geek

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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

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

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.

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How many times haven’t i come back to my computer and found that it has rebooted on me. At least KDE (and Firefox, and my pro-pimped IE) has session saving, but whatever was on the Windows desktop prior to the reboot … is no longer.

While Windows needs to reboot once in a while, the least it could do is do so on my terms. And my terms are “ask first”.

To prevent Windows from auto-rebooting after applying, apply this handy registry hack (but do remember to reboot your computer eventually, or your sysadmin will be very, very annoyed).

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Name That Code

[via]

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I’m now on jaiku. Don’t know exactly what i’m going to do with it, but at least my geekness/hipness score increased a bit.

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I shared this on Google Reader, but as far as i can tell, i only have one friend (in Google terms) who uses Reader, and since the Google Reader Shared Items Thingy is so damn ugly, i’ve taken it off my site. So with that preamble, here’s what i watched on TED today: Five dangerous things you should let your kids do.

For the lazy and impatient (or the ones hoping for my analysis), here they more or less are:

  • Play with fire
  • Own a pocket knife
  • Throw a spear
  • Deconstruct appliances
  • Break the DCMA
  • Drive a car

As you can see, the above “five” dangerous things really sum up to six, but the two last really can be summed up to “break the law”.

Now here’s the fun thing. The first two or three Dangerous Things really sum up to “be a scout”, at least in this country. We (let our kids) play with knives and fire. We believe that doing so in a responsible way teaches respect, responsibility, curiosity and empowerment in us (and our kids). The Throw a spear thing was new for me, but that’s probably because i’ve never been very athletically inclined. Or very good at throwing stuff. I hope this will change with my kids. At least i am playing outside with them each weekend day, except on days when i’m too tired and i mostly just watch them play and participate on an edge.

The next one and a half item, Deconstruct appliances and Break the DCMA sum up to “call on their Inner Geek”. Understand that there’s something beneath the blank, safe cover of a washing machine or the law regulating how we are allowed to enjoy our media. So void your warranty; there are interesting — and non-scary — bits inside that are both magical and very un-strange!

Finally, drive a car, really sums up — though through an US perspective — the whole bit. Empower your kid. Show that the limits can be pushed. Show that s/he can be in control. It’s scary and it’s fun. There is responsibility included, but most of all, let them see that they can.

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iPad

I’m way behind in my feeds so it’s only now that i read Robert X. Cringely’s Kindling pulpit from the 7th of December. In it, Bob envisions that the next “innovation” from Apple is a tablet device. I’ve actually been waiting for technology to mature enough for us to see tablets like the one seen on Star Trek Enterprise. Smaller than the “tablet pc” form factor (in all three dimensions), about two or three times larger than a typical pocket pc — but no thicker.

Regrettably, the technology for that hasn’t existed yet. At least not in the stores i frequent. But as we can see from the iPod touch, it’s possible to make a nifty slab of hardware that is sleek, sexy and very, very desirable (i was about to write an article about the stuff i’m missing from the iPod touch earlier, but having been exposed to my collague’s “iTouch”, i just wants one, okay?).

Cringley calls it iTablet. Here’s my guess: The Apple tablet will be called the iPad. Kudos to me if i’m right.

While i’m waiting for the iPad to appear, i’m on the hypothetical look for a surfboard for my wife. It should be simple (in the positive sense), quiet and cheap. I’m undecided between the [computer previously known as] OLPC, which is on sale” for just another three days, a Tranquil PC T3 and an Asus eee PC (model 4 or 8), and possibly one of those ridiculously-small form factor Norhtec thingies i wrote about a year back. I’d add a MiniMac into the equation but that’d rule out the “cheap” factor, and i would have to get two of them — one for myself ;) . Currently, the Asus is the top choice. It’s an affordable all-included-package that probably can be configured to having a Finnish keyboard layout with negligible problems (and a sharpie). But as long as it’s all hypothetical, i’m still open for options. And i’d still want that hypothetical iPad for myself.

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My NAS, the venerable little Linksys NSLU2, plays music to me! And it was very, very easy to get it working. ssh to the slug, and enter this:


ipkg update
ipkg install kernel-module-audio kernel-module-soundcode
ipkg install madplay
# plug in a cheap-ass USB audio adapter into the Slug’s Port 1
insmod soundcore
insmod audio
cd /public/Marillion
madplay "06 Neverland.mp3"

Ah sweet music!

Since it’s in the middle of the night, i can’t really pump up the volume to say if the sound quality’s any good, but for this time of the day, it’s schweet enough.

Next time, i’ll install mpd and i’ll have myself a jukebox.

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While looking for something entirely else, i stumbled upon this list of Useless Animal Facts. The site also list useless facts on Weather, UK, Other Countries, Humans, and Americans.

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My desktop

I (finally) got this wonderful second monitor to my work machine. It’s a near-HD widescreen Dell thingy and it makes working with multiple windows so much nicer.

But of course, things ain’t better and they could be perfect. The thing is that Windows XP don’t scale. In this case, it don’t (or doesn’t) scale the stuff on the screen.

The new monitor is a 20 inch thing with 1680×1050 resolution. My laptop’s display is 1900×1200 at 15 inches. But the way Windows XP sees it, i’ve got a smaller screen and a bigger screen. The smaller screen just happens to be physically bigger than the bigger one… That means that when i move my mouse pointer, the pointer suddenly rushes like crazy when it goes from the laptop screen to the new “main viewer”.  Or it makes a vertical jump whenever it goes from one screen to the other — if it doesn’t get stuck at the bottom of the higher-resolution laptop screen.

Display properties

Why oh why can’t i set the physical size as an attribute to the screen? Or put more technically, why can’t i set the DPI resolution of both of my screens independently? Or even better, why doesn’t Windows do this automagically for me? I bet if it were a Mac, it already woulda :)

(Update: Seems like this is possible on Windows Vista)

(Update on the update: Nope. Seems like it won’t.)

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Shutdown day

Shutdown day iconSaturday is Shutdown day. Can you live with your computer turned off for one day?

I for one know i’d have a hard time to. I would probably use my phone for surfing, knowing that it bloody well counts as a computer when used as a surfboard.

What about the router and the NAS? Not much use to have them up if i shut down the client computers, but then i’m losing the valuable (*ahem*) network statistics of that time…. am i enough of a geek? Maybe shutdown day really is for me? :)

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