Tag Archives: geek

Linux UI: crippling itself?

I was recently talking with a friend about commandline prompt gadgetry, and our tangent conversations drifted to 256colour support in X terminal emulators. xterm. gnome-terminal, and presumably kterm and others also, though only the first two have I looked at.

256 colour support is there. It’s in the code. It works. It’s nice. And it’s… not only not enabled by default, there is no clear and simple way of enabling it even if you WANTED TO.

I was going to blog more about this, but the following IRC fragment I think says it all. Any questions?
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Scrabble Sheet 2

I have recently been working on an updated version of a small scrabble sheet I made a few weeks ago for some friends.

version1 (as I have since backnamed it) was simply all the 3 letter words in the scrabble dictionary, handily laid out alphabetically on both sides of an A4 page.

In the weeks since I’ve started using it, I’ve found it to be a useful reference, and heard feedback along the same lines.

For version2, I have added in all the 2letter words as well, plus a limited selection of 4 letter words. (those able to score 12 or more points with natural (non blank) tiles and no specials. Continue reading

Magnets vs ATM cards

For some time I have been… let’s say, mildly annoyed, at what I see as a cultural paranoia regarding magnets. This has come about, imho, due to the prevalence of ATM cards for finances, harddrives for data storage, and an unawareness of what it takes to magnetically corrupt these media. I even had a friend (who works in IT!) make strong worrying noises once about data corruption on my hard drives simply because I had a fridge magnet applied to the outside of my case.

Now whilst I was certain that was not a problem, I confess to general ignorance on the subject, and so I intended to do something to correct it. Something a little fun. Continue reading

when firefox corrupts

I note that as of writing this post, firefox3.5 is out, but I have yet to switch to it. I do not know if it will alter behaviour, but I’m on firefox 3.0.11 under ubuntu.

So my system crashed. It’s done that a little bit recently (thrice in the last 6 months, but that is not what this post is about). On return, firefox is a bit fail. Some files are corrupted…

If this has happened to you, this is some information which might help you cope… Continue reading

binary grep to find mp3s stored in zip

Once upon  a time whilst sorting my mp3 collection, I ran across a little problem. The tags which I had found and saved to the id3 tags using quod libet (being my favourite tag editor – better than the related Ex-Falso incidentally) were not showing up in Rhythmbox (being my favourite actual audio player). Instead, Rhythmbox was seeing the OLD tags.

This is curious, thinks I. And I go off in search for answers…
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