This is splorp.

ISSN 1496-3221

Category: Compunabula

October 18, 2005

Applesopht.

Stewart Smith (working under the canopy of the brilliant Stewdio) has taken two things I enjoy and mashed them together in a simply wonderful way. Frankly, this is one of those things you wish you had thought up yourself. This home-brew video for a song from Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump album uses a vintage Apple … More

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

October 4, 2005

I see London. I see France.

I see Newton’s underpants. Well, perhaps not underpants. Underpinnings, maybe. Invigorated by this thread on the NewtonTalk mailing list, I somehow decided it would be good idea to post and annotate an x-ray image of a MessagePad. It’s partly an exercise in technical documentation, but it’s also pure, green-bleeding geekiness. Come on, admit it… you … More

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

August 26, 2004

The cam came back.

After slightly more than a month of downtime due to the unfortunate demise of a certain piece of data storage hardware, I am pleased to report that the grantcam is alive and well once again. The delay was not due to any technical issues. Dear me, no. It was just one of those things that … More

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

July 13, 2004

The sound of silence.

At least the hard drive that contained data I had actually backed up still works. The other drive — my boot drive — doesn’t. Applications. Email. Prefs. Several gigabytes worth of current work files scattered all over the blessed desktop. Poof. Reflecting on this incident, I have determined that I feel much more comfortable with … More

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

January 31, 2003

Roadside assistance.

Steve Comrie, of pseudodictionary fame, kindly emailed me a hint regarding yesterday’s CPAN installation issue. Based on the error message I posted, he suggested that I install the File::Spec module, seeing that it’s a prerequisite module to have in place prior to CPAN attempting to update itself. It was apparent, at least to Steve, that … More

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

December 16, 2002

Input. Output. All around the port.

When your company name is straddling the chasm between typographic awkwardness and nerdy self-awareness, your product better be damn good and useful. From what I’ve seen so far, IOXperts seems to have avoided most of the issues surrounding its corporate moniker by developing some dearly needed device drivers. USB and FireWire-based cameras, webcams and other … More

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

January 21, 2002

Untitled

I know you were all wondering about this. What on earth did he name his hard drives in his new computer? Well, after much personal deliberation and careful contextual research of pop culture, I settled on Shadrack and Snimm. For those of you who did not hear the bell ring, Shadrack and Snimm are two … More

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

December 30, 2001

Undo.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do like spending my Sunday afternoons undoing a bunch of stuff that I apparently screwed up on the Linux box last night. Ding dang it, there should be warning labels on these things.

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

December 28, 2001

Bingo.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/custodiat {start|stop}

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.

December 28, 2001

Custodiat? Who dat?

Who can tell me what the heck the custodiat process running on my Cobalt Qube is doing? And more to the point, why in the world is it using 43.7% of the available memory? Is it safe to kill this thing? Update! I found a very detailed post on the cobalt-users mailing list that actually … More

This item was posted by Grant Hutchinson.