Applications
-> Utilities
-> Disk Utility
-> Images Menu
-> Open...

I want to open the file /tmp/FC3-i386-disc2.iso.  But the dialog provides no way to view the /tmp/ directory.  It appears that’s impossible.  If it IS possible, a half-hour of searching has yet to lead me to the solution.  Anyone?  Please??

Hi Anthony, Your tutorial on making a Kenwood Aux. Adapter is for a specific Protocol of the Kenwood cdc(cd-changer).

If you want to add the following to your tutorial I dont mind:
For Protocol C(1995’ish) of the Kenwood cdc you need to put the resistor(10k ohm) between points 4(ch-reqh) and 12(ch-reqc) of your tutorial. This is to get the H.U to get the extra Disc Menu.

Left Audio in is point 9 and Right is point 5. Audio ground is point 7.

There are Several cdc protocols(D,C,B,A; D being oldest) and I guess the pinouts are all different.

Those of you who know my dad and/or my neighbor Dan Watkins will appreciate this little exchange that happened in a dream I just had:

Quoting a strange dream:

Dad: Where’s Nick?
Dan: They’re caving, in Holland.
Dad: Where?
Dan: It’s the bomb.

I was up in my room and they were in the kitchen, and Dan had just come up from the basement, where he had been playing my drums -- he was playing a song from Rage Against The Machine’s "Evil Empire" album, and he totally nailed it.  I was in my room banging my head and waving my arm as he played  ( :

OK, back to sleep.

I saw a Segway in person for the first time in my life today.  A guy was riding it and he was flying.  He went from the sidewalk down the little ramp to the street and across an intersection without slowing down at all.  It was pretty funny but also looked really fun and cool.

And it looks like Adelphia has relented a little on their upload cap.  As long as I’ve been a customer of their cable internet service, it’s been capped at 256 kilobits/sec (32 kiloBytes/sec), which is pretty pitiful.  But for the past few weeks I’ve noticed (in disbelief) that my tx-meter showed I was transmitting at around 100KB/s.  Today I transferred a 350MB file and sure enough, it took 57 minutes for an average of 102KB/s.

This is good news since I tend to transfer files a lot, and whenever I’m at work I have a VNC window viewing my home desktop, and I’m also often streaming music from my home system to listen at work.  At the old 32KB/s the music skipped a lot and the remote desktop window was really slow.

Update 20050517: either there’s a problem with my connection, or they changed their minds about this.  My connection is now limited to 50KB/s upload -- still better than the old 32, but only by about 50%, whereas the old new speed of 100KB/s was a 200% improvement.  Hrmph.

Image-editing programs can be so frustrating, and it seems that often the most frustrating things are the simplest.  When I can’t figure out how to do something or other, I look it up and it turns out that usually the solution was simple and I was trying too hard.  Anyway here are a few handy things to remember about GIMP.

To draw a straight line using a tool like the pencil, first click the starting point, then hold the shift key, and click the end point.

To draw a circle, use the oval-select tool.  Draw a selection, then click Edit, Stroke Selection.

To select shapes/regions from an image, use the Path tool.  Click on the border of the region you want to select and it’ll make a "node;" click again and it’ll make another connected to the first.  Do this until you have the shape/region fully enclosed -- if you want to connect the last node to the first, hold the control key and click the first node.  Then you can click Select, From Path to turn your path into a selection.  You can also save ("export") your path to a file.  And here’s one of those simple-but-nonobvious things: when you switch to another tool and your path’s nodes disappear, the way to get them to show up again is to switch back to the Path tool and then click around somewhere that you know a node is at (approximately).  This will make them all show up again.

To make the background transparent, you have to add a new layer, an "alpha" layer.  Just click Layer, Transparency, Add Alpha Channel.  Now when you use the eraser tool (or select an area then press Ctrl-k), it will erase to "transparent" instead of to the background color.  (Of course, only PNG and GIF images support transparency, or at least, they are the only popular formats that do.  JPEG and BMP do not.)

To remove red-eye from your photos, download the script from the bottom of this page and save it to your /home/user/.gimp-2.0/scripts/ directory.  Then it’ll show up in GIMP under Script-Fu, Selection, Red Eye.  All you need to do is select a small part of the red area inside the eye, then click that menu item, and it’ll do all the work for you.

After changing an image’s canvas size, you often need to click Layer, Layer to Image Size.  And if after doing some manipulation you find you can no longer draw on your image, you may need to do Select -> None, and/or Image -> Flatten Image.

There are a few more that aren’t coming to me right now, but if and when they do I will post them here.

But if you happen to see it before I delete it, post a test reply and fill in all the fields, would ya?

Hey, nice head shot.  Do you hope to have one for everybody?

Google bought the mapping company Keyhole last year, and now Google Maps can show you aerial satellite photography of whatever location you’re mapping.  As if Google Maps wasn’t cool enough already!

Google also recently added support for natural-language search queries (like the one I just posted about).  But according to the article:

Quoting internetnews.com:

Google Q&A has strengths and weaknesses, Norvig admitted. ... For example, asking, "What is the population of India?" returns rock-solid results in the form of links to Web sites that answer the question.

On the other hand, the top result for the question, "What is the capital of France?" was "Investment Capital and Banking in France."

... But the queries don’t have to be full sentences. The system identifies both query words, such as "who" or "what," and fact-type terms such as capital, director, population. "To find out who directed "Finding Nemo," you don’t have to put in the ’who is,’" he explained.

I think this is more marketing hype than anything "new" from Google.  Their existing search already ignored common words (like "is") anyway; I don’t see how this new "natural language" support is fundamentally different.

In other tech news, Microsoft’s approach to Windows system security may be changing (which can only mean "improving" at this point) when the next version is released in a year or so.  One huge problem with the current design is the fact that, although Windows supports the concept of different levels of user privileges:

Quoting pcworld.com:

...90 percent of Windows software can’t be installed without administrator access to Windows, [and] 70 percent won’t run properly unless the user is an administrator.

The whole point of having restricted user-level accounts is that you don’t want your users to be able to break critical parts of the system -- even when "your users" just means "you."  You don’t want to use the powerful administrator account for your day-to-day activities, because 1) even if you’re good with computers, you could accidentally delete something crucial, and 2) you run lots of programs written by other people and companies, so you don’t want to give them access to critical parts of the system either.

But as the above quote shows, it’s simply not practical to run Windows with a user-level account, because like so many things in Windows, this security feature was hacked on as an afterthought and doesn’t really work yet.  Until it gets fixed, we’ll continue to be plagued by myriad viruses and otherwise-malicious programs that hijack Windows systems and then modify the system to prevent the user from removing them.

This photo is very fun.  You almost don’t even notice that it’s a night shot.  The photographer used a 583 second exposure -- yes, that’s nearly ten minutes.  One of the very few things I dislike about my DSC-S85 is that its longest possible exposure is merely 8 seconds.  I have a few somewhat similar night shots, but they aren’t nearly so cool.

Also very fun is the fact that I’m the fifth hit on Google for this:

Quoting some poor soul:

what does it mean when you have the same dream about the same person for over a week?

Yes, what does it mean?  Pray tell, oh Magic Google Ball!  : )

There should be The Stupid Police, and their job would be to throw people like this in jail.

Quoting Associated Press:

Arkansas coach Houston Nutt said that players caught loafing will no longer wear pink jerseys during practices in an effort to avoid offending breast cancer survivors.

So it’s now Politically Incorrect to use the color pink in association with anything negative.  There are lots of other sensitive issues in our society, some of which have particular colors to identify their movements.  Should all these colors be off-limits for all uses with negative connotations?  Of course not, that would be stupid.

[Hat-tip to Mike.]

In case you haven’t seen one, this is what a computer might look like in the year 2004.

The best part is the steering wheel ( :

This is really funny.  Make sure to click the "Next" link at the bottom -- they only get better.

No banners.

No pop-up ads.

No pop-under ads.

No flash ads.

No email solicitation.

No free-plus-shipping.

No accounting scandals.

No fat cats.

No corporate jets.

No friends and family.

No Steve Ballmer monkey dance.

No annoying SBC partnership

No Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanies

No shooting the target to win a prize

No "Earn $107.00 Daily, Part-Time... Even While You Sleep!"

No missing classmates from other countries.

No running around the pool.

No gratuitous use of exclamation marks!

No goofy guy singing the name of the site.

No e-ANYTHING.

No i-ANYTHING.

I really hope they don’t re-insert Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube for the third time.  I’m against that on two levels, legally and logically.

Legally, the husband is the guardian, so the decision is his.  Period.  That’s all there is to it.  It’s not President Bush’s decision or Congress’ decision or her parents’ decision.  She is incapacitated (far beyond that, in fact) to the point where she cannot think or make decisions on her own, so her legal guardian -- her husband -- gets to make the decision.

Logically, it isn’t a question of "life" or of Terry Schiavo "dying" because she is no longer alive, according to the doctors, who unlike Bush or her parents or Congress, are actually qualified speak on the matter:

At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid.  Medicine cannot cure this condition ... Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state...

Terri Schiavo is no longer a conscious human being.  Reflexive means that whenever she moves, her body is responding automatically to external stimuli without any mental processing of the stimuli nor of her response to it.  The only "life" present in Terri Schiavo’s body is the same kind of simple cellular life present in plants -- they grow towards sunlight automatically, not because they think "hm, sunlight looks good, let me slowly grow in that direction from now on."  It is merely a reflex; it isn’t supported by any conscious decision-making process, because plants contain no such facility, and neither does Terri Schiavo.

It is not morally wrong to "kill" Terri any more than it’s wrong to "kill" a plant, because neither is alive in the Biblical sense.  And this is not the same as killing an unborn baby, because babies are not in a permanent "unconscious, reflexive state" as are plants and Terri Schiavo.

I’m all for "favoring a presumption of life" in unclear cases, and for the first few months, or a year, maybe even a couple years, I would say this MIGHT have been an unclear case.  But now, 15 years later, this case is no longer unclear: "Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state."

I finally got my Niagara photos online.  There were so many to sort through, and I ended up only putting about 1/4 of them online.  I think a lot of them are really good though, and Kim has a bunch of good ones too.

I am on Canadian soil as I post this message!

Kim and I are on a little road trip to visit Niagara Falls, and it is amazing.  And I’ve never been outside the USA before so this is extra cool for me.  I know, I know... the Canadian side of Niagara is about as close as you can get to the USA without actually being in the USA (er no, wait, that’s California...) but still, I am on foreign soil for the first time in my life.

I took about 200 photos today, so they’ll show up here soon, along with a more full report of the coolness of this adventure.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for about 6 months now, but somehow never think about it when I’m at my computer.  I have 50 Gmail invites, so if you’d like a free email account @gmail.com with ~unlimited space, just ask.  Because let’s be honest, Google is much cooler than Microsoft, and @gmail is much cooler than @hotmail.

Theoretically this shouldn’t matter for long, because eventually Google will open up Gmail to new sign-ups from the general public... but until they do, the only way to get an account is from someone else who already has one.  My guess is that this has nothing to do with being "beta" or a "preview release" or anything like that, but rather is a test by Google to see how many degrees of separation there are between their employees and everyone else on the planet to whom these Gmail-invites eventually filter.  Well, that, and to create more demand for their product through the artificial scarcity, just as the DeBeers cartel regulates the worldwide diamond trade to make diamonds artificially valuable.

One of the hardest parts of making a website is coming up with a good domain name (AKA address).  Or rather, it’s not hard to come up with a good one, but it’s very likely that whatever you come up with has already been registered by somebody else.

I’ve been pretty happy with "nodivisions.com," even though it’s a tad long and may be tricky for some people to spell.  Those two issues aren’t really a big deal for me though because most of my visitors come from Google or from links on other websites, where you don’t need to manually type in the address.

My home computer has always been named stop.dyndns.org, which I think is really good (among *.dyndns.org names) because the part that I got to choose ("stop") is so short and easy to remember.  But this address doesn’t need to be remembered or typed by anyone except me, so again those issues don’t matter that much.  Still, lately I’ve wanted to give it a new name -- one that isn’t tied to dyndns.org, one that’s a top-level name instead of a subdomain.

Well, last night I came up with one that’s awesome and available: antio.net.  (It’s pronounced "ANT ee oh" or "AN tee oh.")  Scoring a 5-letter domain name is virtually unheard-of, especially one that has any meaning or relevance, and that is pronounceable too.  As you can see, the dot-com version has been registered by one of those stupid domain-squatting companies, and they’re selling it for $700, on top of the normal $10 yearly fee.  (Normally, domain names have no cost other than the yearly fee.)

So now, when I’m at work or at someone else’s house and want to connect to my home system (to view my home desktop, check email and IMs, access files, etc), I’ll be connecting to antio.net instead of stop.dyndns.org.  I like this new name so much, I’m even considering renaming my website to it; but that’s a much more drastic move, with implications for my Google rankings among other things, so for now that won’t happen.

- Cox & Forkum

Yep, that’s about the size of it.