Geek dinner!
Tonight we went to the fifth GeekDinner, where I gave a short talk about free licences, which I hope was not too dull or incomprehensible. Here are my slides, for anyone who is interested in the links at the end:
Since this was a talk about licences, I will explicitly mention that I am releasing the content of these slides into the public domain. 
Interestingly enough, the current version of s5, the handy HTML slideshow tool I used for the slides, is also in the public domain. So you can redistribute the code that makes the slideshow work together with the bits which contain your stuff, and not worry about it.
The next geeky event coming up is *camp, on the 8th and 9th of December. I’ll be presenting a Scribus tutorial. Ideally, I would like to go through the creation of a small booklet/flyer/whatever step by step. If you have a real (small) project that you would like to work on during the tutorial, bring all the relevant text, pictures and fonts with you. The default project will be assembled from random stuff pulled from Wikipedia. Perhaps a flyer about kittens. Because everyone likes kittens.
Games and comics summary
Read: Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus 2, Predator Omnibus 1, Strangers in Paradise graphic novels 2 and 3, some Bleach. Unexpectedly, I found Predator more enjoyable than AVP, because the plot of the first and longest AVP story was nigh-incomprehensible. SiP 2 had lots of crunchy plot; SiP 3 not so much. Am sticking with the series. And ordering more A/P/AVP omnibuses — which, given the way Dark Horse’s international sale weirdness is going, might not arrive at Outer Limits before I have grandchildren, but I live in hope. Bleach is kind of cool, but I’m reserving final judgement until later.
Watched: more Blood+ anime, Porco Rosso, more Farscape, Beowulf. OMG, Blood+ is so slooooooooow, and so prone to lengthy explorations of angst and whining in between brief, tantalising glimpses of demon-ass-kicking*. But somehow we keep watching it. PR was awesome. I’m really enjoying Farscape Season 3; I suspect I know which Crichton they’re going to kill off. I liked Beowulf more than a lot of the people I went to see it with; it was a lot less bad than many other movies I have seen.
Played: XBlockOut, a linux 3d tetris clone. It had been weird and jerky since a few upgrades ago; I fixed it today by rebuilding the package. Hooray! I have also installed Basilisk II, a 68k mac emulator, so as soon as I find out what old MacOSes my dad has lying around, I will be able to play all the awesome Mac games from my childhood. Ah, memories.
* OK, and demon-clawed, cello-playing man-candy, which is the not-so-secret real reason I’m not giving up on the series. 
Bad URL! No biscuit!
Blogspot has always allowed people to put weird crap in their user names, like underscores and hyphens, and this leads to malformed URLs. I have never been able to see a particular blogspot blog regularly linked to from a linkblog I follow, because the username (and thus the first part of the domain name) begins and ends with a hyphen. (”No! Bad!” says the RFC to leading hyphens in domain names.)
Other people on Teh Internets could evidently see the blog, and further investigation revealed that 1) google caches it and 2) IE seems to have some kind of work-around for this problem. It looks like the problem exists in the DNS lookup step — various lookup tools I tried choked on the leading hyphen, but when I escaped it, they worked fine. So, here is my fix (for Linux, per offending domain), if you have a similar problem:
1. Look up the url, escaping the hyphen:
$ nslookup '\-baddomain-.blogspot.com'
(host works too.) See what IP address you get. Then edit your hosts file, and put in:
insert.ip.address.here -baddomain-.blogspot.com
Fixed!
ETA: if you use Windows, you may encounter the same problem in Firefox. Since you also have a hosts file, and apparently also nslookup, you can probably employ the same solution.
Graphic Novels, Gutsy, and a Gadget for Girls
Am now running Gutsy. The new kernel had to be persuaded to work, but everything seems fine now. Hooray!
Yesterday (well, the day before yesterday, actually) before the CTPUG talk we stopped by the V:TES tournament at Outer Limits, mainly so that Hodgestar could buy a Giovanni starter deck. I bought the first volume of Strangers in Paradise, because it was there, and an Aliens/Predator art book, for much the same reason. The art book is very, very pretty. Not very much happens in SiP vol. 1, but the writing is good, so I’ll buy a couple more volumes (since they’re conveniently in the shop right now) and see if the plot gets more exciting, as advertised.
In completely unrelated news, if you are of the female persuasion (and anyone who is disturbed by female bodily functions should now take the slip lane to the left), I heartily recommend that you investigate the menstrual cup, a somewhat obscure alternative menstruation product. I think it deserves wider distribution than it currently receives. You can order one on the internet from one of the manufacturers, or from the South African Mooncup distributor, or you can go to Whet in Cape Town (it’s, uh, sort of a hippie sex shop for women), which stocks the Lunette.
The main disadvantage of this product is that it costs about R300 (how much it actually costs varies wildly depending on the distributor). That’s not very much if it turns out that you like it, given the cost of disposable menstrual products — but of course you won’t know until you’ve tried it. If you’re not keen to spend that much money on something you might not use, I suggest going for one of the manufacturers that offers a money-back guarantee.
There’s a LJ support community which offers troubleshooting suggestions and advice. It is frequented by all kinds of interesting characters, some of whom suggest using your blood to perform magical spells or water houseplants, so crank up your common sense filter to eleven. Which is always a good idea when one is receiving medical advice from Teh Internets, anyway.
Speaking of which… disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I have no medical qualifications at all. If you have any concerns about the safety of this device, please consult an actual doctor before using it!
The great config adventure
For a long time, I haven’t been able to switch to the text consoles in my Ubuntu installation (or rather, I couldn’t do anything with them after switching, because they were garbled, and I couldn’t switch back, because X would die horribly). At about the same time as this started happening, I also stopped seeing bootup and shutdown messages. I recently noticed that sometimes the consoles were not completely garbled, just extremely magnified, and that I could type stuff in them, although I couldn’t see it — so it was probably something to do with the resolution settings. I’ve been too lazy to do anything about it for ages, but X has also recently started crashing more frequently, and having to reboot and sit through an invisible bootup every time that happens is not fun. So, today I finally decided to fix my computer.
Before I realised that bootup and console resolution has absolutely nothing to do with X configuration, I found out that there was a newer Intel driver than the one I was running, so I installed it. It made my screen break out in blurry stripes. Fortunately, this is a known problem with this driver and LCD screens, and you can patch it quite easily. So I did. Hopefully the newer driver will make X crash less, and the diversion wasn’t a complete waste of time.
Then I found information related to my actual problem. I tried one of the really basic modes. Success! I could see the bootup messages and use the consoles! I tried out other modes and eventually settled on 8-bit 1024×768; a couple of higher resolutions that I tried didn’t want to work.
Once I could see the bootup messages, I saw that the splash screen was dying because it couldn’t find a theme appropriate to its configured resolution. I found some suggested causes and fixes, most of which involved updating initramfs (a thing the kernel uses when it boots up, apparently. I didn’t need to know more than that. 
), which I found I could not do because of a problem with the configuration of mdadm, which is a module which has something to do with RAID. Teh Internets advised me that if I am not using RAID, the simplest thing to do is to remove the module, which I did. Now my splash screen works!
So my computer is in a much better state than it has been for a long time, and I had a very educational experience.
Freddie’s new old ruffler
My sewing machine is a Singer 99K, apparently made in Clydebank, Scotland in September 1950. Since yesterday evening, it is called Freddie — I blame Hodgestar; I was going to use some long and improbable woman’s name, but he said I should name it after a singer. So.
Freddie is an old-school sewing machine, made from durable metal parts in an era when appliances were built to last forever. I bought it from an old Muslim lady for R500 a couple of years ago. It’s in pretty good condition, although the original manual was mouldy and I’m going to have to sand and re-varnish the wooden case.
It came with many random attachments and mysterious metal pieces, most of which I have managed to identify thanks to the awesome power of Teh Internets. One of them is a ruffler foot. I have previously met with crushing defeat when trying it out — thread jam and general badness. Some of its surface is a bit rusty, and I was worried that it was irretrievably damaged. However, yesterday I decided to make a renewed effort to resurrect it — I unscrewed all the bits that were unscrewable, doused everything in WD40 and wiggled all the joints. Lo and behold, a previously unmoving part began to move! I cleaned it off, put everything back together… and it ruffles, as advertised!
I don’t know what I’m actually ever going to put ruffles on, but that’s not the point.
I have recently been spending a lot more time with Freddie, raising my sewing XP by resizing all my huge, baggy t-shirts to shirts that actually fit me (I’ll make a post once I have a nice collection to photograph). It’s sort of like killing kobolds. Firstfallen has started a monthly sewing circle thing, which is very helpful for prying me off the internet and actually making me sew. Future projects include more clothing surgery and a corded corset.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I can't really swim. I did sort of learn in 2007, but I don't know if I remember. :P
- @wizzyct The only thing I've done with it for the past several years is increase the privacy setting on every stupid new "feature". :/
- A petition in An Tir to allow same-sex couples entry into Crown Tourneys: http://www.scatoday.net/node/16930 (SCA stuff)
- Flat international shipping surcharge sucks. Especially when it ends up costing more than the books. No impulse purchase for me today. :P
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
