I've never worked out how you are supposed to receive them at a time other than when they are broadcast, mind you...

hmmm... take the signal from your antenna, shift it to audio frequencies, record on some analog media (tape or whatever)... then to "receive" the signal you play back your recording, shift back to the original frequency range, and pump it in to the RF input of your TV...

so... if you did... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 6:57 PM on June 25, 2008

not actually an answer, since it's a home-built watch, but I love the geek appeal of the pong watch... it plays pong against itself, so the score display tells the time...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 7:31 PM on June 19, 2008

(for Australians only) the old Life - Be In It jingle gets the occasional smile or chuckle from strangers when I'm on the way to work...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 11:53 PM on June 12, 2008

whistling it, that is...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 11:55 PM on June 12, 2008

is there a piece of hardware I could swap my sim-card into and plug into my laptop?

there are devices like this for GSM, and it appears also for 3G services... I believe the GSM ones present to your laptop like a serial port with a PPP server on the other end, so you set it up as if it were a dialup connection...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 9:47 PM on June 11, 2008

editing over a remote screen at the end of a DSL line is going to be excruciatingly slow - you're essentially planning on sending uncompressed video (as displayed on screen) over the DSL slow direction... this is unlikely to be much fun for anyone...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 6:37 AM on June 11, 2008

if you really want to make it look like NORAD, you could use it for playing DEFCON on...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 11:08 PM on June 10, 2008

if you follow the path Joh suggests, this tech info library article on login hooks and Mike Bombich's logintrack.sh script might be a helpful starting point...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 5:34 PM on June 10, 2008

perhaps one of the other families who have offered to let these people stay with them could suggest it... "you've been staying with batcrazy's family for a while, and we thought they might like a bit of their space back. would you like to take our spare room for a short while?"
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 7:12 AM on June 10, 2008 marked best answer

setup for an advance fee fraud?
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 6:39 AM on June 10, 2008

bingo! thanks, zamboni...

out of curiosity, was that from memory, or via. some sort of search?
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:54 PM on June 8, 2008

Caduceus - I suspect "geeky teenage outsider uncovers the Big Secret" is a pretty common theme in books read by geeky teenage outsiders...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 11:04 PM on June 8, 2008

on the specific topic of dentures, my granddad was given dentures for his 21st(?) birthday... off to the dentist, pulled out an entire perfectly good mouth full of teeth, and wore dentures for the rest of his life... at the time it was apparently not a bad move if you (or your parents) could afford it, since the expectation was you'd have a non-negligible proportion of your teeth replaced throughout your life anyway... but I have access to modern dentistry, toothpaste, and fluoridated water...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 3:24 AM on June 5, 2008 marked best answer

is the wireless base station an Apple-branded AirPort unit, or something else?

it's been a while since I used an Apple base station, but they used to do some magic so modem/DSL messages from the base station would show up on Apple clients... if it's an Apple base station it might be worth taking a look in the AirPort Admin Utility (in the Utilities folder in Applications) to see if there's an "always stay connected" option that needs turning on for the base station...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 3:15 AM on June 5, 2008

onedarkride's looks OK, except it'll barf on filenames with any odd characters that xargs interprets as seperators... if you change the find/xargs line to

find $nas_folder -name $delete_file -print0 | xargs -0 rm -r

(that's a zero in both "-print0" and "-0") find will separate the found items with null characters, and xargs will only treat null characters as record separators...

you'd still be... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 4:42 AM on June 3, 2008

hmmm... vaguely mangled... remove the blank lines between every content line...

to be a bit clearer, that's a single find command piped into xargs, and the trailing "\" on each line continues the command to the next line... otherwise it'd be even nastier to look at...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 4:45 AM on June 3, 2008

oh, and if you want to test that it won't go and delete all your important files/directories too, change the "-print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf" into just a plain "-print" to see what it'll be matching...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 4:52 AM on June 3, 2008

ah, there's a thought... in your original script most of the directory finds are exec-ing "rm" not "rm -r", which won't work (you need recursive delete for directories, like the first two have)...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 6:00 AM on June 3, 2008

how "recent" are you after? static.wikipedia.org currently has HTML of 2008-02...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 8:47 PM on May 29, 2008

(and in theory at least, "searchable" comes for free with Spotlight on your mac...)
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 8:49 PM on May 29, 2008

gah! looks like static.wikipedia.org is b0rked in some way or other, and is missing dumps for languages en and upwards... never mind me...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 8:52 PM on May 29, 2008

+1 to orthogonality's answer...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 9:46 PM on May 22, 2008

even if, in the end, you don't have the resources to pursue this (assuming they are infringing and don't stop), the groups behind the libraries that HandBrake bundles also have an interest... if Kandalu(?) aren't interested in resolving the issue I'd be emailing the foo-dev lists of your component libraries to let them know what's up...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 11:08 PM on May 21, 2008 marked best answer

VNC can give you remote view/control, but I'm not aware of anything that'll cover your other requirements... a slight improvement over having 2 management machines would be a single Mac with ARD plus SchoolVue running under Parallels...

and not directly related to the question, but if you haven't seen it you might find Mike Bombich's Boot Picker (plus the other Mac lab deployment tools/tips on his site) useful...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:37 PM on May 17, 2008

it sounds like you mean "static IP addresses" rather than "static routing" - these terms are not interchangeable... also, the network description you've provided don't seem to make sense... it looks to me like this is the setup

internet --- (?.?.?.?) cable modem (?.?.?.?) --- (?.?.?.?) Linksys (192.168.100.1) --- (192.168.100.?) Belkin (192.168.101.1) --- (192.168.101.?) PC

which doesn't include the 192.168.1.1 you're using as... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 11:13 PM on May 15, 2008 marked best answer

I use Mythbuntu (ubuntu with MythTV bundled in) for my DVR. It works for me, but if you're not looking to build/configure the box it may not be for you.

For Australian EPG, shepherd does good work - it scrapes a number of other data sources and gives you a damn fine aggregate data feed. It can output the data in standard xmltv format, so as long as whatever DVR you use can accept xmltv EPG data you should be golden...... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 11:51 PM on May 13, 2008

Since you've lost your resource forks and finder info in the rsync copy, I'd first off try using the Apple migration helper - if it works, then you know all is good and that's that... if it doesn't make it through then it's time to recover whatever you want... don't just rsync everything back, you'll kill the 10.5 install... if you copy over the old ~/Library that'll bring in all your mail, browser settings, and other user-specific data... specifically, mail is ~/Library/Mail and... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 9:48 AM on May 10, 2008

and if you're worries about having a half-completed migration, just nuke and reinstall 10.5... easy, since it's fresh anyway...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 9:49 AM on May 10, 2008

"Is there an ideal size for the disk cache?" - no, not really... or alternatively, yes, but it depends on a whole lot of things, including some the browser cannot know (like whether the user needs that disk space for something else)...

if you only browse a few sites regularly the cache can be smaller and still provide decent coverage, but if you browse more widely the cache will have to be larger in order to be useful (by keeping static images etc from all... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 9:31 AM on May 10, 2008

I've asked several people this question and what I usually get is a string of brand names.

in your "italian" bit, I notice you included some real italian, because you know those sounds are "italian" sounds... people who don't speak english will still be exposed to english language brand names, because they're everywhere, so stringing a bunch of them together would provide a slab of the appropriate sounding syllables while carrying... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 7:03 AM on April 10, 2008

for the NAS device to be directly visible to OtherMac, it needs to be on the same network - the only way to do that with the layout you've described is by having MacMini bridge the wired and wireless networks together. this is easy in Linux, but I've not seen this done with OSX (may well be possible, but I've not seen it done). it also sounds like the built in file server is refusing to share out a volume that's mounted from the network, which is on the face of it a reasonable call, but annoying... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 2:35 AM on April 10, 2008

hmmm... while the setup Alterscape found is called "bridging" by it's author, it's actually just putting the wired devices behind NAT on the machine the article calls "Ethernet Basestation"... this is the configuration you already have, and (as you've found) doesn't work...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 2:39 AM on April 10, 2008

if you like gnome-terminal, try installing MacPorts and then "sudo port install gnome-terminal"... MacPorts is a framework for installing unix software on OSX, and is well useful for all your unix development needs...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 7:38 AM on April 5, 2008

what exactly is happening when you try to "access any Google sites"? working out what's wrong (and then how to fix it) is easier if you provide the actual error messages that you're getting... is firefox giving you an error dialog box? if so, what does it say? are you getting some error page showing up inside the browser window instead of the google page you're expecting? if so, what does it say?
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 7:31 AM on April 5, 2008

here's the one you're after...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:53 PM on April 3, 2008 marked best answer

assuming that no header line will begin with a digit, run your text through

perl -pe 'next unless /^\d/; s/(.{0,50}) /\1\n /g'
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:22 PM on April 1, 2008

gah... f'n HTML collapsing multiple spaces... there are 4 space characters between the \n and the /g...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:26 PM on April 1, 2008

hang about... that gives the second and subsequent lines from a wrapped line a top length of 54 characters... grrr...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:38 PM on April 1, 2008

chrisamiller - ummm... does that wrap lines at 50 characters?

I ought to be shot for this, but still... and with any luck the spacing will be right this time...
perl -pe 'next unless /^\d/; s/(\d.{0,49}) /\1\n/; while (s/\n([^ ].{0,46}) /\n \1\n/) {}; s/\n([^ ])/ \1/'explanation: loop over the file, printing each line once we're done with it. unless it starts with a digit, leave it as is. change (a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:56 PM on April 1, 2008 marked best answer

nicwolff's Text::Wrap answer is the right one...

chris - tell me about it... I feel dirty for having barfed that out onto the keyboard... :)
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 11:52 PM on April 1, 2008

a bunch of industry groups and analysts publish salary survey data that should help you calibrate. I don't know about the quality of any of the US surveys, but googling should point you at some ballpark numbers.
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:08 PM on April 1, 2008

and while you're at it, complete a survey or 2 as well - the more data goes into these things, the better for all of us...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:14 PM on April 1, 2008

acidrabit - plus they say "However, the association was substantially attenuated with further adjustment for educational attainment, cigarette smoking, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors associated with red meat intake"... also, I may not be reading those tables correctly, but it looks to me like the largest increase they saw, for the top third of long-term red meat consumption compared to the lowest third, was a 1% increased risk... I think slow graffiti... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 2:34 AM on April 1, 2008

misinformation, acridrabbit? I read it as approx twice as likely, on top of a base 1% risk, which is a ~1% increase in risk... let's say there's something with a 1 in a million risk, and I do something that increases my risk 1000-fold, I've increased my risk all the way to 1 in a thousand... saying "1.5 times as likely" without stating the base risk is a classic way of inflating the apparent scariness of these sort of numbers...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 8:13 AM on April 1, 2008

Shoes looks nice from what I've seen, and _why (the author) does good work... Tk 8.5 is visually much prettier than the old versions, can be used from many scripting languages (not just Tcl), and is packaged for Ubuntu - newly launched docs site here... if you don't want to deal with the "nitty-gritty of the OS" then you want to stay the hell away from Java and go with something on top of a scripting language...... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 1:57 AM on April 1, 2008

Can I actuall influence the order in how the songs are saved and played? Especially CAN I USE FOLDERS on the iPod shuffle?

no. that's because it's an iPod Shuffle, whose purpose is to shuffle your tunes before playing them to you. the best you can do is copy the tunes on to it in the order you want to listen.
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 2:37 AM on March 17, 2008

for booting off a USB device, I'd recomment extlinux instead of GRUB... it's dumb as a rock, and won't give you the nice kernel package based boot options updater, but it makes USB booting Just Work without the futzing around GRUB requires...

added bonus is it uses the same config file as isolinux does, so that's one less thing to deal with for shifting to CD boot...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 4:08 AM on March 16, 2008

OpenVPN runs over TCP, is un Ubuntu universe, has a Windows client, and can be configured to listen on whatever port you want...
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 7:52 PM on February 28, 2008 marked best answer

(of course to make everything do what you want you'd also need to set your Ubuntu box up as a client to both the PPTP and IPsec work VPNs, routing all traffic appropriately... not difficult if you know unix networking, but not easy if you don't...)
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 7:55 PM on February 28, 2008

I don't do Access, but if that doesn't work for you perhaps something like

UPDATE tracking t SET invoiceno = (SELECT invoice_no FROM so_invoiceheader h WHERE h.salesorderno = t.salesorder)

(perhaps with a "WHERE invoiceno IS NULL" or some other restriction in the outer UPDATE statement so you're not needlessly updating every record every time)... this assumes that you don't have multiple invoices off a single sales order - if you do,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by russm at 10:36 PM on February 6, 2008