blahg: Archive

A Backup is Not an Archive

Shawn Blanc recommends: use SuperDuper to keep a bootable copy of your main startup drive, and let Time Machine do its thing to archive stuff When Time Machine was announced, I’ve scratched my head for a while, clueless as to why people were finding it useable at all. One day the realisation finally hit me: I had failed to distinguish between archiving and backing up. To me, this is the same...

Feb 11th

Macworld prediction

The new subnotebook will definitely be heavier than air.

Jan 15th

Niilo Nönnönnöö, HETU: 715517 →

The odd thing about brain washing is that the less of a brain you have, the better it works.

Jan 14th

Sticking with PyPortMIDI for now

Oh wow, MIDI in Python is in a sub-optimal state, at least on the Mac. I was just about to switch from PyPortMIDI to something with a more recent release, as people had complained that they couldn’t get it to run – maybe because it hasn’t been maintained in years, or maybe because you have to muck around with Pyrex in order to build it. Since I’d made the decision to switch (many...

Jan 2nd

Rocky Mountain Alpenglow →

Religion is the logic of idiots.

Dec 31st

“[letters are] Kinda like mediaglyphics except they’re all black, and...”

– Harv in Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, ‘Part The First’, chapter ‘Nell learns to work the matter compiler; youthful indiscretions; all is made better.’

Dec 8th

The Quake3 Networking Model

The client’s receive logic boils down to: if ( newState.sequence { //discard packet } else if ( newState.sequence > lastState.sequence ) { lastState = deltaUncompress( lastState, newState ); ackServer( lastState.sequence ); } The client then extrapolates movement and whatever other information it needs based on the last game state it received. It’s even simpler...

Dec 8th

It's The Ninja's Nunchucks. →

I can’t tell you why, since I haven’t found out what exactly it is, but heroin thin looks way better than bulimia thin.

Dec 6th

Scribbles →

Yet another new drawing app for the Mac, and only for the Mac. The interface demo video is interesting. I just tried it for a couple of minutes. It took me about a minute to find a severe bug, but it was only that one, otherwise it works like a charm. The full-screen mode is very well implemented. It makes a lot of sense to have the full-screen ability in such an app, and Scribbles’s GUI...

Dec 5th

Linker trouble again. For me it’s always the linker, never the compiler. In the context of something or other (haven’t investigated details yet, I hope I can fix this without anything as laborious), this comes up: "cputype (18, architecture ppc) does not match cputype (7) for specified -arch flag" OK, a bit of context: I’m trying to build a universal binary by invoking a...

Dec 2nd

Note to self: “StarCraft requires TCP and UDP port 6112 forwarded to properly join and host games on Battle.net.” Yes, not just for hosting. The weird bit is that you can easily get in a situation where your connection is misconfigured, but you don’t get any error message whatsoever; just extreme lag whenever a game starts. Update: Turns out this tip is not even wrong;...

Dec 1st

When first details about iPhone pricing in Europe emerged, I was quite pleased with myself to find out my prediction of a price around EUR 1000 was holding up. However, that was before the price cuts. Now T-Mobile Germany just announced their price for non-locked, contract free iPhones (usually the only fair data point for comparison, as subsidies vary greatly and you’re paying the...

Nov 22nd

“Because of its condensed nature and non-standard characters, APL has sometimes...”

– APL (programming language) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Oh, and Tumblr just eated a post that I’d just meant to edit … specifically in order to add back in some markup it had eated when it imported the feed. I don’t know what to make of this. It is a great tragedy.

Nov 20th

Abusus Non Tollit Usum →

Dirty as in beer, not as in speech.

Nov 13th

Gruber recently linked to Greg Knauss, who says: Are gas pumps really accurate to a thousandth of a gallon? No. Greg uses Tumblr, so I thought I’d try out tumblrs new (to me, anyways) ‘reblog’ functionality and call bullshit. That is, I have absolutely no idea how accurate gas pumps are, but the explanation is bullshit. It doesn’t concern itself with the actual question...

Nov 13th

3 notes

Naked Light →

Yet another new image editor. I’d like to try it out, but it required Leopard. Meh. The beta is apparently scheduled to appear some time today available for download.

Nov 9th

Oy … ouch. I’d thought I’m importing the full text via the feeds from blogr. However, that’s not really possible with tumblr :-( Now the previous item ends in “I didn’t want to live …” – which is not quite what I wrote. I’ll avoid that in the future; for now you’ll just have to click through to resolve that mystery.

Nov 5th

Oh come on! →

PyCairo doesn’t allow you to load a font from a file you specify; neither does Pango. Aggdraw and PIL can do that, but they don’t provide font metrics. A PIL font object can at least give you a bounding box for a piece of text before actually rendering it, so for my current needs, it looks like the best choice of the bunch. However, it doesn’t really look attractive enough to be...

Nov 5th

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the...”

– John Maynard Keynes (British economist, 1883—1946)

Nov 4th

DarwiinRemote →

I had completely missed this: DarwiinRemote has been supporting the sensor bar for ages. This means absolute positioning works, i.e. you can use the Wii Remote as a pointing device. No idea how stable it has become meanwhile or what the latency is, but I’m contemplating getting a Wii Remote and finding out now.

Nov 2nd

“Then there’s the popularity of the Weighted Companion Cube - it’s insane. How do...”

– RPS’s interview with Erik Wolpaw, who is very hilarious.

Nov 2nd

How brilliant was it? Fucking.

Initially I hadn’t clicked Gruber’s link to this article, What the F***? – Why We Curse, assuming that I couldn’t learn anything new from it. (The title’s idiotic orthography wasn’t a good omen either.) But on this Sunday morning I fancied some slight fare to have with my breakfast tea, and it turns out the essay does have a worthwhile moment, from an educational...

Oct 21st

Oct 17th

Morning After Small Talk

I don’t want you to be no slave. I don’t want you to work all day. I don’t want you to be true. I just want to make install. (via errantville)

Oct 8th

Ubuntu Studio →

looks super sexy, and apparently you can set it up on PPC, too. Gotta try this after I’ve gotten my machine a bigger disk.

Oct 5th

Edge’s web site had been circling the drain for a long time, but no updates at all since early August, not even an announcement of a new print issue, what’s up with that? Does an October issue exist at all? Update: Haven’t found a copy. Looks like it’s dead.

Oct 4th

PixelJunk Racers

Looks neat, but apparently it’s quite boring, as you don’t really get to drive your car. And what the hey does such a game do on the PS3? Had they made it for Mac, they could charge $25 (instead of $7). Well, that is, if they’d managed to make it less, you know, boring.

Sep 27th

Musicus Maximus

Shit all over the Optimus it does not (I think … although SlashGear and the very opinion-leading Music Thing predict otherwise), but if you’re into digital audio gear, the Fairlight Xynergi might still give you a stiffy. I couldn’t find a site for the thing yet, but teh YouTubes have a video and another one.

Sep 26th

ver-con-tion-sa

I can’t find any link or contact information on bb for sending bug reports, so I’m going to abuse their “suggest a link” form for that purpose. And since providing a “link” is mandatory, I’m putting my bug report up here, so it has a URL; I’m not actually suggesting anything for an entry on bb here. I just noticed that comments on bb are displayed...

Sep 21st

Elimination of legacy functionality

I just had a first glance at this OpenGL 3 Overview (PDF) from Siggraph. Check out this highest level overview: What I like about this slide is that the largest section is about what they’re about to remove (and, from what I can tell, that list isn’t even comprehensive). It’s nice to see that GL isn’t just going to become ever more complicated and crufty until 99% of...

Sep 19th

Help stamp out GL_PROJECTION abuse →

Nice and concise explanation from Steve Baker of why it’s stupid to use the GL_PROJECTION matrix for setting the camera’s position and orientation.

Sep 19th

Frustrated Total Internal Reflection

Does ‘woking’ also encompass the situation when you just opened a new browser tab, but forgot which site you wanted to open? Or do we need a new word for that? (via errantville)

Sep 16th

Laser Paint →

The toddler version of laser graffiti.

Sep 13th

Ronald Jenkees →

(freshly boingboinged) plays his own stupid sidekick, so his music sounds like Batman. By YouTube standards, ingenious.

Sep 5th

Bible Wiki

Magic is anything you can see working without knowing how it works. Lack of documentation works wonders there. (via errantville)

Sep 4th

Recursive grep done right

I end up opening grep’s man page every time I need an option that I haven’t used in a week, so now I’m making a note to myself about something that took me a few minutes to figure out: grep -H -n -r —include=”*.py” “<what I’m looking for>” . The pattern has to go after the other options, even when you prefix it with -e . Or maybe...

Aug 28th

What the gate88 creator is up to now →

Jonathan Mak’s new game almost became freeware for PCs again, but looks like you’ll need a PS3 to play it.

Aug 15th

Literate Programming for Robots

You can judge the quality of a random number generator by putting a sample of its output as points into a plane, storing these points in a quadtree, and checking the evenness of the quadtree’s recursive depths. (via errantville)

Aug 9th

The extent of censorship in the MTV version of this otherwise insignificant Snoop Dogg video is hilarious. Bad boy taking that amount of shit from the man so MTV pimps his CD – gotta love it.

Jul 18th

Visual Diff Tools for the Mac

I just saw Amjidanutpan Ramanujam’s post on Visual Diff Tools in Linux. Looking through the suggestions there (including the comments), here’s what I found for Mac OS X: KDiff3 is of course for KDE, but there also are Windows and Mac binaries available. Meld has a Gnome-based GUI, is open source and available via port and fink. Guiffy is based on Java and freeware. DiffMerge is...

Jul 16th

Quantum Harmonic Oscillator

A decrepit lightbulb can sound like a paging harddisk. (via errantville)

Jul 3rd