Displaying post 1 to 37 of 37
Does anyone have any ideas about why my 2003 Subaru Outback stutters on acceleration for the ten or fifteen minutes after I fill it up with gas?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 11:13 AM on March 11, 2008
(9 comments)
My wife and I both
loathe our Motorola RAZRs, and fortunately, we're able to replace them at subsidized, new-customer pricing at the end of this month (October 28th, to be specific). We're Verizon Wireless customers for a slew of reasons, and are going to stick with VZW; does anyone have recommendations for phones we should consider?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 9:45 AM on October 15, 2007
(24 comments)
Save Eastern Market
When fire gutted the 130 year-old Eastern Market building overnight Sunday night, most everyone in Washington, DC's Capitol Hill began mourning the loss of the neighborhood's centerpiece. After the mourning, though, began a bunch of ideas on how to help keep informed and even participate in the rebuilding process, and from that, my wife and I started
Save Eastern Market.
posted to Projects by delfuego
at 4:01 PM on May 3, 2007
I have a bunch of wooden casing moldings around the interior doors of our Washington, DC home, and over the past 75 to 100 years, they've taken quite a beating. I'd love to slowly replace the worst of them with identical moldings, but despite a pretty exhaustive search on my own, I can't find anyone who still carries anything with the same profile. Does anyone have any tips for molding manufacturers/sellers that have good variety, especially of moldings that are accurate to the turn-of-the-century period?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 8:27 AM on April 13, 2007
(12 comments)
Does anyone happen to know how to find an electronic version of Title 18 Chapter 3 of the District of Columbia Municipal Regulations? Damn that DC,
only certain titles of the DCMR have been made available online (apparently for the simple reason that
DC can't muster the staff to put them all online, bleah). I'm hunting for the actual law that establishes DC's driving infraction point system, something that's apparently codified in said Title 18 Chapter 3, and would love to get a version of the law that I can keep archived on my computer!
(Apparently, the entirety of the DCMR is available on Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw, but non-law peons like myself don't get the benefit of this. Double bleah.)
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 4:15 PM on September 24, 2006
(4 comments)
OK, so I'm sitting here with one of my buddies, talking about his research, and we realized that we know the word for "of or relating to mice" (murine), and the word for "of and related to cow" (bovine), but have no clue what the word for "of or related to rat" is. And after what we thought of as a pretty comprehensive web search (including
this very good Google Answer), we're no closer to an answer. Anyone know what the word we're looking for is?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 1:47 PM on September 16, 2006
(14 comments)
Doing It Ourselves
After my wife and I purchased our first home a month ago, I walked around the house and quickly realized that I was making a mental checklist of all the things that I wanted to do -- as in, do myself, with my own hands and tools. That was my first clue that I had just crossed the threshold of true DIY-land, and I started to get really excited about that. Being an inveterate geek, I figured I would end up documenting everything as well... and how better than a DIY weblog? From that was born
Doing It Ourselves.
posted to Projects by delfuego
at 10:14 PM on June 12, 2006
Does anyone have recommendations for a company to replace windows in Washington, D.C.? I've got a few original, uninsulated, leaded-glass windows that need to go bye-bye.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 2:42 PM on April 4, 2006
(4 comments)
Is there a utility out there that does for Javascript code what
HTML Tidy does for (X)HTML? I've started working with a bunch of Javascript code that's just messy as all hell, and would love to preprocess it into something a bit neater before buckling down and getting to work. Something online (similar to
this online HTML Tidy interface) would be perfect, something *nix command-line would be good as well, and I guess an app that handled the cleanup would be fine (OS X preferred). This might be a no-brainer, but I've searched high and low without results...
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 8:19 AM on November 12, 2005
(5 comments)
Some of the best still images of what remains in Hurricane Katrina's wake
are up over at the
Washington Post; there are a lot of compelling shots there that put into perspective the horror of the situation. If you're looking for a well-edited group of photos that convey what the Gulf coast has faced over the past few days, and will face in the coming months, this is it; I'm in awe of the photographers that continue to work hard to document the disaster.
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 3:55 PM on September 1, 2005
(48 comments)
Can anyone help locate a Craftsman screwdriver that the fine folks at Craftsman say doesn't exist? A friend was helping me install an air conditioner last week and developed a crush on a screwdriver I have for getting to screws in tight spaces; it has "Craftsman 41380 USA" engraved on it, and it was given to me as a gift. (
I shot a quick picture of the screwdriver; it's best-described as a small metal donut with a rough outer edge and with a narrow cylinder sitting in the hole of the donut that accepts either hex bits or square bits.) About six months ago, I was able to walk into a Sears hardware store and pick two more up as a gift to give another friend, but now, the people at Sears and Craftsman say that that part number isn't valid, and that they've never heard of anything like I'm describing. Oddly,
Googling for the part number (and Yahoo!ing, and MSNing) doesn't bring anything up, either, nor does a search on eBay. Am I crazy, or has this incredibly useful screwdriver not only been wiped from the planet, but also from the annals of tool history?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 11:19 AM on June 18, 2005
(7 comments)
I'm looking to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) when it's released next week, but have one fear that's holding me back from doing it as soon as my delivery arrives: does anyone know if Tiger and the current releases of MySQL 4.0 play well together?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 4:11 PM on April 21, 2005
(6 comments)
I stumbled across an Internet Explorer display problem today that I just can't figure out. It feels CSS-related, and it feels float-related, but despite knowing all about the Holly Hack and all about how to deal with most every float-related IE bug I've seen prior to today, this one has me totally stumped. Can someone help?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 2:39 PM on April 6, 2005
(4 comments)
Yet another dorky Linux question: how can I install an upgraded version of the
Berkeley DB libraries on my RedHat Linux 9 machine without totally horking all the apps that are installed that rely on the older version? (more inside)
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 11:16 AM on October 23, 2004
(3 comments)
In the midst of setting up a new
Apache webserver, I started investigating the purpose of the modules that come with the default installation, a process which led me to
mod_cern_meta. It's odd -- it's a module that lets you embed
web page meta information into separate files, and it's loaded by default, but it's not enabled for any sites or directories, nor have I
ever seen it used. A few Google searches turned up no obvious web applications that use it, either. Is there something I'm missing here? Is there any reason I should keep the module loaded?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 12:52 PM on September 6, 2004
(7 comments)
I have a friend who's developing an application that solves a board game via visual recognition of the current state of the board. The image is captured via a webcam, and he's currently in the midst of discovering that the quality of the image (or specifically, the color and white balance) acquired by CMOS-based webcams is just subpar. Can anyone recommend a decent, inexpensive (less than $75, perhaps?) CCD-based webcam?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 10:53 AM on August 10, 2004
(9 comments)
I consider myself a reasonably good computer person, so the fact that I'm having this problem angers me. I'm working on a laptop for a friend -- a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S253 -- that runs Windows ME. When she gave it to me, it had a trivial problem with the Content Advisor, which I fixed; it also ran fine on a network. Now, 28 critical updates later, it runs fine off the network (which is the way she uses it), but the minute you plug a network cable into its built-in ethernet port and then try to run anything which uses the Windows Shell (e.g., Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, any open/save dialog box), it freezes solid, and you have to manually quit the Explorer process in order to recover it. I've tried everything -- deleted all the clients in the Network control panel, plugged it into three different Ethernet switches, updated every single driver and/or BIOS that I could, prayed to the Holy Gods Of Built-In Hardware -- to no avail. Any ideas?
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 2:51 PM on August 8, 2004
(13 comments)
I'm in need of putting a somewhat nonstandard 3.5" floppy drive --
this one, a combo floppy plus flash memory reader -- into a
Dell Dimension 4600 case. The problem is that there are only two options for faceplates for the 3.5" bay in the Dimension 4600, one that's solid and one that is solid save for the slim slot for the floppy drive (meaning that it will cover up the flash slots, and probably won't line up with the floppy slot at that). (You can see this
here.)
Anyone have any ideas? I've already called Dell, and they don't offer any other solutions.
posted to Ask Metafilter by delfuego
at 4:31 PM on June 17, 2004
(9 comments)
So alas, one of the processor fans in the MetaFilter server decided to up and die, which coincided perfectly with a planned vacation to New York. Upon coming back, no replacement fan was to be found on my doorstep (due to stupid delayed shipping by the company from whom the replacement was ordered), so a trip to CompUSA later, we're back in business. Sorry 'bout that.
posted to MetaTalk by delfuego
at 5:13 PM on February 16, 2004
(78 comments)
Sorry about the downtime -- it turns out that storms and thunder and lightning make the power in Brookline, MA go away for a short bit. Thank goodness for the wonder of uninterruptible power supplies and graceful shutdowns...
posted to MetaTalk by delfuego
at 4:10 PM on August 3, 2003
(9 comments)
Alas, there was a critical fact overlooked on the recent hardware upgrade, one which left the server vulnerable to the [sapphire|slammer|SQ hell] worm. All's better now.
posted to MetaTalk by delfuego
at 10:17 AM on January 25, 2003
(17 comments)
The first mention of AIDS on Usenet
was in the net.singles group back on December 20, 1982. In it, seven people grasp for information about the disease -- how it's transmitted, how long it takes to start to show symptoms, and what those symptoms could be. It's a window both into the early days of AIDS knowledge
and the early days of the Internet, and a fine example of people using 'net-based community groups to acquire information and ask questions.
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 12:56 PM on December 1, 2002
(6 comments)
Sorry about the brief outage today; the networking equipment at this end of the T1 had a seizure, apparently, and needed to be restarted in order to get things back in order. Makes no sense to me (or to the networking gurus at my ISP), but there you have it.
posted to MetaTalk by delfuego
at 12:50 PM on June 26, 2002
(12 comments)
After an eventless trip across the United States, MetaFilter is now happily living again. I was trying to come up with a name for my apartment, now that MetaFilter lives here -- Pyra East? MetaBroadway? I'm not creative right now.
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 10:12 AM on May 31, 2001
(60 comments)
Poor, poor kid.
It sucks when you are out there protesting, get apprehended by the authorities, and are so scared that you have a little, ahem, "accident"; it sucks more when a camera's there to catch it.
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 4:49 PM on April 18, 2001
(41 comments)
Is it just me, or does it seem ridiculous that Napster will
have one billion dollars of expendable net income over the next five years that it will be
able to pay to the record labels? The labels would be crazy to accept this; in a year, when Napster files for Chapter 11, the settlement would vanish.
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 5:27 PM on February 20, 2001
(26 comments)
It isn't just Dubya that's making idiotic mistakes in the White House. The Office of the Press Secretary has posted
a transcript of a press briefing, in which
they themselves identify a source by name that is supposed to be identified only "on background" and as "a White House official." (Who the hell is John Bridgeland, anyway?)
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 6:28 PM on February 1, 2001
(12 comments)
Elian's fathers rights were affirmed today, and
the decision is already online. One thing I love about the Internet is that things like this take nanoseconds to be available to the public (if the system's working right, at least!) -- where previously you had to rely on the newsmakers' spin on things, now you can read the decision yourself and come to your own conclusions.
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 10:29 AM on June 1, 2000
(4 comments)
Does anyone know what happened to
GirlText? Elizabeth was supercool, but for the last week or two, there's been a "denied access" page. Bummer.
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 7:40 AM on May 21, 2000
Anyone know what happened to
Bloat? It went and disappeared today; the page sort of redirects to the main TheWebToday page ("sort of" because "/bloat/" stays in the URL). And the Bloat list isn't in the right-hand panel of the main page, either.
Has Sally Tenpenny gone and left? :(
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 9:10 PM on May 9, 2000
(8 comments)
I wish that this page
had the
complete transcript of Oprah's interview with Janet Reno, since at the very end, she said that she hoped Reno could take a little time off "and maybe not shake so much." Seeing as Reno has Parkinson's Disease, that's a pretty offensive thing to say; if Oprah didn't know this, then she should do a little more homework on her guests, and if she did, then she should be asked sometime in a live interview if she'll get a chance "to maybe stuff a little less food into her overeating mouth."
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 1:34 PM on May 2, 2000
(4 comments)
RedHat Linux security problem uncovered.
Today, apparently it was discovered that if you install the Piranha package with RedHat 6.2 (ostensibly part of the default installation, but there's controversy over this), a default password is installed that would give anyone access to the Piranha configuration package; from there, it is apparently trivial to execute any command on the box that you want.
I find it very interesting that the fact that Microsoft had a "backdoor password" in a DLL made
huge news (and it turned out to be patently false), yet this has gotten almost
no press. I'd like to think otherwise, but I know it's because people hate Microsoft, and thus are eager to deride it... and yet here's proof that even the mighty Linux is susceptible to the same exact problems.
Next time you reach for the keyboard to cry out "nyah nyah!" at the discovery of some problem with Windows, remember this...
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 9:38 PM on April 24, 2000
(15 comments)
A day after a MSIE bug, a Netscape bug.
I figured I had to post this here, since the anti-Microsoft crowd always posts about the MSIE bugs, but seems to stay
reeeeeal quiet when a bug is found in their chosen browser. I wish that people would just acknowledge that all software has bugs, and that discovering them is a helpful link in fixing them.
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 10:23 PM on April 20, 2000
(4 comments)
A terribly misleading use of the .GOV top-level domain
has surfaced. The House Republican Committee, by all means an organization that deserves a .gov designation, has decided to
use that designation for purely partisan means... the site is chock-full of "aren't Republicans great?" feel-good stories and digs at Democrats.
What a terrible precedent to set; I can hardly wait for all of the interest group caucuses to start grabbing their own .gov domain names and throwing up pages that, by virtue of their URL, pretend to be the official word of the U.S. Government.
How does one go about registering displeasure with the person in charge of granting .GOV addresses?
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 9:36 AM on April 11, 2000
(8 comments)
Yay! The flag burning amendment is dead
, at least for another year. What offends me most is: why did 63 Senators vote for this? Second most: do these people actually believe themselves when they preach that people have fought and died for the flag? I *hope* that no soldiers have fought for the flag, per se; I would hope that our military fights for the ideals of which the flag is a nice, abstract representation.
I've put up
a short page with links to the official Congressional Record transcripts of the debate, for those who are interested. (It gives me reading for my plane ride tomorrow, if I can avoid the calling of my Sims family.)
posted to MetaFilter by delfuego
at 5:47 PM on March 29, 2000
(5 comments)
