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Archive Category: Geek
Wordpress Comment & Trackback Spam
Tuesday, 1 February 2005
Just in case you’re using Wordpress, the most successful combination I’ve found so far to Kill Spam Dead (in regard to Comment and Trackback spam) is this:
AuthImage for Comment Spam; I have had no problems with this. No comment spam has made it through since I implemented this. Yay.
Go here for trackback spam. It works. I started getting my first vomit-like chunks of trackback-spam today and I tried a few fixes. This is the only one that worked.
More Speed
Wednesday, 16 February 2005
Today I doubled the RAM in my laptop. Glory be. I was getting completely clagged. What I really need is a bigger hard drive, but with some selective culling and my new half gig of RAM, everything is a little more zippy. Thank you ebay: I still can’t get over how cheap memory is, compared to how much it used to be. I got 256 meg of laptop RAM for $55, which isn’t bad at all. Also, my new USB hub arrived yesterday (thanks ebay - free postage to Australia) and only cost $14AU. It is totally worth it - I spent so much of my time swapping my printer plug, burner plug, palm pilot plug and mouse plug - not to mention my camera plug…the hub holds four USB 2.0 inputs - and I’m happy. Woo!
Geek Hell
Tuesday, 22 February 2005
Every time I upgrade Wordpress (the system that makes this whole thing run) something goes awry. And then I spend late nights getting few responses to my pleas on the help forums and nutting away at it myself. So. Comments are now working - if someone (besides myself) could leave a comment for me to make sure it works for people who aren’t me, that would be appreciated. If this is incoherent it’s because my eyes are so baggy I can’t see what I’m typing. Ack.
Spam Karma
Monday, 14 March 2005
I have to report that I think I’ve finally (touch wood) got a handle on the comment spam. It is all due to the very awesome Spam Karma plugin for Wordpress. Since I installed it a week ago (and removed those word-picture things that were so annoying) Spam Karma informs me it has eaten 641 809 bits of spam - and it’s still hungry. Fifty-eight IP addresses have been permanently banned from posting and are now members of the ‘Bad Guys Hall of Shame’. Nah nah nah nah-nah.
Killer or Coder?
Wednesday, 23 March 2005
Lisa sent me a link to this quiz. I’m assuming the geekier you are, the better you’ll do. Which is why I was v.surprised to get this:
9/10 - You’d spot Hannibal Lector in seconds at an Open Source conference. Your liver’s safe.
Try it out.
Definitely gone…
Thursday, 24 March 2005
Miaow is going to be a bit short on pictures until we get this house sold. As I mentioned a few days ago - my camera has disappeared, and I think by now it is definitely gone. I have checked D & E’s car, D & R have checked their study, my sister has checked the boat, and I have rummaged through my bags. Sigh. If someone finds it, they will have fun looking at before and after shots of Boat, as well as some others I can’t remember. They will also enjoy my little 64MB SD card which I also used in my palm pilot, and has quite a few good tunes on it. It is only now that it’s gone that I realise how often I used my camera 
it is very sad. I do have a back up - but it’s a camera that uses proper film; so it’s much less immediate and I have to scan the pictures in. How quaint!
She’s Ba-ack…
Sunday, 3 April 2005
Holy hairy big fat THANK YOU. I have been like a ravening junkie the past four days, unable to blog. As you may have noticed, miaowthecat was D-E-A-D. And I couldn’t revive it - principally due to the fact that I didn’t have enough time to devote to poking around to find what was wrong. Finally, tonight - the first time I’ve been able to pause for breath - help desk Steve rescued me from my dire situation. I am still not sure whether the issue was dodgy old files or the movement of my server from New Jersey to Dallas, Texas… but I don’t care. It’s all better. I have so much to type about - gah.
Geek Question
Wednesday, 6 April 2005
1. Can anyone recommend a decent webhost? I am on a killer deal at present, it’s $80 per year for my miaow hosting and 256MB of storage - however I need more space! Are there any places that just provide space, and not all the bells, whistles and backends to go with it? I want to stick with my current host, but move all my mp3 files elsewhere…
…they have offered me 100MB more for $40 per year, which is starting to sound pretty good.
Frustrations & Friday
Friday, 6 May 2005
For the past two and a half months my junk mail filter has be staging a revolt and has been quietly siphoning off many non-junk emails into its cavernous bowels. So, please accept my sad apologies if you think I’ve been ignoring you… this issue may also have caused my server to go over quota, so my mail was suspended and I was admonished for my slackness [pouts]. I am going to come into work one boring day and fix everything in the whole world of [m i a o w]…
Today has been fraught. Everybody haveagoodweekend… and pray for the positive reaction of the people who are inspecting our house tomorrow morning. M has been cleaning the house like it has never been cleaned before. We miss you M!
GMail
Monday, 9 May 2005
I wrote previously about subverting the system (read: ‘firewall’) at my workplace to gain access to gmail. They got wise. It no longer works. I have been wasting precious time trying to figure out how to one up them, and so far have come up with one viable option - GMail-Lite.
What I Want
Thursday, 26 May 2005
A handbag with a solar panel to charge my palm pilot and my phone (unless, post-house, I splash out on a Treo 650 and have a phone and palm in one device - oh then I would need another, smaller bag - and why not a solar panelled one?)
Sweaty Palm
Sunday, 5 June 2005
I leave to go to Beechworth via Macedon tomorrow morning. Which would ordinarily be a nice trip, but as it is for work, I will glimpse scenery on the way to the conference thingy each day, and that’s about it. Thank God I am staying with A and not dossing with everyone else, where I would run into people I only know by sight and have to pretend to look knowledgable (always hard - particularly early in the day). Today I discovered that my Palm Pilot has spacked out and erased itself. Everything. Everything on it is gone. All my information about flying cats to Melbourne. Phone numbers. The lot. I can sync it with my laptop, but it still means I’ll lose everything I’ve entered in the last month, as I just sync it on my work computer to update AvantGo. Goddamnit, this is annoying!
Seventeen days, including two weekends, until I leave to head north and find M, cats and house. I’m not counting hours, but I’m definitely crossing off the days.
I picked a Canon A85
Friday, 29 July 2005
My days sans camera are at an end. After agonising as to whether I should order one from the US and get my mother to schlep it back, I decided that;
1) I couldn’t wait that long,
2) I don’t know how long ‘that long’ is,
and
3) I don’t know IF she would have brought it back…
So yesterday I went out and got the Canon Powershot A85. I was after the A95 - but it was $200 more than I paid with the only differences being one megapixel and no fold-out-and-pivot LCD screen - both of which I can [gulp] live without. On the plus side, it takes AA batteries, which I prefer, and compact flash cards - one of which I already own (thank you D & R).
So last night, when M and I went on a date to the Astor to see Coffee & Cigarettes and Maria Full of Grace, I took my first little movie. We were sitting underneath a speaker…
Headache gone from naming that song
Tuesday, 23 August 2005
Ohhh. This would save my brain in such a big way. I would probably gain a year of life from having this little gadget. Tres cool…
There will soon be no need to wait for the DJ to back-announce the title and artist of a great new song he’s playing on the radio. Just dial a number on your mobile phone, hold the handset next to the radio, and the answer is sent as an SMS…
Kiss My Butt Dylan Perry
Tuesday, 30 August 2005
OK, so I’ve been labelled a whinger. Naturally, my lovely friend who utilised the term is safely in the US, though unfortunately not in Mississippi with Katrina.
The truth is, I have malaise. I have ennui. The hysterical truth is that I am actually working at work and thus my regular time for blogging has been kicked in the guts. I can’t seem to organise myself out of my routine of the last three years. I’m sure it will happen. But at the same time I am having trouble sharing. That’s right. I don’t like sharing. Some things. M and I are sharing my laptop at present, and although he is quite happy, and I couldn’t think of a better person to share my beloved with (except maybe a total luddite who wasn’t interested in using it, ever) I still feel like I am being a hog when I use it at night, or during the day on weekends.
Which is why I am poking around at alternatives. Some involve money and some do not. Right this second there is a manky little laptop whirring away to my right as I install DSL on to its puny 2GB hard drive. If M looks at it and spits, I won’t chastise him (sorry Dennis).
My more frivolous, self indulgent option (which is where the money comes in) is to yield to my yearning for a Mac, and give M my laptop. I’m thinking of a souped up G3 Powerbook - a ‘Pismo’. From what I read online, a fair amount of people consider the Pismo to be their favourite Apple laptop. Although it came out in 2000, it was - sorry, is - very upgradable.
Another option is to just get M some old Thinkpad or Tecra from Ebay that will just run Firefox and Photoshop, which seem to be his two main requirements. We ponder here at [miaow] - we waste valuable time pondering while we should be concentrating on getting our recording rig set up. On that front, M has been my researcher, and we are a hair’s-breadth away from going with the EMU 1820 - and we are then going to build the machine around it. A lovely stable and silent machine that once functioning, will not be tweaked.
Booky
Wednesday, 7 September 2005
Later I will post a picture of our room. It’s kind of like a library. Not only did M build three gorgeous bookshelves, but he found two more in a secondhand shop that matched them. Now we have five. All my books are finally unpacked (except all my plays - what am I going to do with them?) and very anally arranged in alphabetical order. I have a crime fiction section that occupies about eleven shelves! And I just began looking at LibraryThing with appraising eyes. I think I’m going to have to do it - after I wipe the hard drive on my laptop and start anew. If I can’t have a Mac, at least I can have a semi-zippy ThinkPad.
Note To Self: try to remember not to brandish around new announcements online before checking whether the family of the anouncees have been informed of said announcement [bangs head gently and repeatedly against wall]
I Wanna Nano
Thursday, 8 September 2005
The Nano appeals to me greatly. I don’t need more than 1000 songs on something I’m going to carry around. And it looks like it’s tiny. Pencil thin. Ohhh, I must put in my tax return so I can semi justify my lusting.
Ugly
Tuesday, 11 October 2005
OMG. I’ve just seen what this site looks like in Internet Explorer 6 - it’s completely revolting. Dis-gust-a-rama. This is what I get f0r being narrow minded and only using Firefox. Jeeez. I have some work to do when I get home. Horror! (Or, just maybe, this computer I’m on has some weirdo settings enabled and doesn’t allow CSS or has it’s own webpage styles turned on in the browser. Fingers crossed.)
The Rig
Sunday, 16 October 2005
It’s been too sunny to blog. Which isn’t exactly true. I spent most of Friday in the garden with myself in the sun, the laptop in the shade, researching my recording rig - which is proving to be quite frustrating. It seems that new motherboards appear all the time - I am trying to track down one that is recommended by Bob Lentini (who is the inventor of SawPro, SawStudio etc).
So, for the geeks out there, this is what I have so far come up with in regard to what I’m after.
Seagate 8M IDE 120g x 2
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe
Zalman CPU fan
1GB PC4200 DDR2 Corsair (2×512MB)
Matrox G450 DualHead video card (I know it’s old, I don’t care)
EMU 1820M
Coolermaster Real Power 450W Silent Power Supply
Intel P4-630 3.0G CPU 2MB Cache 775pin
GMC X-21 Trinity Case
Some CDRW
All I have so far is the EMU 1820M, which is the main thing. I am also thinking of an external hard drive usb case, but I’m a bit vague on what kind to get as I’m not sure what size normal Seagate IDE hard drives are… Am also wondering whether the CPU I have chosen is compatible with the motherboard, but it’s now midnight and I’m too tired to find out. Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow. Anyway, this is what has been occupying my brain for the past few days (as has Hell To Pay - a George P. Pelecanos novel which has held me spellbound for three days. It’s tres excellent…)
Geek Out! Part 1
Tuesday, 22 November 2005
So today I picked up almost the last bits of my much researched ensemble. The computer case and the power supply. I could finally begin building my DAW. Get used to the geeky term DAW. It stands for Digital Audio Workstation. Ha! I have replaced a motherboard before, swapped hard drives, mucked about with cards and RAM, but I have never built a computer from the ground up before. Well, not without someone geekier than me holding my hand (thanks, Dyl).
Once I spread all the bits and pieces out, I was fairly convinced that I’d bitten off more than I could chew.
However. I did deep breathing and took it one step at a time. (E cooking me dinner helped too.) It couldn’t be worse than a bad bikini wax (note to self - never go back to that place in Sandringham again. ever). I tried very hard to follow all the instructions, which was a little bit hard for some of the time, as my case DIDN’T COME WITH ANY. I also had no idea what ‘thermal interface material’ was and whether I had any. After some googling, and poking about in the CPU/heatsink packet, I decided that it was already included (fingers crossed) on the basis that it would be stupid to sell it without it. [looks hopeful]
So as of 25 minutes to midnight I’ve got the motherboard in the case, the hard drives, power supply and cd drive installed and was just about to embark on connecting up all the wires, when startlingly, common sense prevailed. I will resume tomorrow with a clean brain. But in the meantime, here’s the proof that I got my hands dirty…
Geek Out! Part 1.2
Thursday, 24 November 2005
Erm. So I’m still building my DAW. Am having a few issues (fear, knowing very little, horror). I am wondering if anyone out there can help me… [looks hopeful…again]. Non geeks can tune out for this request. There’s this thing on my motherboard - the Gigabyte K8NS Ultra-939 - where you attach all the front jumper wires for the front panel i.e. the power switch, reset button, etc. So, I’ve been getting a lot of help from the AMD Socket-939 DIY Guide. I’ve attached the right jumpers to the right bits, but as my case is different from the one they use in the guide, I have two wires left that I don’t know where to plug! I have one called RESET LED (which is two wires) and another called GRD (which I’m gathering stands for ‘ground’ - and is only one wire). Neither of these are mentioned in the guide, and I have gaps in my front panel section, as I have only one POWER LED wire instead of two, and no HARD DRIVE LED wires. I’m wondering whether I put the RESET LED and the GND. Any idea?
I have to get myself a monitor still, but I’m too scared to connect the power before I know exactly where these wires go. Here is my whole rig (a little bit different from my original plan):
Gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939
AMD Athlon 64bit 3000+
EMU 1820M sound card & breakout box
Seagate 7200 8MB 160g hard drive
Seagate 7200 8MB 120g hard drive
Corsair Value Select 2×512MB RAM
Lite-On 52×52x32 CR-RW
Matrox G450
Seasonic S12 430w power supply
GMC X-21 Trinity case
P.S. Am wondering if the voltage of the Matrox 450 is compatible with the motherboard, but as I can’t find out what voltage it is, I’ll just have to wait and see
Freak Mouse
Monday, 12 December 2005
More on Meredith later when I go through my photos… but in the meantime, I turned up to work today (feeling a bit bedraggled) and my new mouse had arrived! I’ve been having some trouble with my shoulder, and took it to the osteopath last week. While he was torturing me working on it, Craig The Osteopath quizzed me about my computer usage and suggested that a change in mouse was due. He recommended one where your hand remains in a kind of handshake position. I relayed this information to lovely L.I at work and voila! a new mouse arriveth! The company that we got it from are pretty amazing, as they send you the mouse to try out for a week or so, and if you don’t like it you can send it back free of charge. It sort of looks like a piece of rounded cake…
Optus is Crap. Scrapbook is Good.
Thursday, 9 February 2006
We use OptusCable for our internet connection in our current house. It was already all hooked up when we moved in. I bought a wireless router and a couple of wireless network cards, and M and I were very happy with our wirelessly connected lappys. However. I have begun noticing that whenever the weather gets fairly hot (like yesterday, and those 40 degree days a week or so ago) we lose our internet connection. I called Optus and flexed my old help desk muscle and got them to tell me that it was defnitely at their end and not at ours. And this was confirmed this morning when I read this on Whirlpool.
It’s very annoying. And as I’m not the account holder, there’s not really much I can do about it. But - I did remember the other night that I used to use the Scrapbook extension for Firefox. I installed the latest version the other night and saved myself some articles that I wanted to read through at a later date. So last night when I got home and, what a surprise, our connection was down, I just used Scrapbook to go through and read what I’d saved. It’s a very cool extension.
Consolidation
Wednesday, 15 February 2006
This might be a useful tool if you’re like me and have accounts at flickr, allconsuming, 43things, delicious etc. It’s called SuprGlu (don’t ask me why neither of those words have an ‘e’ - maybe it’s the new cool thing…) and it basically pulls in feeds from all of your accounts with those aforementioned services. Maybe good and nifty, maybe not. Have to play with it a bit more. Here’s mine at http://miaow.suprglu.com/
Oh. And say hello to Ian, my friend in northern NSW who has succumbed to the lure of blogging. He’s getting geekier by the week and is hanging out over at dotdotdot
Just so it’s down on…er…paper?
Wednesday, 31 May 2006
There may be some [miaow] issues soon, as I’m sick to death of the way this thing looks, and want nothing more than a good hard… geek session, where I will upgrade my Wordpress installation and grapple with a new layout and all the gnashing and slashing that entails. I have always liked the look of What Do I Know? and I also like Kartar’s site (as you can see, I’m into those little tabby things at the top) although I much prefer my side column on the left. Anyway, with my next few days full of steam cleaning, grouting, shed building and finding a copy of The Hot Kid in a place where internet banking is viewed with suspicion…my nights will hopefully be spent playing with kittens and giving [miaow] a revamp. As some famous political slogan put it - IT’S TIME.
Redesigning my B-R-A-I-N
Saturday, 24 June 2006
I’ve been working on the redesign of this site every night for a week. I have only made progress over the past two nights, and there are still some evil bastard bits that won’t work yet. People have left comments, but it continues to say ‘No Comments’ - grrr. The FAlbum plugin which puts that cute little picture over there in the top left looks great - but don’t bother clicking on the picture, because it DOESN’T WORK - and over here are all the other poor people that can’t make it work either. So I’m not alone in my nuffiness, but it feels like it.
I am sort of geeky, but definitely nowhere near as geeky as I need to be to make all this stuff work. Every. Single. Time. that I redesign my WordPress site I get stuck in all the convoluted madness of php (I’m sure there are php guru’s sitting there reading this, shaking their heads and sipping at their JOLT! cola - please, give me more of your pity!). I’ve given up for the night. I have a very exciting thing arriving in the morning. Fingers crossed…
Chronological Archives
Sunday, 25 June 2006
I am feeling almost a religious fervour. Here I was, back in August 2004, snivelling on the WordPress forums, begging to know what seemed to me to be a very simple but necessary thing. When I look in my archives at (for example) May 2004 I want to read from the start of the month, to the end of the month. Why on earth would I want to read backwards?
And so, sporadically, I trawl the web for hours on end, googling for descending + archives + wordpress and archives plugin wordpress chronological. I have (seriously, this is how pathetic I became) installed Extended Live Archives, Custom Query String, Smart Archives, SRG Clean Archives and Smarter Archives.
I snivelled back, finally, to my original post that I tend to ignore, and was astonished to find that someone called Phillip Pearson had written a ‘little plugin’ addressing my original post. The plugin is “ascending-date-order-archives.php” and you can get it over here. Thank you Phillip Pearson - I was becoming obsessive, and now I can get on with other things.
Creative? Or just tight?
Monday, 9 October 2006
I kind of knew what I was getting myself into when I made the switch to a Mac. I knew that it would involve what I, in my pc swap meeting life, would term as serious money. What I didn’t realise was that once I had outlayed the ’serious money’ it pretty much meant I would then have to outlay more (the mini dvi converter cable to my lcd monitor) and more (the 2gig of RAM I haven’t been able to bring myself to buy yet - at least $300) and probably even more…on THE CASE.
My MacBook can swim laps in my trusty Kathmandu laptop case. And I use the MacBook for both my jobs. Something had to happen, but I am fairly adverse to spending even more money on this thing. One of the reasons I got the Mac is because they look cool, and thus it followed that I wanted an equally cool case. However, all the ones I like are $100 and over. What a surprise. Then I stumbled on a post over at isoglossia which I thought was quite inspiring.
As M had finally released my toolbox from it’s two month prison inside the boot of my car, I decided to have a bash. I’d already bought an old sleeping mat ($2) and some gaffer tape ($6). So here is how I made my EIGHT DOLLAR MacBook sleeve. Ha! I just followed all the directions from here. The end result is not really asthetically heart stopping…
…but it’s snug, protected, and gagging for me to make it a groovy material cover out of some funky fabric. And it was E.I.G.H.T D.O.L.L.A.R.S - take that Apple shops!
Insecure
Friday, 12 January 2007
Actually, I think the term is ‘unsecured’. I’ve often tried, but have never stumbled on an unsecured wireless network. Until NOW! I’m in at my new office [groan] and there is no LAN or internet access until next week. I started out working in my boss’s office this morning - only one wireless network popped up, and it was secure. Later I moved into my new little cubbyhole, and my laptop kindly enquired as to whether I would like to join a different network. I said yes. Yay me. I can now check my email. And a few other things. I’m assuming it’s coming from the apartments next door… And the port I use for BitTorrent is also open… hmmmm. Now watch me battle with my conscience.
Insecurity Update
Wednesday, 17 January 2007
After the veritable FLOOD of comments (well… 12) that my innocent dabbling in an unsecured wireless network generated, I thought I might provide a little update. Having been chastised by someone with the pseudonym of ‘Andrew Bolt’, my conscience was a bit twitchy. I asked my most geeky friend [husband of L] what I should do. He suggested that considering the person in question was such an obvious nuffer, they definitely wouldn’t have changed their default login on their router. So I should try and find out who made their router, find the default login and then gain access to their router, where I would most probably find their email address.
After very quietly changing the default username and password on my own router [groan] I did what had been suggested to me. And then I had a further thought. I wondered how much information I could glean from what I had discovered. So I googled the email address. It turned out that the email address was listed on a kind of community businesses directory, along with the person’s name, business address and phone number. From there it was a short leap to stick the name into the WhitePages and discover the home address. Bizarre. (I did always yearn to be a detective.)
The weird thing was that the wireless network was not in one of the apartments nearby, but further down the street. No wonder the speed wasn’t great 
- anyway, I decided that the most anonymous way of alerting the person to the situation was to actually post them a letter, with directions on how to secure their network. I sent a draft of the letter to L, who responded in typical crime aficionado style - warning me to post it from somewhere obscure, while wearing gloves, on the stroke of midnight.
However, I belatedly realised that a large portion of my morning had been wiped out by my investigative zeal and that I had a whole days work to get through. So I have yet to edit my instructional letter according to L’s feedback, but I will. And then I will post it. My first good deed for the year.
A tale of two macbooks
Friday, 2 February 2007
In the end, after having a macbook for about four months, I have decided to persevere. Mostly because everything looks so much more aesthetically pleasing, and also because I feel like I haven’t even remotely taken advantage of all the cool stuff lurking under the bonnet. I want to be apple script savvy, for god’s sake.
I was still unprepared to pay over $200AU for 1GB RAM, but meanwhile I was going insane from the slowness, the incessant seconds given to the interior musing of the macbook. Yeah - I had a lot of space clagged up with movies and music, but I still had about 13GB free - which was how big my ThinkPad hard drive was [sob] in its entirety. A few years back 512MB was gutsy. Now? It is pain.
And I couldn’t just buy 1GB - noooo, for the full wonder of duo core, it’s recommended that you have the same amount of RAM in both slots i.e. ‘duo’. I was getting stuck in cyber glue if I tried to run Word, Entourage, Firefox and Excel at the same time. And forget about running Bits on Wheels with more than one other program, or it was Welcome to Slugsville. Population? Me.
It took a month or two of musing, and lots of time spent noodling around at ebay.com looking to see the minimum I could pay to buy a macbook with better specs. I also spent too much time on ebay.com.au trying to figure out how much I could probably get for my little bottom-of-the-range-but-very-cute macbook. I emailed numerous US ebay sellers about how much postage to Melbourne, Australia would cost, and was cynically unsurprised at the wild variations.
I finally found a couple of different sellers with whom I thought I could get a good deal. And I had also established that I could probably get between $1300 and $1400 for the one I already had. After wasting even more time and missing out on a few good deals I gave myself a kick up the butt and decided that the next time a particular seller had the right laptop, I was going to do the deed.
Not last week but the week before, I bought my second macbook. (I’ve decided to get into the nitty gritty of this whole experiment, mostly so I can remember it later - so I’m going to have to be impolite and mention the amounts of moola that were involved. I had paid $1300AU for my original macbook.) I’d signed up for alerts to tell me when the seller put a new secondhand laptop up on ebay. So this is what I got:
Intel Macbook
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
4MB shared L2 cache
1GB (two 512MB SO-DIMMs)
60GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard disk drive
6x slot-loading SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
etc.
Cost: $1100US/$1440AU
Postage: $70US/$90AU
So I got it for $1540AU, including postage. And as it was being posted, someone helpfully reminded me about one VERY important angle that I had managed to completely neglect. Import duty. As my laptop was in transit I visited that site and almost coughed up my own lung in self flagellating horror - because my purchase was over $1000 I was going to be up for $325 in import duty.
I couldn’t tell M of the debacle. I was about to have to pay what it would have cost me if I had decided on the unadventurous path of merely just upgrading my RAM. I whimpered to everyone in my vicinity, including the computer guy who came into work. He said he knew someone who was after a macbook, and also thought he’d be interested in buying my dead ThinkPad for parts. “Whatever”, I said, miserably.
I got home on Thursday night and there was the package. It had taken all of about four days to arrive. I looked at M. He didn’t look like someone who had just had to fork over $325 in order to extract a secondhand laptop from the post office. I tiptoed over and read the postage label. And floated on bubble of gratitude. The seller had ticked ‘Gift’. And had thus rendered me tax free. I know that this is not legal. I also know that I don’t care. As I had been saved from having the whole exercise becoming redundant, I confided to M what might have been. Eeek.
A few days later, the computer guy asked whether I would take $1400 for my old macbook and ThinkPad. I said I had been hoping for a bit more, but was unwilling to push my luck. I do the handover on Tuesday. He gets a very good deal, and I have paid $140AU for a 2Ghz macbook (compared to a 1.8Ghz), a SuperDrive (compared to a non-DVD burning combodrive) and 2×512MB (compared to 2×256MB). My new macbook is a bit more battleworn with a lot of scratches on the outside casing, but it’s the inside zippiness that is my concern - and it’s SO much better.
The fact that my new macbook also came with the full Macromedia, Microsoft Office, WorldBook 2006 and Adobe CS2 (to name a few) didn’t hurt either. However, I will now be much more careful about the import duty angle…!!
Save space on yer macbook
Saturday, 3 February 2007
Don’t know how many people reading this even have a macbook. Probably not many. I don’t personally know anyone who does. But anyway, this is t’internet and someone might be keen to know how I resurrected 4GB from my hard drive, which had previously been concerned with useless muck. Can’t remember how I got on to it. Either Digg or Lifehacker, but anyway - a very nice program called ‘Monolingual’ gets rid of extraneous language files that are sitting around doing a lot of nothing. It saved me 2.9GB - and I didn’t even go near the bit that removes non-Intel architectures from my computer.
Also, another clogger are the the 2GB or so of printer drivers that came with my computer. I was careful. I moved them all into a folder on my desktop prior to any deleting. Then I installed Gutenprint (formerly Gimp-Print), which worked much better with the old Samsung laser printer at work. Now I just have to see if it will also work with my home printer - an ancient HP LaserJet 6L - which I am convinced will continue printing until the end of time, or until people stop making drivers for it.
Dollar Signs - Currency Whine
Tuesday, 6 February 2007
I am becoming fascinated with the disparities of price in between the US and Australia. I know that our dollar is fairly crap, but still… I can get 1GB RAM for my macbook for $125US ($162AU) new from US Ebay, but over here it is about fifty bucks more - about $225AU. I was just having a look at the cost of AppleCare - the thing that gives you a further two year warranty on the one year warranty you get with your Mac.
AppleCare for a macbook in the US?
$250US which equals $322AU
AppleCare for a macbook in Australia?
$420AU which equals $325US
So to buy AppleCare for my macbook in Australia it would cost $98AU more than if I bought it in the US. Which is where I bought my macbook. This sucks. Not that I am going to get it, because I’m almost sure it would be a waste of money… except that things seem to happen in threes. My first ThinkPad was struck by lightning, my second ThinkPad developed a fatal case of dead motherboard… and…
I’ll leave it there. The most recent ThinkPad was taken off my hands today for a small amount of cash. And I bet the guy who took it is going to make about a 500% profit on it when he fits it with a new motherboard, which is something I was too scared (read ‘both lazy and intimidated’) to try.
Toffee apple red
Thursday, 22 February 2007
Last night, the P.O box spat out my latest Ebay items. I treated myself to a polycarbonate hardcase for the macbook, because it was all scratched on the outside. It’s pretty cool. It looks like this:
and this…
It fits on very well, although the lid part could be a weensy bit more snug. It’s great though, because you can’t see the scratches and I’m less worried about leaving it lying around. The red does get fingerprint smears, but I don’t care - that’s what it’s there for. At my city job, the CEO saw my macbook a month or two ago, and when I went in last week he had bought himself a blackbook - which I’ve always thought are more sexy than the white ones - but his had handprints all over the matte blackness. So you might pay a good $300 just for blackness, but you still need to wear gloves when you grab it.
In other gripes, the new install of WordPress has killed my image borders. I’m working on it.
Extend your ring length…
Tuesday, 10 April 2007
An interesting anatomical modification? No. Just a tip that may help some people with mobile-phone rage. Each time I’ve swapped phones in the last two months (twice) I have had to siphon through google with gritted teeth trying to remember how to extend the amount of time my phone rings when someone calls. It would just ring about three times and then go to message bank. A recipe for rage, especially after making death defying leaps toward my handbag, tipping it upside down, only to have the ringing cease immediately. Oddly, this is not specific to the kind of phone you have, but the phone company you use (or who uses you).
So. If you are with Telstra or one of the mobs that use them, extend your ring by typing in **61*101**25# and then pressing the ’send’ button. Then test it.
If you’re with Optus (and therefore VirginMobile, iSim, etc.) type in **61*321**30# and press the ’send’ button. It works.
I feel instantly calmer.
Printing from OSX to HP Laserjet 6L. FINALLY.
Thursday, 26 April 2007
Oh. My. God. A major breakthrough today. For months I have struggled with trying to get my old and excellent HP Laserjet 6L printer to print from my MacBook. Was desperate enough to hook it up to the Windows computer and then try and print by sharing the printer from there. It has been the stuff of teeth grinding infuriation. I was reduced to ‘printing’ stuff to a pdf file on the mac, transferring it to the pc and then printing from there. But no more!!
It’s a wonderful thing that happens when you stumble on a few minor bits of extra information which can revolutionise your previously uninspired googling. My first win was finding out that when you go into the printer setup utility and then click on ‘more printers’ while holding down the option key (of course, how else would you do it?) you get an advanced menu option. Naturally. Anyway, to give credit where it’s due, I got that vital bit of information from here.
But I still couldn’t print. And then, while searching for instructions that included that little trick with the option key, I found a post entitled Printing to windows shared printers from Mac OS X. I was a bit worried that I didn’t have a password to enter for my pc, but just left it out and it didn’t seem to matter. I almost fell on the floor when the printer shuffled into life.
Of course, that had been my modest aim, but as soon as it worked, I had to take the further step and try and see if I could plug the usb cable from the printer directly into my mac, and print that way. I’d read, in my google rambles, all about how it matters what kind/brand of printer usb cable you have - particularly as old laser printers are pre-usb. Complete crap. Mine is just some old usb printer cable that I’ve had for at least seven years. A lot of other posts went on about the need for a print server thingy. Wrong.
I went through all this on my first MacBook and never solved the problem. But one thing I did do when I got this new one was delete all the preinstalled printer drivers (saving myself 2gig) and installed the Gutenprint drivers. I kept looking and on some forum in deepest, darkest somewhere I found a link to a truly simplistic page entitled Tutorial how to connect a Parallel-Printer to Mac via USB - I was made very hopeful by the fact that the person who put the tutorial together also had the Laserjet 6L. There was hope after all!
I didn’t end up being able to print as a result of that page (due to not knowing what the hell a usb device url was supposed to be), but it prompted me to keep looking and I stumbled on an even more encouraging post [Macosx-list] Re: SUCCESS!! Mac 10.2/Belkin Parallel to USB/LaserWriter Select 360 and the key piece of information contained on that page was as follows:
I attempted to manually select the LWS 360 driver by holding down the option key while clicking add and using the “advanced” settings. I chose “unkown” for the device, rather than “AppleTalk Printer Acess Protocol”, which was the default. This was the only choice that resulted in the “device URL” being automatically completed. I then chose “Apple” for printer model and then it let me select the LWS 360 from a sublist. After adding the printer, I selected “show information” from the “printers” menu and changed the name to something more head compatible. I also changed the “installable options” to recognize the sheet feeder. AND IT WORKED FLAWLESSLY!!
And mine worked flawlessly too. It didn’t seem to matter that they were installing a different printer, it was just HOW they did it. Incidentally, I used the driver “HP Laserjet 5 CUPS+Gutenprint 5″. So it can be done! I hope this saves some other poor person out there who doesn’t want to give up on their old laser printer just because their new mac makes it all unnecessarily hard.
Skitch invites
Tuesday, 3 July 2007
I don’t have many friends that would probably be that interested in Skitch (for Mac owners only), but I think it’s super cool. It’s made by the same guys that came up with Comic Life. I have five three NONE LEFT! invites if you would like to try it out. Email me: miaow AT miaowthecat DOT com and I’ll send you one if you like.
Usefulness
Friday, 20 July 2007
Sometimes you just happen upon a site that some thoughtful person has put together because they’ve had trouble figuring something out. I tried to do this with my revelatory (and lengthy) experience of getting my macbook to speak nicely to my ageing HP Laserjet. Anyway, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress tonight - 2.2.1 and in all the faffing about that went with that I started to wish for the days when I had my site setup (somehow) in DreamWeaver so it wasn’t such a headf*#k to edit the layout.
That led me to wondering whether there was yet a simple way to make changes to the site offline so I could tweak away at my leisure and not do millions of uploads, breaking the site in the process. I have tried to do this before, BUT! not on a Mac. So after a few googles, and instructions that included using Terminal (something I am not cluey enough to use…yet) I found Michael Doig’s instructions for installing WordPress locally. He reckoned if you follow his instructions, you could have it up and running in 15 minutes. He wasn’t wrong.
I installed the very exciting almost newbie-proof MAMP and it was all reasonable straightforward (though it did tend to assume that you were familiar with doing a WordPress install - which might bite a few people who use Fantastico auto-install magic). Anyway, with a bit more poking around I am going to be able to work on [miaow] offline and no one will be the wiser. This will obviously be of no relevance to anyone who has not suffered the hell that is the broken website resulting from endless design tweaks by someone who is generally fumbling in the dark - but hey, I can’t be the only one who has suffered.
The MSY Mystery
Friday, 3 August 2007
The computer I sorted for my dad about four or five years ago had finally begun to falter, and seeing it was fairly antiquated and computers are so cheap at the moment, I offered to build him a new one. This was going to be the second computer I’d attempted to cook up - the first is documented here. And of course, since my father was almost a child of the Depression, he has an inbuilt necessity to ‘make do’ until ‘making do’ is rendered impossible. Thus, he needed a new computer yesterday.
So I spent a few hours on the net checking out Charles Wright’s latest workhorse machine - where he builds exactly that, and includes the cost of all the parts. The forums on the Bleeding Edge site also proved useful, as did the exhaustive and excellent whirlpool.net.au. From my time doing IT kind of stuff at Momentum I’ve been using MSY to buy hardware (or ebay), because they’re cheap. Back then, they had one shop. Now they are becoming the La Porchetta’s of the computer world.
Anyway, I used used their latest advertisement to cost all the parts I was after (remembering that this is not some pimped up gaming machine, but a quick and reliable workhorse to preserve the sanity of my father). I came up with this:
Gigabyte 965P-DS3P - $149
Intel C2Duo E2160 - $112
Seagate 160g SATA - $65
2G Kit-667(2×1G) Corsair - $109
Pioneer SATA 18x 212D Black - $50
Antec NSK6500 (with 430w PS) - $139
Viewsonic VA1912W 19′ - $245
TOTAL - $869
Right. I am sure that proper hardcore geeky people could pick it all apart and provide a much better group of working parts, but it was the best I could do in the time I had. It just so happened that we had to go near the MSY shop in Malvern the next day, so I needed to get it all sorted by then. I printed out the above list. We went to MSY. I handed over the list. They handed it back. Because although they list all this stuff in their advertisement? That doesn’t mean it’s in stock. Of COURSE. I won’t even tell you what they didn’t have, and will just say that they DID have the hard drive and the DVD burner - but only in beige. And that was it.And therein lies the problem of only being a part time geek. I only knew stuff about the components I had chosen, and that was about it. Sigh. So we asked them to call their Clayton shop, but the number was constantly engaged. It was kind of on the way home, so we dropped in.
I had become more decisive during the drive, and decided that if they also didn’t have what I wanted, I would improvise, and my father would have to cope with spending a little bit more. Of course - his other option would have been to go out and drop $500 on a new prebuilt bargain box (with potentially dodgy, or at least lowest common denominator, bits in it) and a monitor and get out of the whole thing for about $750 - but I am convinced it was better to spend a bit more and know what’s been put where. Kind of like making your own cake or using a packet mix.Of course, the Clayton shop was almost as bad.
They had the case, the dvd burner (in black - yay!) and the hard drive. I had to upgrade the motherboard to a GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R $177, they were out of Viewsonic monitors, so I went for the LG L194WT-SF $232, they had no Corsair 2gig RAM kits, so I got Kingston - same price, and the CPU was out of stock, so I had to pay more and get an E4400 for $145. Sigh. Oh. And the more computery among you may have wondered what I was trying to do - building a computer without a graphics card? Yes. Well. I did have a graphics card that I planned on using in the back of the cupboard, but of course, it was AGP (i.e. the wrong size) so I had to rectify that and, after convincing the computer shop guy that the most exciting combination of colours my dad’s computer was ever going to have to display would be contained in yet another red carpet shot of Salma Hayek and that he would not be playing graphically intense shoot-em up games, I got a cheap graphics card that will be more than adequate.
[Please forgive dodgy quality of above picture, which was taken on my phone because I need to get around to recharging the batteries in my camera.]
Oh. OK. The title. The MSY Mystery. It’s just that I began to ponder. How many people does it happen to? They go into the shops with their little lists and there (probably) equally little budget, only to find that none of their hard-researched components are actually available and, guess what? There are slightly more expensive ones instead. Naturally, I’m assuming, within my theory, that most people are putting together machines they needed yesterday, if not a week ago, and are thus able to justify an extra hundred bucks. But I have now learnt my lesson, and next time? I will telephone/fax in advance, and have the items procured and put aside for me. I think they suggest that on their webiste… D’oh.
Apple Form Factor Evolution 76-07
Thursday, 13 September 2007
This is a kind of cool picture/chart of Apple products…
Background tinkering
Saturday, 6 October 2007
A while ago I wrote about how I was mucking around with MAMP so I could run an install of Wordpress locally. It has been a godsend for tinkering with my new site. I’ve been poking around with it for about two months now - usually until I begin to pass out at around the witching hour of 10.30pm (y-a-w-n).
The template I decided on, after much trawling, is the Upstart Blogger Modicus by Robert Ellis. It is v.cool - but of course, tweaking around with the css, and various WordPress plugins, archive formatting and general layout is agony. I have to learn as I go. M wasn’t convinced that the redesign was a good idea, but now he likes the look. The other great thing about the theme is the support that Robert Ellis provides in the comments on the aforementioned site - he is patient with nuff nuff’s like myself.
So the point of all this seemingly pointless information? I am actually alive, but have been becoming so preoccupied with my shiny new layout, that I’ve been neglecting my online workhorse.
And… btw, real live prunes (six each morning) as well as hot water with lemon juice, porridge and walks around the paddock? They’re working. And I’m a much nicer person
The new look
Monday, 29 October 2007
OK. This is way too late for me to be up and functioning, but I wanted to get this sorted before I head back to work tomorrow morning. There are probably a few hiccups and things I want to change. I find it desperately annoying that the titles of the books I’m reading don’t appear when you mouseover them. But hey. It’s all basically functional. And most importantly - it’s a CHANGE. Which is almost as good as a holiday…but not quite.
Geekery and whine
Saturday, 5 July 2008
So I don’t get nearly as much time online as I used to have and when I am online I have to get proper things done - like blogging, banking, email - leaving not a lot of room for musing from site to site finding out about the cool, new and interesting. So it’s kind of exciting for me (in a lame kind of way) to have upgraded to Firefox 3.
It seems very cool. It looks better and runs quicker on my macbook. The main reason I got it was because OH MY GOD it lets me read PDF files inline. It is that precise thing that has made me turn again and again to Safari (only to give up, yet again, when I missed all my Firefox add ons too much). Of course, with the PDF excitement was one real annoyance - no ability to tag and post pages with delicious… Oops! I had a few minutes and I double checked - this IS available, and much better than before. Yay!
I also upgraded to Leopard - the latest OS for mac. Of course, in my lather to upgrade I forgot that 1) I have barely any space on my puny 60gig hard drive for all the fun stuff that comes with it - I even uninstalled ITunes a few weeks ago and moved all my music to the PC in the loungeroom in an effort to claw back some space [sob], and 2) The first law of upgrading is it will Most Likely Stuff Things Up. Goddamnit. In this case, my very hard won printer drivers. Gone. Cactus. Ka-put.
When I think back to how looooooong it took me to get my ancient HP Laserjet 6L printer working, I have some serious doubts about ever getting it working again. My time online should be currently devoted to researching baby led weaning and selling things on ebay to fund our week away at the end of the month.
But what I’d really like to do is get a big stonking hard drive for my laptop so I could run the lot - ITunes, IMovie, IPhoto etc. etc. without having to free up space all the time. We were given a very cool Sony video camera with a 30gig hard drive when PartyPie was born, but we basically have no editing software because there’s no point - we don’t have enough space to dump the data off the camera! Grrrr. I need to discover if I can just put any old kind of hard drive in my macbook - I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to be some kind of uber-priced ‘apple’ brand. Anyone? Oh, and if anyone knows whether you can pull music into ITunes on a mac from a pc running ITunes on a LAN….? That would save me some valuable time in which I could be SLEEPING. 
Old tech
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
I began cleaning out the study a little bit - starting with a crate of stuff I had taking up all the room at the top of the cupboard. Chucked out old network cards, graphics cards, leads, and am looking for somewhere to recycle a couple of dead mobile phones. I saved a few old hard drives, as I’m sure there are photos and stuff on there that might be fun to investigate sometime down the track.
I stumbled on my old Palm IIIx. It was this item that began my evil credit card spiral. I would even go so far as to say that I got a job, so I could get a credit card, purely to get myself the Palm IIIx - which at that time was over $600 *goggle* I loved it SO much. And over time I got a collapsible keyboard for it and the fabulous Pocketmail attachment. I could use it to blog and email wherever there was a payphone or mobile phone. It was seriously ace - particularly for boating holidays.
The Wikipedia entry for Pocketmail is quite hilarious, stating with apparent amazement that ‘it works with any phone, EVEN OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES’!! Good god! How extraordinary. It then adds sadly that the Australian Pocketmail has given up and now spends it’s time owning uranium mining prospects in Queensland and South Australia. Of course.
There is no way I can get rid of this thing. I have given it permission to take up unnecessary space in my existence. Possibly there will be some lucrative future recurrence of interest in the Palm IIIx, and when there is I will be able to dig it out with a flourish - while PartyPie looks on uncomprehendingly…”But mum, where’s the colour on the screen gone?” And I will have to tell her that, once upon a time? There was this thing called monochrome…
Delicious Library 2
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
I like Allconsuming and LibraryThing for my reading and watching, but what I really want is something that creates a better looking list on my blog and also that isn’t too labour intensive i.e. not typing in a billion ISBN numbers or whatever.
For some reason I have found it difficult to google for what I’m after. I keep coming up with Shelfari…and AllConsuming and LibraryThing, and GoodReads…but just now? I FINALLY found something that looks AWESOME. Maybe some of you non-mac bibliophiles (yes, you over there in West Preston) should not read on. It might depress you that this application is just for the mac. I haven’t used it yet, but Delicious Library 2 looks super cool.
You can use your iSight camera, and take a picture of the barcode of your cd or dvd or book and it will pull up all related info. I am not sure that this is going to be any good for my extensive collection of Leslie Charteris Saint books, but I really want to give it a whirl.
