a blog about stuff

The 500GB disk in my first-gen Time Capsule became hopelessly full, with two Macs backing up to it and a slew of other media files stored on there to boot. Poking around on teh Google turned up some good tutorials on the mechanics of actually replacing the drive, particularly this one. Doing so is a pretty straightforward process for anybody who has ever cracked open a computer.

However, this Time Capsule has loads of data on it that I wanted to preserve, preferably in a quick-and-easy fashion, and I didn’t find much information on how to go about performing such … Continue Reading

Until now, this blog used Blogger. The reason for this was, primarily, lethargy. While not notable for much else, this blog is at least venerable, dating back to November of 2001, back before blogs were cool, man. Blogging platforms were rather more limited back then (or at least I was oblivious to better options), so I chose Blogger. I never bothered to change services since, well, I rarely bothered to write in it.

I’m also one of approximately three people who were using Blogger’s ‘publish via FTP’ option. I recently got an e-mail from Google saying that they were discontinuing the … Continue Reading

My giving-back to the Internets for the day:

I installed Ruby 1.9.1 onto my Mac using MacPorts, and found that ‘ri’ didn’t work to start off with—the system classes weren’t on the documentation path (as noted in this issue). I tracked down the problem to this file:

/opt/local/lib/ruby1.9/1.9.1/rdoc/ri/paths.rb

To get it to work, change this line (line 31 in my install):

if m = /ruby/.match(RbConfig::CONFIG['RUBY_INSTALL_NAME'])… Continue Reading

I just came across the Google Charts API, which lets you easily create charts to embed in web pages. Now I can simply and quickly do incredibly useless things like creating a pie chart representing the first ten counting numbers by relative magnitude. But it looks cool and was incredibly easy!

Regarding Jonah Goldberg’s new book which likens liberals to Nazis, Ezra says:

“Reading the book is sort of like playing that game where you add ‘in bed’ after reading your fortune cookie, but for 300-some odd pages, and with Sean Hannity.”

In our move to New Zealand, we’re trying to cut costs by buying used items where we can. We lucked into finding some graduating college guys who were clearing house and selling everything, so we bought a bunch of stuff for a good deal.

Amongst this stuff was a DSL modem/wireless router. We definitely needed such a beast, and new ones here are ungodly expensive, so that was cool. However, it was made by D-Link. I’d had limited experience with D-Link products, but I wasn’t particularly impressed b them. It was only a vague ambivalence, and … Continue Reading

Truth is, I’ve been spring-loaded my entire life. Life gets shot at me from point-blank range and I just shoot straight back. Which is okay if you’re John Wayne or De Niro saving the world, but when your chief nemesis is bubble-overrun it’s slightly less convincing. When you’re younger, you think you’re the only one. Special. Then you start seeing spring-loaded people everywhere. Sitting on buses. Kicking their dogs. Beating their children unconscious. Road rage. Trolley rage. Pew rage. Soul rage.
— Overdue new Releases, … Continue Reading

I. Love. My. Mac.

Apple has truly seduced me. I bought a low-end iBook back in 2004 to check out OS X, which sounded great on paper. It was running 10.3 Panther at the time, which was pretty cool. Then 10.4 Tiger came out, and I loved Spotlight and Exposé, enough so that when time came to move to New Zealand and I was shedding computers, I decided to make a Mac my only machine.

And so I bought a spanking new 15″ MacBook Pro. And while my MasterCard smoked for a few days afterward, I never once … Continue Reading

A few weeks ago my wife says, “Some guy built a castle in Calistoga and they’re giving tours…wanna go?”

(Context: Calistoga is a town at the north end of the Napa Valley, about half an hour from us.)

I just stammered: “Castle? Calistoga? Huh?”

“Yeah—they brought in artisans from Italy and everything. It’s a winery.”

I remained dubious. It sounded like a gimmick and completely arbitrary. I feared kitsch.

But Sheila was quite excited by the prospect, and there are certainly worse ways to spend a weekend than a visit to Calistoga. So we managed to book space on … Continue Reading

…what he said!