Category: Geekdom
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The Zim desktop wiki
I’ve discovered that Zim is a great little brainstorming tool, for me at least. While I occasionally “think in images”, my brain usually works on words and symbols. A wiki – especially one that sports a LaTeX equation editor – seems to be a powerful way to assist a text-based brainstorming session. Being a desktop…
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The university of technology
All Curtin students and staff know about OASIS. OASIS purportedly stands for “Online Access to Student Information Service” . Is that the best they could do, you ask? Evidentially, that full name is now such an embarrassment that it doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the official OASIS website. However, I’m still not sure which…
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Conroy’s train wreck
The Federal Government’s proposed mandatory Internet filtering scheme has been battered and bruised from all corners of the technical community. Yet Senator Stephen Conroy valiantly battles on. Last year I wrote to the Senator to express my views, and also to the Greens and to my local member, Steve Irons. Conroy eventually replied with a…
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I’ve been assimilated… a bit
I am reluctantly on Facebook. For the record, I’ve never really liked Facebook as a concept. Networking is great, but such online social networking ventures seem like a way to pool vast amounts of sensitive personal information in the hands of private entities that aren’t really accountable to anyone. Something is bound to go wrong…
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Bouncy bouncy
When my housemate told me of his scheme for constructing a physics simulation, I did the only decent thing I could. I stole his idea. I turned to my copy of Serway and Beichner (a ~1600 page physics book that I keep under my pillow for just such emergencies) and sat down to work out…
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Redeployment
Sadly, due to seemingly increasingly frequent downtime at bur.st, I’ve shifted Dave’s Archives over to a paid service – Jumba. In the process, I’ve discovered to my amusement and mild shock that one doesn’t actually need to use the command line anymore in order to set up a website on a Linux machine, even if…
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Just so you know
I present to you the Frivolous Theorem of Arithmetic: Almost all natural numbers are very, very, very large.
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Window focusing
The user interface of OS X has many things to commend it. Its click-to-focus function is not one of them. OS X, by design apparently, lacks a click-through capability. As far as I can tell there is no way to enable it. This generally means that when you click on a window to select it,…
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Cron just keeps going and going…
What happens when you set a cron job to run every fifteen minutes, generating mail, and then leave the computer in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what a cron job is? 266MB and 54500 messages stuck in a mail directory that would never be read. Today it was turned off, and all trace…