Technology

$ cd ~meri > Technology

PSA: Free to a home. Preferably local to DC.

2013.03.09

(It doesn’t have to be a good home, mind. Just a home. I’m in the Ashburny area about once a week, and otherwise to be found in Maryland. I will, if given sufficient incentive, ship the damned things, but you have to convince me that you really want them. And pay for postage.)

I have an entire box of defunct (expired, likely dead, of the “oops, not as secure as you think” variety) of SecurID tokens. And, by “entire box,” I mean “around 500 of the things.”

I’ve lost my enthusiasm for my original plan for them (an insecurity blanket), given that said blanket would a) be heavier than I generally prefer for a blanket, and 2) full of corners, and 3) rattling.

If anyone has a use for them, speak up. Otherwise, they will probably go into the trash. Or recycling. Do they count as plastic? Probably not, huh? Hrmph.

And no, they’re not stolen.

Classifieds, Craftiness, Technology

PSA: What’s up, Apple?

2013.03.01

For those of you who didn’t know it existed (like me, until a day or two ago), Apple provides a status dashboard. It covers Services, Stores, and iCloud, broken out with a reasonable amount of detail.

This might help with those, “Is it just me, or is $FOO really just broken right now?” moments. (You have those, too, right? It’s not just me? Is there a dashboard for that? Oh dear.)

PSA, Technology, Web Sites

Ask LazyWeb: Best (iOS) food-tracking app?

2013.02.20

Hello, again! This time, I’m here looking for input on a food-tracking app for an iOS device (must run on iPhone, an iPad app would be nifty, but not required).

Have you used any of these? What did you love (or hate) about it? Save me the trials and tribulations you’ve experienced!

(And, to be clear, I’m looking for an app to log what I eat and drink. I do not need a LoJack™ for my groceries.)

Lazyweb, Technology

Ask LazyWeb: Best jQuery reference?

2013.02.11

Dear the smart people,

I’m getting ready to write a tool in a language or two that I’ve never used, and have been told that learning jQuery would be in my best interest. I’m looking for references / tutorials that even a meri can understand. What say you?

 

Lazyweb, Technology

PSA: Google Security Notifications

2012.12.21

This should be of interest to many of you.

Google Security Notifications

Everyone who uses a Google account (Gmail, YouTube, Google Reader, Picasa, Blogspot, etc.) should probably enable this. Better safe than sorry,etc.

Via Google Operating System.

PSA, Technology

PSA: For those of you fleeing Instagram.

2012.12.20

If you’re fleeing Instagram, but trying to figure out how the heck to get your photos out, and what to do with them once you’ve got them, you might want to check out freethephotos.

(Please note that I am in no way connected to this service. I’ve never used it. I have no idea about any security issues involved. I don’t even know if it works. I read about it on the one thing well blog (which is a great blog that software junkies should check out), and thought I’d pass it on.)

PSA, Technology

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OS X UNIX Geeks: Discuss: MacPorts vs Homebrew vs Fink

2012.12.20

So, I have shiny new toy to play with, but it’s lacking some of the UNIX bits that make me feel really at home in the terminal. Previously, I’ve always defaulted to Fink when I’ve wanted package management on OS X. However, this time around, I thought I’d ask what the rest of you are doing. Do you, too, use Fink? Or are you more of a MacPorts sort of person? Do any of you out there use Homebrew? What made you choose the system you’re using? Why didn’t you go with one of the others?

Help me, Interweb! The fate of… well, nothing really important, except maybe my curiosity… is at stake. But I have lots of curiosity!

Technology

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Lazyweb: Calling all *NIX geeks.

2012.12.18

Ok, I know for a fact that my friends list here has a very high percentage of UNIX geeks. It’s you to whom I speak now.

What is your favorite monospace / fixed-width font? If you say Courier New, you will be disqualified from the discussion. (Kidding, kidding. If you say Courier, you will be disqualified.)

The criteria for me are:

  • character differentiation: I should be able to type iI1!lL and be able to tell what I typed (lower case i, upper case I, numeral 1, exclamation point, lower case L, upper case L). Same with oO0 (lower case o, upper case O, zero).
  • reasonably full character set: I’d like to have a few extended characters beyond ASCII, for typesetting purposes. Things like bullets (•) and degrees symbols (°) are nice.
  • font variants, mostly for typesetting, but also for some terminals: bold, italic options.
  • availability: available online, in OTF (by preference) or TTF.
  • price: free is good, cheap is acceptable, expensive is nice to know so I can dream.

What say you?

Technology

Hooray, ethernets.

2012.12.16

While I pretty much live on wireless networks for most of my Interwebly needs, there are times when a good old fashioned ethernet cable is your best friend. Like, say, when you’re transferring an 80G music collection from one computer to another. Directly connecting two GigE ports with a piece of CAT-5 is much much faster than doing it over WiFi (duh).

Just a few gigs to go! Yay, rsync! Yay, ethernet!

(Warning, your meri may be punchy. Please plan accordingly.)

Technology

Living in the future is weird.

2012.12.14

This week, I’ve acquired a new (to me, but also new in box, though not newest model) laptop. I got a great deal on it, thanks to a friend’s wife’s company liquidating some assets. It is a pretty spiffy system, all on its own: Late 2011 MacBook Pro, 2.4G Core i5, 4G of RAM, 500GB hard drive.

But then, being a geek, I got curious. And ともだち (tomodachi, the system in question) is getting a couple of upgrades.

First up, a new hard drive. I’ve opted for the Seagate Momentus XT. It’s a 2.5″ 750GB drive with a 32GB SSD cache. It is, by all reports, quite zippy. It is also $121.54, at the time of this writing.

I also thought that I might upgrade my RAM from 4G to 8G or so, and went to crucial to check things out. Turns out, I can upgrade from 4GB to 16GB for $77.99.

Now, I’m a reasonably old-school computer user, though I know many of you are much older hands. I never worked with punch cards. While I had used other computers before, the first one I really started making my own was a 386DX/33 that I got as a high school graduation gift. My benchmark pricing memory was being shocked when hard drives hit a dollar a megabyte. (That’s megabyte, kids, not gigabyte.)

And now, I find that I can get a kickass little laptop for less than a thousand dollars (with an admitted lucky break). It’s mostly the upgrades that I’m able to get for less than $200 that are really making me feel like I’m living in the future. I’ve recently renounced the statement, “I love living in the future,” but moments like these that kind of make me want to re-adopt it.

Shopping, Technology