2008-10-27

One task down

Recycling things isn't just fun, it's a moral imperative. I just finished fixing a sewing machine someone had tossed. Admittedly it was placed so people could snag it, but it's not the kind of thing you generally pick up off the street.

Looking it over, the zig-zag lock was seized (and I promptly broke it trying to loosen it off). A few minutes with a drill to drill out the mounting bolt and a dive into the parts bin for a machine bolt and an old quick release skewer cap from the bike parts bin and it's working fine. It's up for adoption or donation to Goodwill.

Now back on getting the recumbent ready for sale. Really long cable paths are a bugger to adjust properly.

2008-10-22

Trackbacks disabled

For some bizarre reason I've had a few folks try to inject text into the trackbacks. While the scripts defuse the content, I'm left with gobbledygook in the trackback fields, so I'm removing trackbacks for now.

2008-10-08

Bailout funds well spent

The corporate jackals whooped it up to the tune of $440,000 in celebration of the financial bail out of AIG by the US government

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/1007083aig1.html

I'd say heads should roll, but that would just means whopping lawyer fees and no result. Unfortunately, it's unlikely this pillaging of the American people will end any time soon unless there is a significant about face on corporate transparency and regulation in the US.

2008-10-07

An additional tweak to Mutt

Mutt is completely behaving itself and I'm very happy with that. An additional tweak I've made is to pipe Mailtos to a fine script by Martin Krafft http://svn.madduck.net/pub/bin/mail/mailto-mutt. There's a few scripts out there to handle mailtos but Martins' works splendidly with the browser I'm using, Iceweasel. The only things I modified in his script were to route the /path/to/handler to the mailto-mutt script and to respecify the xterminal to aterm, the terminal emulator I use. And don't forget to make the script executable.

I've given some thought to using a text browser to replace Iceweasel, but generally my websurfing is pretty image dependant. I also think that, as a visual media, that's not a bad thing.

2008-10-06

So what is it?

About jarheads in their crappy lowrider cars who think it's funny to head fake at you in traffic? Seriously. Where's the humour. I know they're sexually inadequate pea brains, and I pity them. Its just surreal.

This chimp thought I was turning to have words as I pulled into my apartment. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to take his picture with my cell camera. Given I think I know this car from the neighbourhood, it would have been good to get his plates and see how he like's tuna juice on the engine block.

Rage fantasy, really. This turnip isn't worth my time or effort.

2008-10-05

Back to the old

I recently decided to go back to using mutt, a text based mailer for 'nix systems. While simple to look at, mutt is an extremely powerful. Because it acts only as a mail reader, it can be a bit of a challenge to set up, particularly if you're not aware of how mail is handled in Linux. There's also a few tweaks you can make to add some useful functionality. This is one of the beauties of mutt, you can script it to run exactly how you want it to, not how someone else wants you to manage your email.

I thought I'd put up a brief blurb of what I used and how I got it running as some resources are pretty scattered and not always written in plain language. I'm not going to go into a lot of details about configuration, there's lots of sources for that out there already. My favourites include My First Mutt and Randall Wood's excellent mutt manual

See more ...