Category: General

  • Lego Brick Separator

    Lego Brick Separator

    We got some Lego for my son the other day and it came with a Lego Brick Seprarator which has to be the best invention since Lego itself. It makes short work of stubborn bricks that are stuck together. As a kid I used to resort to using my teeth to separate them. This thing makes…

  • .bash_profile vs .bashrc in OS X Terminal.app

    .bash_profile vs .bashrc or why does OS X ignore my .bashrc in Terminal.app?

  • Keyboard shortcut to un-minimise a window in OS X

    It’s a bit fiddly but it can be done. Cmd+m to the item you want to un-minimise, then while still holding cmd, press Option. Release Cmd and then finally release Option.

  • Cmd+m to Minimise a window in OS X

    Cmd+m to minimise a window in OS X

  • Collectd causing rrd illegal attempt to update using time errors

    I found collectd causing rrd illegal attempt to update using time errors. I was seeing a whole load of lines like this in my syslog: Aug 20 16:27:12 mythbox collectd[32167]: rrdtool plugin: rrd_update_r (/var/lib/collectd/rrd/mythbox/df-root/df_complex-free.rrd) failed: /var/lib/collectd/rrd/mythbox/df-root/df_complex-free.rrd: illegal attempt to update using time 1345444032 when last update time is 1345444032 (minimum one second step) It was…

  • Choosing passwords for the 21st century

    The recent Mat Honan hack got me thinking about password strength. It turns out he was hacked not due to having a poor password, but because of a security flaws in Amazon and Apples’ systems. Nevertheless it serves as a good reminder to keep yourself safe. One thing you can do is use very long…

  • Event Cinemas’ lousy customer service comes good

    Recently I went to see Dark Knight Rising with my wife. The volume in the cinema was too loud and we didn’t enjoy it because of that. My wife went out to complain to the only person she could find. A security guard who couldn’t be arsed to do anything about it. He said he…

  • Debugging of Pathfinder Rovers

    Jeff Waugh @jdub tweeted an interesting article about how the previous Mars rovers turned out to have a fairly serious software problem, and how the JPL engineers diagnosed and fixed it. Some of the points I found particularly interesting: JPL use a propriety, off the shelf operating system to run the rovers (VxWorks) having a…

  • Flipping the mouse wheel scroll direction in Windows 7

    I have been getting very confused between the mouse wheel scroll directions in Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion. As I consider OS X to be the future, I decided to try and flip the mouse wheel scroll direction in Windows. Turns out there is a registry setting to do this: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\????\????\Device Parameters Set…

  • openscad is cool

    UPDATE: You might also be interested in my list of programmatic CAD tools. Brendan introduced me to openscad while we were at the hacker space last night. I really like it and I can’t believe I didn’t try this tool out before. You essentially write your solid design in a programming language. Its simple to…