Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here is one: This is basically the 1974 version of a DIMM. It measures 16″ by 11.5″ and holds 16 kilobytes. It’s technically 18 bits wide but only 16 were used in the PDP-11. The raised part in the middle … Continue reading →

I recently used Funded By Me to help raise some money for a new build server for Emacs for Mac OS X . com. I set it up and then decided to start publicizing it on a Friday and by … Continue reading →

I just spent way too long trying to figure out why VLC wasn’t opening DVDs. I was getting this error in the log window: no access module matched “dvdnav” Turns out the problem is that VLC 1.1.11 only has 32-bit … Continue reading →

It seems I’ve been writing little daemons a lot lately–small things that don’t want to run as root but still need to be launched in the background as services. I’ve been noticing because it’s such a pain to integrate them … Continue reading →

So I was playing Crysis 2 and hit a random button on my xbox controller and my weapon went into semiautomatic mode. I could not for the life of me figure out what I had done or get it to … Continue reading →

Sparse bundles created by Time Machine in the latest versions of Snow Leopard are created slightly differently than they used to be. It used to be that Time Machine would create a sparse bundle with a name like “machine-name_001122334455.sparsebundle” where … Continue reading →

The idea for Daemon Manager came about when I was converting a web site from Apache to Nginx. Nginx doesn’t launch FastCGI programs itself—it only connects to FastCGI sockets and so it requires that you manage the FastCGI server yourself. … Continue reading →

Leopard came with a program called fsaclctl that let you turn on and off ACL control for a filesystem. Here’s how to get it off your Leopard (10.5) install DVD. Continue reading →

Ok, so you have a random disk lying around and you plug it in and it looks like it has Mac OS X installed on it. How do you tell what version it is without booting into it?
Continue reading →

Say you want to build the source tree for a RHEL/CentOS 5.4 kernel (2.6.18-164.11.1.el5 in my case) and you are running a recent Debian or Fedora system. You might get patch failure errors.
… Just add this to fix it:
%define _default_patch_fuzz 2 Continue reading →

I admit, I am easily amused. Continue reading →

I was getting this message:”Mac OS X cannot be installed on “silver”, because this disk cannot be used to start up your computer.”
…
The problem turns out to be that the Mac OS really wants 128MB of unused space after your main Mac OS partition.
Continue reading →

So at some point the system installed new, nicely gzipped man pages but somehow failed to remove the old ones. And it turns out the man give the non-gzipped version precedence. Giving me old out of date documentation when I ask for it. Weak.
…
I had about 4500 that I was able to delete, and now my ls and chmod man pages have up-to-date info again. Aaaahhhhh. Continue reading →

For years I was GUI calculator fanatic. Desperately searching for that perfect calculator that did all the things I wanted it to do… At some point I decided to write my own. Finally one day it hit me that Perl’s eval() was really what I wanted. And so “pc“, Perl Calc, was born. Continue reading →

I got a new Intel core i7 computer and migrated my Debian server over to it. Here’s how to do it without installing from scratch. Continue reading →

Here’s my slowed down version of the famous “Bloop”. You won’t be able to hear it with tiny little computer speakers. Either find a subwoofer or some nice over the ear headphones and crank the Cthulu Bloop. Continue reading →

I was rearranging my bookcase and happened across a 1976 Readers Digest. I saw this ad and just had to laugh! Continue reading →

Sheila Jones sends us a lost phone and a piece of her mind. Continue reading →

For most of the day today I’ve been missing all the OS X menu extras in the top right of my MacBook screen, including my clock, airport and volume controls. I never knew how much I used that stuff until it suddenly wasn’t there. Continue reading →

What I need is a plug-in that monitors all the javascript and plugins that are running and keeps track of how long each runs. Then I want a unix top-like view of all the pages open and how many resources each is consuming (how much memory, how much cpu time their javascript is taking, etc). Continue reading →