Pants in Motion » Geekery

iPad 3 predictions

paul — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:27:58 +0000

Same price point
Retina display
Dual-core (not quad-core) CPU.
The same or similar cameras (i.e., not an 8Mpx one like the iPhone 4S)
1Gb RAM (with that many pixels I think it’s time)
Siri? Probably.

Let’s see how I do.

Windows vs OS X

paul — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:03 +0000

Believe it or not, both of these dialogue windows address the same issue.

Which scares the shit out of the typical user more?

Getting my prediction in

paul — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 06:53:54 +0000

My guess for the iPad event next week:

faster A5 dual-core CPU
512mb ram
front-facing camera (no rear camera)
same 1024×768 resolution
30-pin dock connector (no thunderbolt port)
iOS 4.3. Possibly a preview of 5.0 but I wouldn’t count on it

Let’s see how accurate I am.

How to hide your Boot Camp partition in Snow Leopard

paul — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:52:21 +0000

So you installed Boot Camp and now you see an annoying read-only Windows drive on your nice clean OS X desktop?

Don’t bother with any of the kludgy workarounds you found on Google (‘put a dot at the start of the drive name’, ‘install MacFuse and do weird crap’). Do it the right way. Tell OS X not to mount the partition in the first place. How?

Like this:

Open the Terminal. If you don’t know how, ask a grownup to help you.¹
Type ‘diskutil info /Volumes/diskname‘ (in my case, the partition was called BOOTCAMP, so I typed ‘diskutil info /Volumes/BOOTCAMP’
Copy the Volume UUID. It’ll be a long string of hexadecimal; on my particular Mac it’s ‘ECE08F90-9FCD-4334-8B7D-DA9B959B9380′.
Now type ‘sudo vifs’ – this is the Snow Leopard-approved way to edit the file systems table. This is vi – again, if you don’t know how to use vi, ask a grownup.
Append the following text: ‘UUID=yourUUID none ntfs r,noauto’
See my example below.

And that’s it. Save the file, reboot and you’re done. Even if you try to mount this partition manually via Disk Utility, it will fail. If you want to undo the change, obviously just run vifs again and remove this line.

Hope that helps.

1. By ‘ask a grownup’, I of course mean ‘use Google’.

Raw idling power!

paul — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:23:08 +0000

So much power – doing… nothing.

I wish Xgrid had a purpose for mortals.

Let's Get Small

paul — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:51:34 +0000

Those with iPhones will be delighted to find that Pants in Motion now has a mobile theme! Now you can read my rarely-updated blog more easily!

ENJOY!

Hey, let's secure our blogs!

paul — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:51:49 +0000

I was already up to date with my WordPress updates, and so should you be too if you want to avoid hassle. The most recent releases can auto-update themselves so it’s worth going through a manual update yourself (which only takes a few minutes) for the peace of mind that comes later.

And here’s a helpful link.

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/

Fail!

paul — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 01:38:18 +0000

Note to self:

When you measure out a distance between two spots on the floor, REMEMBER TO ADD A COUPLE OF METRES for slack! And for the distance between the switch and the hole!

What a waste of time and money. Back to Jaycar I go to get 15 metres of ethernet cable instead of 10!

The Tao of Wiring

paul — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:29:03 +0000

A few weeks ago our naughty greyhound nommed through the ethernet cable that connected the router in the geek room to the switch in the front room, killing Net access for the PS3 and stopping the Airport Express from seeing the network. I got around it by switching the Airport to act as a wireless client and bridged the switch through it, dropping the connection speed from gigabit down to about 60-megabits. Good enough for my purposes, until Crumpet bought an iPhone.

Now, the current iPhones don’t have 802.11n networking, so I had to rip the network apart and start again. It’s working, but the connection between the two rooms has dropped again, to about 10-20 megabits, which is just painfully slow when you’re trying to copy a 2Gb media file to the PS3 to play.

I figured I’d have to run another ethernet cable under the house – not a problem now that we’d put up wire fencing to stop the dogs getting under there. Problem was I bought Cat6 cable instead of Cat5e, thinking it would be better-shielded against all the electrical wiring under the house. Cat6 is a right bastard to fit into an end connector designed back in the Cat5 days, and that kind of connector is naturally all I have!

I finally got one end (excellently) wired up and tested this evening though, and I’ll do the painful undoing of the wire fencing and crawling under the house tomorrow. I needs me my gigabit ethernet!

Copyright is awesome

paul — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:44:58 +0000

I just got a notification that a video that I had uploaded to YouTube contained audio that had not been cleared by Warner. YouTube had automatically disabled the audio.

Now, I am a believer in fair use. I credited the band in question and didn’t use the entirity of the track, plus it was overdubbed with the sound of cars going around a track, so it wasn’t something you’d want to steal.

As I’m apparently not allowed fair use anymore, I decided to delete all my YouTube videos. Why should I promote bands if I’m just going to be slapped for it? Good luck getting people to buy your music if they don’t know it exists, Warner. And thanks for not defending fair use, YouTube.