My biggest problem with the latest MacBooks is Apples insistence on selling them without user serviceable batteries. To me that means that the battery life is what it is and you can’t do anything about it. I own an older MacBook Pro with the replaceable battery. And I have a pair of batteries for the machine. What a pain in the neck it is to have two batteries. The webs advice on battery storage is to keep Li-Ion batteries in a cool place at about 40% charge. Also, under no circumstances let your battery discharge to nothing. I have two batteries because I don’t want to be stuck on a trans-continental flight with no laptop but more and more airplanes have empower and a trans-continental length flight is only 5 hours of laptop time when you add it up. The new Apples advertise a 7 hour battery life. Mine does slightly better than 5 on each battery depending on the workload. So in the past few trips I’ve never gone on to the second battery. Given all these things the Empower to Magsafe charger is probably a better investment than a second battery.
Occasionally you do find Pearls on the web.
Shout outs to Rami Ben-Ami for his templates at lady-beetle.com. The two people out there who have read this blog before know that I’ve been struggling with building Templates for Joomla for a bit of time. My biggest struggle hasn’t been html, it has been finding a template which has a high code quality. To me that means: Coded using CSS rather than tables. Coded using enough care to get the indention right.
Gmail from Exodus
It looks like the Exodus XMPP/Jabber client has a new home here. I found out because a friend had signed up of a gmail account and wanted to use a real chat client. As an old Jabber user I told her about Exodus.
You are in a maze of teeny tiny passages, all alike…
Mod_python and Django have me going around in circles because I don’t want to take my old brain with learning either how to build apache with the worker MPM or mod_wsgi.
Soviet Toys
When I was younger I read an essay that told how the leaders of Soviet Russia enforced a standard of low quality in the creation of their toys. The reason for doing this was to instill low quality expectations from future Russian Citizens. While this was obviously a propaganda piece designed to make me think less of communist Russia, it resonates with me because I’m forced to do tech support on my son’s toys. The toy provoking this blog entry is the EA Sports Voice Command Pitching Machine. I’m going to put a new set of batteries in the thing and give it one more chance but given that it started out with new batteries in the first place I’m not holding out much hope. Now, this is in contrast to the Nintendo Wii and the Easton Junior Pitchback Elite. The problem with the Wii is that it’s made so well that he cannot unplug the Nunchuk attachment. The pitchback is a solid toy that does one thing but does it extremely well.
Jay’s growing up in a Mac/Linux/TiVo world so when toys disappoint like this it really bugs him. When I look at his face I have to ask if we are doing our children any good when we provide them with poor quality toys. In consumer goods I believe that your choice is: cost, feature set, quality: pick two. It’s hard watching my son learn this.
— Chris
Samsung 2333HD Dubious Easter Egg
I purchased a Samsung 2333HD Monitor to supplement/replace my 6 year old Samsung 213T. Until 30 minutes ago I would have classified this experience as disappointing. That is until I found the HDMI Easter Egg that Samsumg hid in the monitor’s firmware.
My problem is that I want to be able to use both my MacBook Pro and my Mac Mini with this monitor. And I want a full digital signal path from either computer. On the 213T that meant switching cables or sucking it up and using one computer with an Analog VGA input. The Advantage that the 2333HD has is that it takes HDMI Digital inputs. I got an HDMI -> DVI cable and ran it to the monitor and I was surprised to see the poorest display that I’ve seen in a while. Luckily I ran across a review on the internet of the monitor that mentioned that it will change how it handles an HDMI input signal if you label it as coming from a PC. A couple of menu settings later and I’m looking at a reasonable display.
It’s nice that they set things up this way. It would have been nicer if they had documented it in the manual.
Website setup.
This seems obvious but it’s really handy to have my website setup with DAV access to the backend for administration purposes. I’ve recently setup on of my sites this way and it works out quite nicely.
Split horizon, Bind, and reloading zones
I always have to look this up. To reload a zone on bind 9 where the server is running split horizon you need: rndc reload
bogofilter and the corrupt wordlist.db
Looks like something burped on my mailserver and my bogofilter wordlist got too big. Probably something to do with limits anyhow. In any case I was looking for a way to recover from the issue and came across this pearl in the Bogofilter FAQ. Well, the advice is incomplete. If you really hose up the database then bogoutil -d will stop printing entries before the end of the database. The next recovery step is to use the db utilities: db_dump and db_load to fix the database. db_dump -r (on FreeBSD db_dump-<version>) dumps the database into a text file and db_load creates a text file from a word list. The problem is that the advice in the bogofilter faq is out of date. It looks like there are some parameters that have to be specified. My solution: use db_dump without the -r that creates a broken database with a default header. Copy the header into the new text file and then append the output of db_dump -r to that. Et voila!
Mother of all MiFi wishlist
My Mother of all MiFi wishlist:
- Runs for 4 ~ 5 hours on rechargable batteries. Preferably 4xAA NiMh cells which I have in abundance.
- WPA encryption if possible otherwise pre-auth by mac address or live auth via authpf.
- Automatically connects to my lan using certificate based IPSec.
- Provides DNS locally.
- Gui configuration but can be a python TkInter of X11 Gui.
- 802.11b/g although given my experience last week 802.11n over 5GHz would be nice.
- SNMP configuration? That’s why I got an enterprise number from IETF.
To Do:
- Put the Soekris Net4511 on my Kill-a-watt meter to see how much juice it really needs (and how efficient the power supply is.)
- Figure out how to get USB into the thing. The outside internet will be a Verizon or Sprint network dongle.
- Get a case and power supply for the 4511
- Will OpenBSD provide WPA2 authentication?
- How hard is it going to be to get a USB jack into a 4511 case? (Bill Johnson?)
- How many people can I connect to it before it’s overloaded?
- 4521 Case? Automatically has room for batteries.