to show off).
What Nokia doesn’t have is proper usability, sexiness and bling. The S60 UI on my phone is ugly, clunky, bulky, boxy, and just plain out of fashion. No, i change that. It never was in fashion, or if it truly was, i don’t remember when it was. Perhaps in 2003 when i got that 3650 phone.
Nokia smart phones seem like command line UNIX. You can do anything with two character commands, a heap of obscure switches and a set of pipes… if you can. iPhones on the other hand go well in cocktail lounges with long drinks, soft jazz and indirect, blue light. There’s very little jazz and overpriced mojito in an E90 Communicator. Also, Nokia has more phone models on market that i can comfortably fathom and Apple has, uh, two. Truly, i think this goes in Apple’s advantage. It makes communication so much easier if you can focus on just one thing. Which is the other thing Nokia must have got wrong.
How can it be that Nokia has had all these features out forever and ever amen but when Apple (finally) releases a product with these features, the assembled congregation applaudes the Church of Jobs with standing ovations? Because of the delivery. Apple has an uncanny ability to present their stuff so that everybody listens and think that what they hear is cool. Because it is. Nokia would really benefit from a Steve Jobs or a Barack Obama who can take the stage and make the people go “ooooh, that’s niiiiiiiice”. Nokias press events are pale stuttering men delivering epic epistles of boredom in tankero englis. Listen to Nokia’s The way we live next podcasts, you’ll see what i mean. I too subscribe to that podcast, but it’s not because of the presentation. It’s despite it (oh that’s right, Nokia also got podcast deliveries over the air to the device before Apple). The lack in presentation horribly overshadows the usefulness of the content. There’s this small company run by some friends of mine. They are excellent programmers. They have some excellent products. They are really nice guys. They just don’t know how to sell it. In the mega league, that’s Nokia when compared to Apple.
Nokia phones look and feel like they are innovated by a happy cadre of engineers. A happy cadre of engineers can take you to the moon and back, but they sure aren’t sexy. At the same time, i would not trade in my E90 for an iPhone. Not with their respective current feature sets. But i would appreciate my Communicator with iPhone’s looks, schwing and usabililty.
Tags: apple, evangelism, iphone, marketing, nokia, presentation, smartphone
Good news. After a mere four years of application, the Chinese Ministry of Health has stepped up and said that using electric shocks probably isn’t a very good idea to “cure” Internet and computer gaming addiction after all. Chief zapster Dr Yang Yongxin reassures us that electric shocks to the brain are inherently bad themselves, or dangerous — just painful. Experts at the Ministry on the other hand aren’t really convinced that electrocuting is efficient (and besides, they now have a distributed content filtering system which just awaits being approved for release, in addition to the Great Firewall of China).
In any case, a halt on zapping youngsters’ brains has been ordered, which is a good thing regardless of rationale.
Another thing that amazes me is that i actually stumbled upon a follow up to a blog story i wrote four years ago. Maybe i would benefit from a brain zap myself?
Annat är det numera när man kan flasha firmware-updates tom. på sin teve. Men döm om min förvåning då jag tittade in i firmware-flasharen. boot.img? u-boot.bin? vmlinux.ub?
Bor det pingviner i min teve?
Bad Behavior has blocked 648 access attempts in the last 7 days.
