April 26 2011

What’s up with apartment kitchens?

I don’t understand the prioritization of features - I mean, granite countertops sound sexy when you write about them on Craigslist, but I’d be happy with Formica if it means I can have an uninterrupted span of it that’s wider than two feet, or appliances that aren’t older than I am.

January 26 2011

sparrowmail features that would make me extra happy:

  • let me make it narrower
  • unified inbox option
  • monospace (ideally customizable) font for plain text email
October 15 2010

I wish they had defined the inch to be 25.6 mm rather than 25.4. Or that 127 weren’t prime.

June 6 2010

The view from Mount Washington in Pittsburgh.

Full size = 92.8 megapixels (63MB jpeg). And here’s a modest-sized (760k) version to look at while you’re waiting for that to download.

It is stitched together from 25 individual images, but it turned out that was not quite enough to finish the panorama and I had to fake it in Photoshop - see if you can spot how!

November 11 2009

The audio DAC/amplifier/etc. in my new MacBook sound (subjectively) vastly better than the ones in my iPod. (Yes, I used the same headphones.) I guess given the different space and cost constraints that shouldn’t be too surprising, but now I’m disappointed the iPod doesn’t sound better.

November 11 2009

The gadget in the center looks to me like a DSL modem. Its MAC address, 00:19:15:1c:a8:a0, belongs to an outfit called Tecom which does indeed manufacture such things. (Incidentally, I was surprised not to get any Google hits for that full MAC. I guess I’ll be the first.)

October 27 2009

How to: set a custom icon for an NTFS Boot Camp drive in Mac OS X 10.6

This uses the experimental read/write NTFS support of Snow Leopard. Note that the icon in the boot option menu (that you get by pressing the option key at startup) will not change; this is because the Mac firmware does not include an NTFS driver, even read-only, so it has no way to read the icon. You’ll need to have the Developer Tools installed. I’m assuming you have an icon file ‘prettyicon.icns’ on your desktop, and your NTFS drive is called WindowsPartition. Here goes:

# remount the NTFS drive as read/write
sudo mount -u -o rw /Volumes/WindowsPartition

# copy the icon
cp Desktop/prettyicon.icns /Volumes/WindowsPartition/.VolumeIcon.icns

# set the flag that tells OS X to use a custom icon
SetFile -a C /Volumes/WindowsPartition

# remount as read-only once again
sudo mount -u -o ro /Volumes/WindowsPartition
October 19 2009

It seems that htop was finally ported to Darwin this summer. That means I can quit procrastinating on doing it myself. Awesome. A big thank you to whoever was responsible.

August 16 2009

The directions for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese say to prepare the sauce with 1/2 cup milk and 4 Tbsp. margarine. Don’t do that. Use 1/2 cup milk, 3 Tbsp. butter, and 1 Tbsp. cream cheese. Yum.

August 6 2009

mac + stm32 + gcc = happy

Thanks for collecting this information in one place - without it I’d’ve probably been tearing my hair out for days rather than just hours.

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