Tag Archives: Technical Notes

So.

I’m working on repairing a co-worker’s laptop. Seems he ran a disk utility to defragment the drive, and it didn’t update the catalog file correctly. Part of the OS got overwritten. Then the catalog file got overwritten. This is a bad thing.

Normally, I’d do up a post at this point warning folks off and recommending against that particular software. Unfortunately, he doesn’t remember the name of the utility, apart from it being “Disk Something”.

So here’s my warning to you all: If you find a program called “Disk Something”, DON’T USE IT. It will eat your hard drive.

This music video has been getting some circulation from various folks on-line. Enough so that I can’t remember where I first ran into it (Fark? Wil Wheaton? Andy Ihnatko? Decafbad?)…

Anyway, the video for Keith Schofield and Wintergreen’s song When I Wake Up gives a brief history of the abysmally bad Atari 2600 video game based on the movie ET. The tune is pretty cool. The sight of a bunch of hipsters digging up a desert landfill in search of old video game cartridges is quite chuckleworthy too.

A very cool little applescript:

If you have OmniGraffle, you can download and run the AppleScript below. It’ll trawl through your iTunes library, map out all the artists, hi-light the most popular, and connect it all so you can arrange it as you will. I’d say that qualifies as suitably neat yet pointless…

Looks like it’s a hardware problem.

The laptop is gonna be heading in for repairs this afternoon. Last night the screen went dark and the clicking sound started up again. And after rebooting, the screen stayed dark. So far as I can tell, everything is coming up and running, it’s just that the backlight is out of whack so I can’t see anything.
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Looks like the total wipedown & reinstall of the OS on the powerbook worked: complex 3D no longer causes the system to go all pear-shaped. As something of a bonus, I was able to trick the OS installer into restoring all of my user files & preferences from my backed-up system. The only stuff it didn’t grab were the UNIX specific things that I’d installed.
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The comic is quite the learning experience… For example, I’m poking around a bit more with what can be done using PHP. And also what kind of problems crop up with having different versions of Apache and PHP on my laptop and on the server.
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Well, I’ve gone and done it… I’ve eliminated a stack of folks who were indulging in image swiping.

I’ve mentioned it before. Basically, I don’t have a problem with people using the images I post here, so long as they give credit and don’t steal bandwidth. Unfortunately, some folks do neither. And the biggest offenders have been the folks over at myspace.com. To the tune of close to 30,000 hits from uncredited links this week.

That’s right. Thirty thousand. In seven days.

Even at less than 32k an image, that’s close to a gigabyte of stolen bandwidth so far this month. I just can’t afford to be a free image host for these guys.
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Do you know what your printer is saying about you? If you’ve got a color laser printer, every page you print gets subtly stamped with a nearly invisible barcode. The guys at the Electronic Freedom Foundation have cracked the code for one type of Xerox printer, revealing the printer’s serial number and a timestamp…

So yeah. Podcasting. The whole personal radio show thing… I think it’s a neat idea, in most cases. Sturgeon’s Law applies, of course, especially to anything I happen to produce.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that we’re looking at doing internal podcasts of some of the medical lectures here. Which means I get to experiment and geek out a bit, learning how things are done. Which means that you get to benefit from my mistakes, if you’re trying to do the same thing.
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Helped out a friend with a problematic iBook on Sunday. We commandeered his kitchen table and tore the whole laptop apart, stem to stern, all to replace the display cable and the internal hard drive. Got the whole thing back together too. And best of all it seems to be working… I’d left before the backup of the old drive had been fully restored, but it was booting up in target disc mode and the screen wasn’t flickering on and off randomly.
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