Skye's Blog of Doom

Fun Fact

2007-02-12T15:38:00.001-08:00

I recently discovered that I'm 41U tall.

You know, just in case I need to be rackmounted...

Motherboard Upgrade Results

2006-12-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

This week I did a little eBay bargain hunting and upgraded my motherboard & CPU from a MSI K7D Master-L with a single Athlon MP 1700+ to a newish Socket 939 based Abit AV8 with an Athlon 64 3000+ processor. The new CPU has the 90nm Venice core and the mainboard would finally use the full AGP 8x of my ATI Radeon 9800 so I was excited to see how it would perform.

Tested with Kill-a-Watt and Aquamark 3:

	MSI K7D	Abit AV8
Power @ Max CPU	305W	280W
GFX Score	4,611	6,207
CPU Score	3,900	8,630
Aquamark Score	28,980	45,650
FPS	28.98	45.65

So now I have a computer that runs almost twice as fast, and uses 20W less than before. Yay for technology! I could get a lot more out of this rig with some judicious overclocking, but I don't know if I'll bother.

Possibly the worst Phishing email ever?

2006-10-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

If you're going to take the trouble to sending out a phishing email, at least check your English spelling and grammar, people. Here's a classic that recently appeared in my inbox:

Dear customer,

It occures here to us that you or a wrong person is unusually trying to log into his your account because it has being trying to login by unknow person who provides to us your accurate ussername with wrong password, of which by what we are seeing here, the person might log into this account if nothing is done, since he's missing only one letter from what we have here as yourpassword.

Besides, five more wrong login into this account might couse you service suspenssion that will require your coming to the bank for clearification. So the earlier you get this account updated the better for you. So click on this below link to re-proccess your onling banking to update to avoid service suspension.

Does anyone actually fall for that?

Using Mac-formatted iPods with iTunes 7 on a Windows PC

2006-10-28T23:02:00.000-07:00

For quite a long time I'd been happily using my girlfriend's Mac formatted iPod with iTunes 6 on my Windows PC by using the great and wonderful MacDrive HFS driver. After upgraded to iTunes 7 though, for some reason it stopped working. About a week later the MacDrive 6.1.5 update was released, promising compatibility with iTunes 7 but iTunes still wouldn't recognize the iPod and insisted it needed to be reformatted for Windows.

I decided to try uninstalling and reinstalling MacDrive which pointed to the real problem. Apparently Daemon Tools (which I use to mount ISO images on drive letters, saves having to burn them) uses a "SCSI Passthrough Device" to fake its drive letters and that interferes with MacDrive operation, detailed in this knowledgebase article. I uninstalled Daemon Tools, rebooted, deleted SPTD*.sys from WINDOWS\System32\Drivers, rebooted again, and reinstalled MacDrive.

Success! iTunes 7 now recognizes the Mac formatted iPod again. Apparently more recent versions of Daemon Tools don't use the SPTD driver, but I haven't tried installing a newer version to see if it will coexist better with MacDrive. I'm just glad we both have lots of podcasts to listen to on the long bus ride back from Vancouver next week.

Fixing my CBC Podcast iPod crash problem

2006-10-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

I got sick of not being able to listen to my favourite CBC podcasts so I did some Googling and found this article at Apple:

Fifth Generation iPod resets when playing some mono MP3 songs and podcasts

Basically, you just have to turn off the EQ and lo, no more iPod crash when I try to play "Best of As It Happens" or "C'est la Vie: Word of the Week". I'm surprised Apple hasn't released a new revision of the iPod firmware to fix it.

Why I hate the SPEWS database

2006-09-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

I've wasted so much time dealing with ISPs that use the SPEWS blacklist to filter out spam - my upstream colo is accused of not kicking off a customer that sent spam at some point, so they block thousands of IPs apparently with the intent of causing enough "collateral damage" to innocent customers that they will put pressure on the upstream provider to enforce their AUP. What a load of bull. This article called Why I Won't Use SPEWS expresses the myriad problems with this approach better than I can. It's pure laziness for sysadmins to be using this heavy-handed method rather than more complex spam identification methods, and in my opinion totally unacceptable to be inconveniencing your own customers in order to make a political point. If you care that much, lobby the government to pass stronger anti-UBE legislation.

Attaching a LCD TV to my Powerbook

2006-09-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

I decided to take the plunge and sell our old 32" CRT TV and buy a same sized LCD TV before we move back to Vancouver, to save myself from getting a hernia during the move. I settled on the Vizio L32 HDTV since it got great reviews for it's size and price; not the best you can buy but I certainly don't need anything better and didn't want to pay over $800. What was most important was that it had good support for connecting a computer, because we're planning on ditching cable and putting the money into a Mac Mini (hopefully they will release a new Core 2 Duo "Meron" based Mini soon) and a really fast broadband connection.

Well I'm glad to report I'm very happy with the TV, the only complaints being the black isn't exactly "inky", there's no S-Video inputs and there's no menu option for 1:1 or dot-dot mode. The native resolution is 1366x768 so I thought I would use use a DVI to D-Sub (or VGA or RGB or whatever you want to call it) cable and my PowerBook G4 would recognize the resolution and that would be the end of it. I quickly discovered that it would not detect the native resolution but was stuck at 1024x768 which made text look like crap stretched out to the LCD's native resolution. After some web searching I downloaded and configured DisplayConfigX to give me a higher resolution available in my Displays Preferences. It wouldn't let me use the exactly resolution, forcing it to 1360 for some multiple of X reason. The picture looked better, but still not as good as I thought, and the VGA cable wasn't long enough and was very thick and heavy.

I looked up the issue on Apple's site and saw they had a DVI to HDMI cable (for about $120) and figured I could probably find one for much cheaper than Apple's. Naturally I did, buying a 10 foot DVI to HDMI cable on eBay for $10 shipped - how does Apple get away with these accessory prices? Anyway, on arrival I connected the cable to the HDMI port on the LCD TV and.... nothing. Blue screen, no signal. Stumped, I read the manual and did some more searching and discovered some LCDs only like the official 720p resolution of 1280x720 at 60Hz. Since the TV was showing blue screen I couldn't change the Displays Preferences, so I uninstalled the custom DisplayConfigX modes and rebooted.

Voila! Driving the TV at the stock 720p rate brought up a very crisp image. It's still a bit distorted due to the lack of a 1:1 mode on the TV, so the TV is stretching it a little to the native resolution. There's a bit of a problem with overscan on the top and bottom of the screen as well, so you have to be careful not to lose windows' title bar off the top, but it looks really good and plenty crisp enough to read text and use the LCD TV as a casual web browsing or email platform. Playing DVDs and downloaded anime on the PowerBook with the VLC Player looked great. Too bad the TiVo picture quality is lagging so far behind.

Next I connected my PlayStation 2 to the composite input and loaded up Gran Turismo 3. I instantly knew I was going to have to improve the situation; it was blurrly, bleeding and generally awful. I learned the best thing to do was to order a component cable, so back to eBay and bought one for $8 shipped. Connecting the PS2 to the Analog HDTV input using the new cable was like night & day - GT3 looks fantastic now, maybe I'll get around to finishing the Professional league. Too bad more games don't support 16:9 aspect ratio.

Switching to Camino for OS X

2006-09-09T19:09:00.000-07:00

I love Firefox but on my Powerbook G4 with only 768MB of memory and lots and lots of tabs open, it's not exactly a speed demon. I'm trying out Camino now, which is also based on the Mozilla codebase and Gecko rendering engine but with a true Cocoa interface instead of the slow cross platform XUL that Firefox uses. It also uses standard Mac keychain access for storing your saved passwords and all the other nice integrated OS X features I've come to love, including Cocoa Gestures and various input managers.

On the minus side, that means all the wonderful Firefox extensions that use XUL aren't available, but a lot of the essentials such as a session saver and Flash blocker are available at PimpMyCamino. The CamiTools are great and CamiScript, which adds Applescript support, seems really powerful. I did have to do the chrome.rdf hack to get CamiFlash to work properly, essential as a lot of Flash sites like Yahoo Finance drive up the CPU usage to 100%.

Another extension I'm trying out is the shareware Inquisitor which adds live predictive searching to Camino and Safari. This replaces the current search bar functionality with a fast live-search style drop down. Start typing your search, and the list appears with possible queries. The registration nag is kind of annoying but it's actually quite handy! What I'm looking for often appears in the drop down, saving me a click on the Google or Yahoo search results page. Since I search about a bajillion times a day, it adds up.

So far I'm loving it and it is a LOT faster and uses a lot less memory. I've been using it for about a week and haven't opened Firefox once, so that's a good sign!

SkypeIn Alternative in Canada

2006-08-25T23:15:00.000-07:00

Since Skype doesn't seem to be interested in the Canadian VOIP market (idiots) I'm looking at alternatives, like vbuzzer, for when we move up to Canada. This blog outlines an interesting alternative using a SIP phone:

$5 Phone Number in Canada

Come on Skype, get with the program.

A Simple mIRC for Automating XDCC Downloads

2006-08-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

A lot of the fileserve bots on IRC these days have disabled the xdcc list command, presumably because of abuse from bots and crawlers. Here's a simple mIRC script that will automatically get the next pack. To kick it off, just type:

/xdcc start BotName Pack#

The script automatically stops at the last available pack.

on 1:FILERCVD:*: {
inc %xdcc_pack
/msg %xdcc_bot xdcc send %xdcc_pack
}

Alias xdccstart {
%xdcc_bot = $1
%xdcc_pack = $2
/msg %xdcc_bot xdcc send %xdcc_pack
}

Pretty simple really, I'd like to add the ability to fetch specific packs or skip packs based on description regex or pack size at some point. If the script goes nuts you can stop it with:

/remote off

Top 10 Cameras Used On Flickr

2006-08-23T05:10:00.000-07:00

Interesting comparison, I'm considering the Nikon D50 myself, but I'll probably wait until next year when the new Nikon models are released and the price drops.

read more | digg story

Fighting Image Spam with SpamAssassin

2006-08-21T23:09:00.000-07:00

My servers at F4 Systems are getting a lot of image based spam lately; you know the ones, where all the text is presented as an image (usually a stock scam) and as such the spam filters don't have a chance to scan and tag it.

My first attempt was to add this rule:

# "CRITICAL INVESTOR ALERT!" image spam - added dynamic image size
rawbody __LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST1 /^font-family:Arial'<>img width=[345]\d{2} height=\d{3} id="_x0000_i1025"/m
rawbody __LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST2 /^src="cid:image001.gif@/
#rawbody __LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST3 /^ name="wetback.gif"$/
meta LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG (__LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST1 && __LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG_TEST2)
score LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG 3.0
describe LOCAL_CRIT_INVEST_IMG BODY: Contains CRITICAL INVESTOR ALERT! image

It blocked quite a few, I'd say about half, but I know I can do better. The first thing I'm doing is upgrading SpamAssassin from v3.1.1 to v3.1.4 to see if that helps. If not, it's on to try an OCR Plugin. Great... more CPU load. Did I mention about 80% of all the email my server receives is recognized as spam?

Update: Well the upgrade didn't seem to help at all, so I'll tackle the OCR plugin soon.

Firefox Advocacy

2006-08-20T23:22:00.000-07:00

Have you seen the videos over at Firefox Flicks? There's some great stuff, and make sure to check out the crop circle! Here's one of my favourites:

Synergy: One Keyboard & Mouse, Many Computers

2006-08-20T22:05:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across a really cool piece of software listening to the Hak.5 Video Podcast last night. It's called Synergy and it's like a virtual software KVM switch without the video; it allows you to share one keyboard and mouse among many machines. You simply download the software on all the computers you want to control (they have binaries for Windows, Mac, and most Linux distros), start a server on any machine, and start the client on all the others, and presto! Drag the mouse to the edge of one screen, and it appears on the other machine, and the keyboard input goes to that machine.

I used to have two keyboards and two mice on my desk, one for each machine; now just one keyboard and mouse (my Apple keyboard and a Logitech MX518 optical corded mouse) controls both my Windows XP PC and my Apple PowerBook G4. It also has other cool features like a shared clipboard (copy from PC, paste on Mac seamlessly), synchronized screen savers and more. One of those things that makes you instantly wonder how you ever got by without it...

The Synergy software is still a bit rough around the edges, especially the Mac OS X version, where you have to configure the application by editing a text configuration file and run the software from the Terminal. No big deal, but not great for newbies. I'm sure someone will step up and get it polished soon. The Windows installer was dead easy, and has a nice simple GUI for client and server configuration, as well as installing it as a service so it starts at boot time, so you can control the XP login screen.

I'm running the server on my OS X laptop, so I also had to add a new rule to the built-in firewall on TCP port 24800, as well as add static DNS entries to /etc/hosts on the Mac and C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on the Windows box for the machines being connected. Would be nice if it supported Bonjour or some other sort of autodiscovery protocol.

The mouse movement is a bit odd, possibly due to a lack of development on the OS X software. If the mouse is on the XP screen and I shake it back and forth quickly, it "ghosts" on the OS X screen simultaneously; the reverse doesn't happen though. Sometimes the mouse pointer doesn't hide on the Mac, which is a known bug. Also, if I accelerate the mouse quickly on the OS X screen towards the edge, it pops out in the middle of the XP screen unexpectecly. I enabled an edge delay of 500ms which helps with this issue. I'll continue mucking around with the options and file some bugs to help the developers.

One thing I've found very useful is to add the following two lines in the screens section of the config file for the Window box:

alt = ctrl
ctrl = alt

Since I'm used to using Mac keyboard shortcuts, namely having the Command key under my left hand thumb, this swaps Control and Alt so that they same keystroke activates Control- on the Windows box. Hooray for muscle memory.

Wish I had time to contribute to the project! Having all this reclaimed desk real estate is awesome.

Go to the Synergy web site on SourceForge

I've also found a Synergy GUI Project for OS X but haven't tried it yet.

Color Photos From the World War I Era

2006-08-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

Really cool article over at Damn Interesting about pre-WWI colour photos:

Damn Interesting » Color Photos From the World War I Era

The photos by Prokudin-Gorskii of pre-revolution Russia are like stepping back in time. Then again, in some of the documentaries I've seen of Chechnya, the buildings don't look much different; the peasants are always on the edge of poverty, it seems.

Brilliant Social Networking Idea?

2006-08-11T18:09:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago I was listening to the CBC Radio podcast "The Best of Ideas" series on the life of Karl Polanyi, the author of The Great Transformation. I wasn't familiar with the book but it has a very interesting perspective on the dissonance of the market economy and society. I won't go into detail about the theory (go get the podcast yourself) but it got me thinking about society and the Internet, and the rise of social networking (Friendster, MySpace, etc), RSS aggregators, sites like eBay and craigslist, flickr, and the hundreds of accounts the average Netizen has on all the large and small websites they visit. I suddenly realized there was a whole new kind of service that could be implemented in the brave new Web 2.0 world, one that seemed too simple to be true. I've been looking around and I don't see anything quite like what I've got in mind; exciting, but it's still early going.

I'm working my way through the Mashable blog and Wikipedia's list of Social Networking Sites for starters. Another thing to consider is the recent Friendster Patent # 7069308 on social networking. It seems like the patent is way too broad but who knows? Anyway, I'll let Rupert Murdoch's lawyers battle it out for me, I doubt I'll be targeted even if it takes off.

Anyway, stay tuned; it shouldn't take too long once we're settled down in Vancouver to get a proof of concept site up and running. Can't say much more that that for now. I think this idea might even be NDA and patent worthy!

Fixing SSH Login Failure Security Reports on FreeBSD 6.1

2006-08-11T17:52:00.000-07:00

I recently noticed on my FreeBSD 6.1 server that login failures from ssh weren't being reported in the daily security email like on my older box. Since my old box gets a few hundred ssh login crack attempts every night (good old zombie PC brute force hack attempts...) it's kind of something I like to keep track of. I discovered it was because "fail" no longer appears in the auth.log line on my FreeBSD 6.1 installation, and /etc/periodic/security/800.loginfail was only grepping for "fail" and nothing else. The lines look like this now:

Aug 11 08:39:20 hostname sshd[48839]: error: PAM: authentication error for someuser from somewhere.some.net

So I simply modified the grep in 800.loginfail to read:

n=$(catmsgs | grep -ia "^$yesterday.*$fail\|authentication error$" |
tee /dev/stderr | wc -l)

I also submitted the patch to the FreeBSD bugs database under PR conf/91732 which is closely related.

Fixing DRI for the ATI Rage Mobility M3 on Ubuntu

2006-07-25T00:45:00.000-07:00

I'm setting up a cheap PC for my Mom with Ubuntu (yeah, it's a Linux distro that even Mom can use) and I noticed it was waaaay snappier than on Ali's Dell Latitude C600 laptop. I thought at first, is it the power management messing up and slowing the CPU down? As I was looking up benchmark programs I had another idea - the difference was that the video was much faster on the tower PC. Now, it's no screamer - it's got an old S3 AGP 1x video card, probably a bargain even when it was new, so I knew something was up.

Searching on Ubuntu video benchmark, I came across the popular glxgears demo. Now I can hear the purists screaming already, it's not a real benchmark - but it's very useful for debugging video card problems. Probably these bunch of semantic whiners are the ones that removed the FPS from the default display in glxgears (at least in Ubuntu 6 "Dapper Drake") and lacking a man page I had to Google to discover glxgears -printfps brings it back. The old PC was doing about 350fps, crap by today's standards but it looked nice and smooth. The laptop was getting 70fps and it was choppy as hell. Uh oh!!

The first thing I found was that "direct render" aka DRI wasn't working; I got something like this:

% glxinfo | grep direct
Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".
direct rendering: No
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect

According to the ThinkWiki the ATI Mobility Rage 3M is supposed to support DRI. Big problem because the poor old CPU in this laptop is having to do all the work instead of offloading video tasks to the graphics card, which makes Ubuntu almost as slow as Windows XP which was on it previously before it decided to eat it's own registry.

At first I thought I needed to install the fglrx driver package as per the Ubuntu Desktop Guide. I followed the instructions and.... kaboom, X would no longer start. Oops, I should have read things more carefully - the ati driver X was using before was the right one, since this is an R128 card. After running sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and changing back to the ati driver, X came back, but I was back to square one - no direct rendering.

Well I searched some more and finally found the Tao Security Blog which pointed me in the right direction - I use FreeBSD a lot for my server work so his OS of choice didn't throw me off. Indeed, the problem was the paltry 8MB of memory on this card would not support DRI with 24 bpp. Changing it to 16 bpp and voila: Direct rendering enabled in my /var/log/Xorg.0.log

However, all was not well - glxgears still reported the same crap 70 fps.

The next piece of the puzzle came soon though, from the DRI Wiki. Enabling verbose mode via export LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose showed this interesting factoid when running glxgears:

libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib/dri/r128_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/dri/r128_dri.so: undefined symbol: _glapi_get_dispatch)

Well this drove me up the wall for a while. I dumped symbol tables, reinstalled all the libgl, mesa, etc packages in Synaptic, nothing helped. By the way, being able to search for files in Ubuntu packages helped a lot. Then I compared the size and dates of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 and r128_dri.so between the laptop and the PC and lo, libGL.so.1.2 was different sizes and dates...

Some quick investigating told me I was still using the fglrx version of that file. Oops - how was I to know it would overwrite it with an incompatible version? Oh well - removing the xorg-driver-fglrx package finally fixed it.

Hooray! The Latitude is now pushing about 500 fps on glxgears, and the UI is much snappier. Playing anime video no longer stutters and chops if you do... anything else. The CPU is happier too, and Ali's lap should be kept a little cooler.

Trying a new programmer's editor: TextMate

2006-07-25T00:28:00.000-07:00

Can't remember if I first saw it on digg or heard it on TWiT or something like that, but I got turned on to a new programmer's (or markupsman's) editor called TextMate a few days ago. I've been a Vim diehard for many years, and I'll still use it a lot, but this has the potential of finally converting me to the land of GUI editing.

I think the tutorial videos are what really convinced me - I plunked down the rego fee after just a few minutes of playing with it, and that's not something I normally do. It's just so damn slick! I find myself paying for programs on OS X, something I never did on Windows (confessions of a pir8). It just seems like it's something I can use over many hours and not want to barf. BBEdit reminded me of a Windows app actually - clunky, monolithic and ugly. I never got the appeal.

The first issue I had with TextMate prompted this exchange on the mail list:

I don't seem to be able to set up TM to handle tabs the same way. Here's the relevant snippet from my vimrc:
" Leave default for printing etc
set tabstop=8
" But use spaces between real tabs
set softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
" Use 'real' tabs (^I) when possible
set noexpandtab
This works great, real tabs (^I) are left alone at the usual 8 spaces, however I like to indent my blocks by 4 at a time. This tells vim to use a real tab if it can, and "pad out" with spaces at the end if the current indent isn't a multiple of 8. Here's what it looks like in vim:
<?php$
$page = new PageController($
    'shop.tpl',-$
    array($
>       'showAds'   => FALSE,$
>       'icon'>     => 'shop'),$
    'Online Store');$
$page->render();$
?>$
If I configure TM to use soft tabs at 4, then all my previous code looks wrong because it sets hard tabs to 4 as well. If I set it to 8, then my existing code looks fine but I'm not getting my desired softtab indent of 4.

This is a pretty annoying problem for me because I have hundreds of thousands of lines of code formatted this way :( Kind of ironic since I did it this way to maximize compatibility!

I guess what I'm looking for is the ability to set soft tab size independantly of hard tab size - the former to 4, the latter to 8. Is this possible??

(I suppose if there's no other option, I could convert all tabs to 8 spaces in all my files. However I like using tabs because it cuts down on file sizes a tiny bit.)

Unfortunately the only current solution is to convert tabs to 8 spaces in my files, and I wanted a macro or command to do it on a file by file basis as I have the need to edit them rather than touching every file en masse. Haris and Allan gave me these fast responses:

You can record a macro that uses that, or of course you can write a command. Anything you can do in the shell, you can wrap around a TM macro/command.

...

Use the Filter Through Command... (or create a command [1].)

The shell command you want is: expand -t8 with input/output set to document/replace document.

I'll give it a try and see how it goes. I've got a lot of code to maintain now with my AutoShrine Network sites, with a mix of PHP, HTML, SQL and CSS, so it should be a good test case.

PS: BSD style(9) all the way baby!!

Georgia all messed up on OS X

2006-07-25T00:14:00.000-07:00

Update: I finally got around to writing a little HTML file in my local Apache sandbox (thanks for bundling that, Apple!) and I was wrong, it was Georgia that was messed up, not Trebuchet. Downloading the new FFIL file from the download page below, wiping the previous TTF file and restarting seems to have solved it. Yay! Now Salon.com and a lot of other sites look right again - it's a pretty popular font these days, and having the spacing all messed up was really annoying. It's also the default font on Blogger so I can go back to using the Compose feature instead of Edit HTML....

A while back I copied all my fonts over from my PC to my PowerBook, and I think I messed up my installation of the Trebuchet font somehow. I've gone through Font Book and removed all the duplicates, and I'm reasonable certain the Trebuchet I've got is the one that shipped with Tiger, but for some reason in Firefox (haven't checked against Safari etc) sites that use Trebuchet have really messed up spacing, for instance anchor tags, italic text, navigating in textareas etc is completely screwed up. I found an archive of Microsoft's old Web Fonts package on the Download Microsoft Core Fonts page so I'm going to try installing that version and see if it fixes the problem.

Well, it installed Trebuchet MS, and I think the "bad" font is just Trebuchet so I'm sure it's getting chosen when CSS specifies it without the MS part, so I'm going to try removing Trebuchet and see what happens. I have a feeling other things that depend on it without the MS part will get messed up *sigh*

Font Book reports the only Trebuchet installed now is the MS Core Font version in my home directory, but it didn't seem to help. I moved these out of the system wide /Library/Fonts:

-rwxr--r-- 1 skye skye 134108 Aug 4 2004 trebuc.ttf*
-rwxr--r-- 1 skye skye 131188 Aug 4 2004 trebucbi.ttf*
-rwxr--r-- 1 skye skye 139288 Aug 4 2004 trebucit.ttf*

Maybe someone can comment on if those file sizes and dates match for your Tiger install. Quite annoying, considering how popular Treb is these days.

New Wifi Skype Phones, Very Cool

2006-07-24T23:58:00.000-07:00

Sort of hot on the heels of the Netgear Skype Phone comes an even sexier Wifi based Skype phone from Belkin in sexy black. I want one. IMO it's this shift that the telco's are sweating bullets about and are much more concerned with than Google Video when it comes to Net neutrality. And if they're not, they're dumb (possible)...

July 20 - 15:03 EDT Belkin today announced its new Wi-Fi Phone for Skype,which gives users the increased mobility to place free, unlimited domestic and international calls over the Internet to other Skype users, and low-cost calls to ordinary phones worldwide. The Wi-Fi Phone will ship in North America in August with launches in Asia, Europe, and Australia to follow shortly. The Belkin Wi-Fi Phone connects to many Wi-Fi hotspots around the world, allowing users to easily access their Skype account without turning on the computer. It is perfect to use at home, in the office, or in a free public hotspot. The Wi-Fi Phone works anywhere in the world where there is a free Wi-Fi network, also making it an ideal traveling companion. The Wi-Fi Phone for Skype is priced at US$149.99."

NewerTech drops prices on Apple replacement batteries

2006-07-24T23:52:00.000-07:00

This is a great idea - I'll definately get one of these uprated batteries, both my PowerBook G4 batteries have been through so many cycles they can barely make it through one DVD. Before my next big plane ride anyway. Then again, I've got a Video iPod now...

NewerTech drops prices on Apple replacement batteries
July 24 - 12:23 EDT Newer Technology has announced new low prices on its NuPower line of the highest capacity iBook and PowerBook replacement batteries. NewerTech NuPower extreme power batteries are available for every iBook and PowerBook model produced from 1998 to 2006 including: G3 PowerBooks at up to 62% more capacity, G4 PowerBooks at up to 48% more capacity, and iBooks at up to 50% more capacity, notes the company. Pricing for the replacement batteries start at US$99.95.

Welcome to my new blog

2006-07-24T23:44:00.000-07:00

I've been hosting my own Serendipity based blog for a while, not really doing much with it though. I'm going to use this new, separate blog for more technical information so I can keep track of it and have a nice searchable interface. The bookmarks menu in my browser is a cluttered mess and I can never find anything...

My other blog (which basically covers our trip to New Zealand) is at sauceonrice.com/blog