This weekend I’ll be finding out if I can boot a Powerbook off a USB flash drive with a bootable FAT32 primary partition that’s an Ubuntu live CD running VirtualBox with a Windows XP disk image.  The end result of that would be running Windows on a Mac, but I have no idea if that will work.  I don’t even know what the hard/impossible step(s) might be.  Something something x86 instruction set something something hardware abstraction layer something something I have no idea what I’m talking about something something laser beams.

Error message:

When the used computer place sold me a refurbished Dell Latitude D810 notebook PC, they included a 65W power supply.  This is apparently not the correct one: it gives me a BIOS warning that this underpowered model would not give optimal performance.

Also, unless I throttle the 2.13GHz CPU speed back to 1.33GHz or lower, the laptop will most of the time overheat, triggering an auto shutdown.

Could these be related?  (Can you tell I’m not a double-E?)

For what it’s worth, even with the 2.0.1 firmware upgrade that (as of this writing) iTunes will insist on putting on your iPod if you restore it from a Windows box, you can get it working on Ubuntu Karmic.  The trick is the program ipod-read-sysinfo-extended, which you execute after attaching (and initializing) your iPod with the drive id and the mount point, for instance, ipod-read-sysinfo-extended /dev/sde /media/IPOD.  This writes an XML files to your iPod.

You may need to run the program with root privileges

Here’s an freeze-frame output from lame while encoding using variable bitrate on Ubuntu:

LAME 3.98.2 32bits (http://www.mp3dev.org/)
CPU features: MMX (ASM used), SSE (ASM used), SSE2
Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band: 17249 Hz - 17782 Hz
Encoding pj2007-08-05d1t03.wav to pj2007-08-05d1t03.wav.mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III VBR(q=4)
    Frame          |  CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU |    ETA
  3500/10289  (34%)|    0:05/    0:15|    0:06/    0:19|   16.994x|    0:12
192 [3481] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%****************************************************************************************************************
224 [  11] %
256 [   7] %
320 [   1] %
----------------------------------------------02:57---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   kbps        LR    MS  %     long switch short %
  192.3       12.1  87.9        95.9   2.1   2.0

Specifically regarding this:

192 [3481] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%****************************************************************************************************************

What does the ratio of % to * mean?  It shifts around as the encoding progresses.  Is it something like “placeholder for 100″ or something?

Here is a recipe for printing 8.5″ x 11″ pages four to a page (two landscaped on the front of each sheet, 5.5″ x 8.5″, and two on the back) such that when the pages are folded perpendicular to the long axis, they form a booklet that one can flip through.

1. Print the document as a PostScript file

Open up whatever program you want to print from: oowriter, acroread, evince, firefox, gedit, whatever.  Go to File→Print (or equivalent), select “Print to file”, choose “PS” as the format, give it a filename (I’ll assume you choose “document.ps”), make a note of the directory you’re printing it to, and click “Print”.

2. Get the PostScript utilities and viewer you need

In Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install psutils evince

3. Rearrange the pages in booklet order

psbook document.ps document.signature.ps

4. Render the files “2-up”

psnup -l -pletter -2 -s.65 document.signature.ps > document.2up.ps

Option #1: Your printer prints double-sided

Just open document.2up.ps in evince (evince document.2up.ps) and print it.

Option #2: Your printer does not print double-sided

pstops "2:0(1in,0in)" document.2up.ps > odd.ps
pstops "2:-1(1in,0in)" document.2up.ps > even.ps
evince even.ps odd.ps

Print odd.ps, flip the pages over, then print even.ps (Keep track of how your printer flips your paper.  The direction the top edge is facing will stay the same, but you may have to load the pages face-up the second time, or maybe face-down.  Tip: make a small mark with a pencil on the top surface of the top page in the paper tray.  After printing, look at the page you put your mark on.  Is the text on the side with the pencil mark?  Load the pages face-down for the second pass.  Is it on the bottom?  The pages get flipped internally, so load your pages face-up.)

[Slightly modified from recipe at dsl.org]

Having gotten a humorous wrong-word error in a text message spelled out with a cellular phone number pad, I started to wonder about collisions of this sort in general.  What keystrokes match the most words?

Well, I turned to my trusty bigwordlist.txt, a big dictionary file I pieced together from multiple places, particularly orchy, and I wrote a Perl script to look at it.

If a phone were to have this dictionary (there are a lot of reasons it shouldn’t, mostly because a lot of the words are of much lower frequency than others) there would be more than 20,000 collisions — places where the phone would have to guess, whether by a stupid algorithm (”pick the lowest alphabetically”, say) or something more sophisticated (”rank by frequency of occurrence in the wild”) or something very sophisticated that took grammar into account.

Here are some facts I found:

* The most troublesome sequence is 2666.  That can stand for ammo, amon, anno, anon, bonn, bono, boom, boon, cmon, comm, como, comp, conn, coom, coon, or coop (16 possibilities).
* The most collisions for two-, three-, and five-letter words are for 66, 466, and 46637 with 13 possibilities each (that “66″ — “[mno][mno]” — shows up a lot, yes?)
* My mom’s allergic to shrimp, so would that make them a “non-mom-nom”?  Spell it out.
* A lot of long medical words collide, because the ending “-ia” is the same as “-ic” in T9 (”hypercholesterolemia”, “hypercholesterolemic”).  Below that, “-ser” and “-ses” and “-zer” and “-zes” in verbs cause a lot of collisions.  The longest not-trivial pair looks to be “unreasonableness” and “unseasonableness” at 16 letters, but I’m not sure those are standard usages.
* Any requests for more info?  Raw files?

After a super-fun episode in which Ubuntu’s Simple Backup didn’t restore successfully after a hard drive failure, I went searching for a better solution to back up my /home directory to a (1.5 TB w00t!) external USB hard drive.

I found this lovely solution using rsync.  It’s worth reading the whole page if you don’t know how hard links work in *nix, but basically the solution has four backup slots, which get moved by one in the queue every backup, and if the files haven’t changed across all four, there’s only one copy of the files, because everything is done with ln.  And the most recent backup is always the full backup, which is ridiculously cool.

Here’s the whole thing:

rm -rf backup.3
mv backup.2 backup.3
mv backup.1 backup.2
cp -al backup.0 backup.1
rsync -a --delete source_directory/  backup.0/

Careful with the trailing slashes: include them where included, omit them where omitted.  The “backup.2″ would really look like “/media/disk/backup/backup.2″ or whatever, and “source_directory/” would really look like “/home/you/”, but you can fill those in.

I put those five lines in a script called backup.sh, chmodded it +x, and put the following line in my crontab:

00 04 * * * /home/joshua/bin/backup.sh

And — yeah — that’s it.  Awesome.  Now all I need is a second, larger hard drive to backup the first backup drive.  (”Big fleas … little fleas … ad infinitum“)

𝌐 mcgees.org has had mega-fun with automatic translators; first Babelfish with holiday cheer, then (unsolved) puzzles with Google Translate.

Now here comes translationparty.com, doing one thing and doing it well: in and out of Japanese (always a fun language for translators) until equilibrium is reached.

I was ecstatic when I found a stable oscillator (order 2), but it turns out those are quite common (even if the site doesn’t recognize that it’s stable at order > 1.)  Then I found an order 4!  A→B→C→D→A.  Here it is, with thanks to Eddie Izzard.

OK!  Beat that!  Game on!

(No one is going to play, is he?  Then I will be very   )

I’m borrowing my Mom’s Mac again.  And I notice that it’s really, really light.  Like, half the weight of a comparable PC.  So, one of my deep reflections:

I loathe Microsoft Windows.  I haven’t used it in years, using instead one version of Linux or another, and Ubuntu is nice enough to spread on toast.  Also, I love free-as-in-speech software and hate DRM and spyware.  But Macs have this bizarre ability to “just work” when you try to do things, in the way that Google “just works”, and that’s a tune gets stuck in one’s head.  And they usedappropriated the Linux kernel, so there is no forgivable reason that what I’m about request shouldn’t be possible.  Maybe — just maybe — a Mac is like one of those yummy Victorian writing desks where cool stuff (such as pages of young adult adventure fiction) happens when you hold a lever down and push somewhere else.  Or maybe they’re like a Furby, and if you scalp it there’s wickedly-cool stuff underneath.  Or maybe it’s like a Ferrari that’s delivered to the customer with the engine compartment welded shut, and another welding torch (?) would let you do something like — um — bore out cylinders (?) — don’t really know what Im talking about.

So: A largish minority of my readers are Mac users (if Google Analytics is to be believed) and a statistically-significant percentage are techie guys (if comments are to be believed).  Is there overlap?  Huddle together and evangelize — y’allz groupies are into that shit, right? — or, if you’re Marcus, give me an appointment at the Apple Store and sell me one.

Whatever you want to say, Say.  It.  Here.  I don’t want to collate Facebook, email, and Twitter kthx.

What I absolutely need:

1. Hard-core access to a command line (found this already!)
2. A full platter of indispensable command-line goodies (named pipes, STERR redirection, various awks/seds/whatever; egrep, sort, wc, uniq, and all the other stuff that makes computing worth doing in the first place.
3. PERL.  In bold: PERL, with full access to a debugger.
4. emacs; cron; sendmail; whatever I’m forgetting
5. The ability to completely ditch Finder in favor of something that doesn’t blow gangrenous goats.
6. The ability to customize keyboard shortcuts as arbitrarily convoluted as I need, and remap any — any — exiting ones
7. Full access to ps that will hide nothing from me and full access to kill that the OS will not override.
8. The ability to add arbitrary DRM-free media to the drive without complaint, tagging, or tattling.
9. Access to a proper, free package repository and a fully-featured package manager (I.  Don’t.  Care.  Which.  Just something.)
10. The ability to add software that Apple really doesn’t want you to use, such as aircrack and john, with, again, no tattling

Second tier:

1. ability to be a SAMBA client or server
2. ability to play DVDs regardless of region, and, ideally, to strip or bypass PUAs (running DVD Decrypter in an emulation mode or VM would work, which leads me to …)
3. emulation mode or VMs at least as good as wine
4. some way of upgrading these toy keyboards.  No, sorry, that’s mean to toy keyboards.  Toy keyboards at Target have greater key travel and less rattle.  Ideally I’d like some kind of fancy piano-hammer-type “breaking” keys (pressure/Pressure/PRESSURE/PRESSURE/snap!) but it’s not a deal-killer

And tertiar(il?)y?

1. Ability to fold into a tablet that I can prop up on the table and use a Twiddler to type with

I’m pretty sure the A/C adapter on my laptop is going bye-bye, and in an effort to not have it take my laptop with it, I’ve unplugged it.  My mom lent me a Mac which is simply awesome and is making me think of giving up Ubuntu.

Oh, wait, I think I meant kinda like a plastic toy with fewer keyboard shortcuts, but, still, THANKS MOM!

Diss diss diss Mac Mac Mac.  I know, I know.  Here it is in two sentences: “Everything the designers thought you should do is trivially easy.  Everything they didn’t want you to do is completely fucking impossible.”  If it’s a choice between “makes the easy stuff easy, the hard stuff impossible, and everything uniformly pretty” and “makes the easy stuff possible, the hard stuff possible, and every UI look like a different mongrel dog”, please sign me up for the latter.  Except — most of the easy stuff is easy now in Ubuntu, and it’s getting more handsome.

Anyway — I may not respond quickly to your attempts at contact.  But I love you anyway.  Some of you.  You know who you are.

I once saw an absolutely appalling Pepsi ad: it read, “If you must drink and drive, Drink Pepsi”.  shivers

So, in the same spirit and same lack-of-tact: I don’t recommend you use a Mac, nor recommend you upgrade to “Mac OS X Snow Leopard” (WTFIU with that name?), but if you do, and want to preorder, doest though through me and I’ll get an 8.5% kickback.

espeak is, in the developers’ words, “a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.”

I cannot comment on the Windows version, but the Linux version has a command-line interface with a lot of options.  So I wrote three wrappers, called, respectively, mespeak, mespeakf, and mespeaku.

mespeak, to be used as mespeak "some text":

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp "$1" --stdout | aplay

mespeakf, to be used as mespeak file:

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp -f $1 --stdout | aplay

mespeaku, to read a webpage as mespeak http://www.website.com:

lynx --dump $1 | sed 's/\[[^\]*]//g'| mespeak --stdin

So sorry about the sed script.  It becomes rather write-only when one is matching against literal brackets.

[link]

After my discovery that notebook PCs cannot swim, followed by difficulties with the power regulation in the outlet I was using at home, followed by buying a new PC, followed by that PC being stolen from my truck, followed by getting a new PC donated from a good friend, followed with tons of compatibility problems with Ubuntu, followed by the running of the bulls in Pamploma, followed by assorted escapades involving peanut brittle, Daniel Boone, and a titmouse named “Slinky”, I am back online, albeit with a really lousy video card, and shuffling through all my accumulated emails.

Your patience is appreciated or, failing that, please resend urgent messages if I didn’t respond the first time.

I heard a segment on public radio about the perfume industry and the changes it is undergoing.  Apparently a new class of perfumes don’t smell like great perfume, they smell like the person him/herself smells wonderful.  There was a bit on a perfume designer who can allegedly duplicate any aroma: he made a perfume that smells like snow for his daughter.

Who the hell would want to smell like snow when Weird Fragrances exists?

Presumably for the Jones Soda crowd, you can smell like, well, simply weird shit.  Like burning rubber.  Or crisp banknotes.  Magazines.  Fireworks smoke or (aargh) an ashtray.  As of now, you can request a free sample.

Oh, and if anyone remembers the details on that public radio segment, or the book the interviewee wrote, let me know.

Update: This may just be a spam trap.  I have received huge amounts of spam to an email address used only to register on this site.  I haven’t checked my mail yet, so I don’t know if the free samples exist or not.

Yeah, that’s the best title I can come up with, let alone coming up with two jokes (no one has commented yet on the double jokes in the post titles and URLs, which means — although I’m still likely funnier than Dane Cook — that it’s not really working.)  Cut me some slack.  You’re reading at a reasonable time.  It’s 01:00 for me.

No, I’m not in Ubuntu yet.  I still have to [illegal] a bit more.  So, a parting thought: I’m giving up some stuff in fleeing Redmond.  Like any abusive relationship, it wasn’t all bad.  There are some things I’ll miss.

Three, actually.  Homebase; Quicken; and Windows-Tab.

Windows-Tab is Irene-Jacob-sexy.  Damn.  It is the coolest fucking thing in the world.  If there is not a KDE clone of it, I’m going to have to write one.  It would be good to keep my coding neurons busy, anyway.  Do they even document this?  Are you on Vista (you poor sod)?  Hold down the Windows key (which has euphemistic names in other PC OSs), and hit Tab.  Oh.  My.  God.

Why isn’t a Quicken replacement available on *nix?  I don’t know.  Maybe nerds don’t want to admit that they can’t figure out double-entry accounting to a sufficient degree to use GnuCash.  And a substitute for Homebase?  Robby’s doing an unbelievable job with Tellico, and he’s even incorporated some of my code as well as written an export template geared towards booksellers at my request (not sure which shows greater benevolence.)  But Win-Tab?  It’s not going to displace Katee — but it might well show up in my dreams.  I can’t wait.

Once, there were desktop computers.  These were so unwieldy that they redefined — upwards — the acceptable size of a desk.  Many people just put them on the floor and stumbled over them.

Then came laptops.  These were just about the right size for a the top of a desk.

Then notebook computers.  These were almost small enough to fit on your lap.

Then there were handhelds.  Handhelds were about the size of your average paper notebook, just heavier.

So when computers were finally shrunken to a size you could accommodate in two hands, they were palmtops.

I don’t think this is too techie for most site readers.  Egads.  It’s not 1 April, so I’m taking it at face value.

Like the article at that site (with which I’m unaffiliated)?  Not to belabor anything, but if you do, click some of the ads.

Reading Gould just now, I ran across the word molluscan meaning pertaining to a mollusk.

This is so cool.  I haven’t been so excited about an animal adjective since cygneous.

Now I have to quickly learn how to program a TWAIN driver so that I can release a Linux scanning program called MolluScan.  It will, of course, need hooks into the Nautilus file browser, but I can skip having to write OCR functionality into it because no mollusk — not even a cephalopod — can, to the best of my knowledge, read.

(Yes, this is a joke.)

Hope this helps someone.  I just upgraded Firefox in Hardy Heron (Ubuntu Linux).  Transition was smooth, except that I could no longer log in to Gmail.  I would try to log in, but it would just send me back to the login page, rather than take me to my Inbox.

The solution: clear your cookies.  Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear Now -> (Just “Cookies”) -> Clear Private Data Now.

I don’t need to write them.  I don’t need to embed them.  I downloaded some OpenOffice.org macros from the web, and for the life of me I don’t understand what to do with them.  In the morning, when pain meds have faded, it may be very clear, but, be a dear anyway and answer my question: “I have a .sxc file that I want to be able to use in any arbitrary OpenOffice.org Calc document, new or old.  What do I do?”

I can’t bring myself to actually post this on a support group, because this is “so obvious”, apparently.

The Moxi DVR is great.  Really, really great.  It took almost a decade, but a company finally came out with a UI better than that of my Series 1 TiVo.

One neat thing about the Moxi is the ability to add an external hard drive.  I tried adding a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive to the unit.  It is recognized, formatted, and ready-to-go.  Problem is, after a certain amount of idle time, it will stop functioning.  When you try to play a show on the EHD, you will get a prompt — twice, oddly — that says “Do you want to keep this episode?”, with “keep” and “delete” options.  Also, if there is no room on the internal hard drive, the unit will fail to record episodes, and in the “Canceled/Deleted Episodes” log, the (unhelpful) reason will be given as “Failed (No Signal)”.  If you go to “Setup”, then “External Hard Drive”, select “Disconnect”, then physically disconnect and re-connect the drive, it works again.

The problem is that the Seagate EHD goes to sleep, and the Moxi cannot wake it up.  The fix is to connect the EHD to a Linux box via USB, and use sdparm to clear the “Standby” flag on the hard drive.  See the flags on the hard drive by typing:

sdparm -a /dev/sdX

where X is the letter assigned to the device (type “tail /var/log/syslog” after plugging in the drive to see what letter it’s assigned.)

To clear the flag, type:

sdparm -c STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX

The “-c STANDBY” clears the “Standby” flag, and the “-6” does it in six-bit mode, which is apparently required.

Answer for how to keep these drives from going to sleep was found at the blog My Slice of Reality.

For Firefox power users, Bookmark Toolbar space (the row under your address entry where you can visit sites with one click) is at a minimum.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were just little icons for everything, as long as you knew what was what?

Favicon Picker to the rescue, replacing the works-only-occasionally functionality to add icons to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

If you are a superpowered user, you can get by on just icons.  So far, I need a little text prod, both as a reminder and as a slightly larger mouseover target.

Here’s mine, for now.  Hope you are inspired.

(A muffin to the person who figures out the largest number of the URLs corresponding to the cryptic icons and tags in my toolbar!)

When you place a bid on eBay, and it’s the high bid, the screen says “Hope you win!”

No they don’t!  They hope someone comes along and bids $500,000, and then another guy ups that.  “Hope you win!”  Gawd.

It’s that whole mentality of making computers seem more like people, like when Tellme says, in a concerned and slightly embarrassed voice, “Hm, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” instead of “Please repeat”.  Or when — I am not making this up — my bank added the sound of keyboard keys clicking in the background to the recorded voice telling you they are looking up your account information.

Or — and this drives me up the wall — when charities use script fonts and blue ink on their solicitations, so it looks like someone personally wrote it with a ballpoint.  I can always tell, because there is not a single person on the planet who writes the two es at the end of my name exactly the same.  One is a transition letter, one is a closing letter, and they shouldn’t be perfect matches.  The next logical step would be to commission fonts that have n (five to ten) slightly differing letterforms for each glyph, all of which connect, and the software to randomly choose which one to render.  That might fool me.  Until then, if you send me a fake hand-written letter, you are not getting money.  Period.

The best free visual geographical traceroute application that works on Linux (lots of restrictions, I know) is here at YouGetSignal.com.  Even if traceroute is blocked by your ISP, this will allow you to bypass this by starting the search from DreamHost’s servers.

If you don’t know much about traceroute, read about it.  It’s a tool that needs to be in your arsenal, for everything from satisfying curiosity to diagnosing network failures to tracking down spammers.  You don’t need to be a poweruser to make use of it.

On M$ Windows, for historical (8.3) reasons, it’s called tracert, apparently, or maybe pathping.

I gave you the StumbleUpon “wrapper” page.  As discussed in 2006, it’s a system worth using.

OK, let’s run down my week so far:

1. Wife left me and took Niall (my fault)
2. Got dropped from the interview process of the job for which I was applying (my fault, essentially)
3. Worker’s Comp claim was denied, so I will have to sue the WC insurance company (not my fault)
4. Ditzy HMO doctor whom I saw twice while out of work due to work-related injury claims I never told her I was off work, and refuses to sign my disability slip (fuckin’ not my fault)
5. Paid over $100 (that I didn’t have until friends opened their wallets) to file my taxes (my choice)
6. Ran out of meds (that said ditzy doctor forgot to refill) and for which I don’t have insurance anyway (not my fuckin’ fault)

So, today:

7. Computer crashes (shit happens)

You’d think with my whole professional and educational life spent living at the whims of computer hardware, I would have a top-of-the-line backup system in place.  You’d be wrong.

I fixed it.  The computer, and recovered the data.  It took some effort, but I did it.  I’m doing a full backup tonight.

Next step would pretty much have to be “blindness”, right?  I’d say “death”, but that’s not always seeming like such a bad alternative this week.

Ten years ago, I had an inkjet printer (it was a Canon) with amazing mechanical registration: you could print a document, take out the paper, put it back in the tray, print the same document on top of it, and you couldn’t tell!  Everything was perfectly aligned, to the sub-millimeter.  This was a sub-$100 printer.  So I know this technology exists in consumer-ready form.

The other piece of my idea is OCR software.  Again, what I need from it is far less than what is available right now.

What do I want?  I want an all-in-one scanner/printer doohickey.  Take a form — any reasonable size — and feed it through the document feeder.  The hardware would scan it, the software would identify the fields where one needs to enter text (they will usually be underlined or have boxes for each letter) and then allow you to type, like those fill-in PDF files.  You would type the text you want on the form, feed it through the document feeder again, and, Bingo!  It would print out your answers, perfectly legibly, onto the empty form.  It would size its font and everything to be just right.

I thought of this in college, years ago.  I’m tired of waiting for venture cap to make a fortune building this myself.  I just want someone to build it now.  Take the idea.  Make your million bucks.  Just charge less than $200, and I’ll buy at least one.

Please.  Now.  My handwriting’s getting worse as we speak.  Build it now.

Here is the best way to do Avery labels in OpenOffice.org (much better than the built-in method.)  Note the instructions on how to copy from one cell to every cell.  Even easier?  Put your cursor in the cell you want, press Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, then, above each column where you want the labels inserted, click the mouse when the down arrow shows, and hit Ctrl-V.  Don’t do this in the spaces between the labels.

Here is where to get the best templates for Avery-compatible labels for OpenOffice.org.

To find which template to use, look at the top of the labels sheet (that one was hard for me).

Here’s where to get OpenOffice.org (like Microsoft Word, for free).

I used to be pretty decent with graphics programs, at least to do image manipulation.  Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, The GIMP, whatever.  Then the whole thing with layers came in, and I’m just fundamentally missing an idea.  I think it would take someone about five minutes to teach me the entire concept that I’m missing, the name and nature of which I don’t even know.  Things that used to be simple, like outlining a selection and dragging it to somewhere else on the image, seem impossible now, especially in The GIMP.  There’s not even a classic “hand” tool for moving stuff around.  Anyone want to teach me?