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Wednesday, 2006 October 11, 10:11 — technology

a life less simple

The looming prospect of liquidity raises new questions, like: How soon does a flat monitor pay for itself in power? Are the cameras built into telephones any good, and do they interface easily with a Mac?

Saturday, 2006 June 24, 09:37 — neep-neep, pets

without questions there can be no answers

Is there a standard Unix shell command to pause for a given amount of time? One wouldn’t use this from the prompt, of course, but it might have its uses in scripts. Mine is to open a large number of files (local or Web), but not all at once:

cat list-of-files | xargs slow-open &

where slow-open looks like

#!/bin/sh
for i in $*
  do
    open $i
    pause 60
  done

It seems like unnecessary overkill to write pause in Python.

In unrelated news — I’ve heard that you can discourage vermin from stealing your pets’ food by setting out a sample spiked with emetic. Have you tried this, does it work? What drug is appropriate for a cat? A neighborhood tom has recently found our cats’ dish, and drops in every night as if he owns the place (if I’m not watching).

Wednesday, 2006 June 21, 10:56 — neep-neep

hypothesis

Somewhere in MS Word’s infinitely deep dialog boxes there must be a checkbox whose default setting is Do what I explicitly asked you not to do.

Saturday, 2006 June 17, 11:49 — technology

theoretical ability

The bank sent me a new card.

Daily ATM Withdrawal Limit: $310

Not since 1990 (or was it 1998?) have I seen a cash machine that gives bills smaller than $20.

Sunday, 2006 May 7, 14:07 — neep-neep

nothing’s perfect

Since moving back to MacOS from Red Hat, I do miss a few features:

  • ability to resize a window by dragging any edge, not only the bottom right corner
  • ability to send the current window to the back with a single stroke (a feature of the Sawfish window manager)
  • gftp, a good ftp client
Saturday, 2006 April 29, 15:03 — language, mathematics, neep-neep

how’s your German?

I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes are quite what I’m after, and I think it may miss some solutions.)

Would I pay for a translation? Well, I’m obscenely broke these days, but I might.

Tuesday, 2006 March 21, 14:22 — neep-neep

another one for Perry?

How many MacOS experts read this?

When I launch Grapher, I get a Warning:

Font Conflict
Several characters (Greek letters, e.g.) cannot be displayed correctly because of a conflict between the installed fonts. If you are using MathType, please make sure that version 5.0a or higher is installed.

Font Book’s function “Resolve Duplicates” does not help. Any suggestions?

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