Category: Geekery

Goodbye old junk

I made another pass through the computer junk today. Two weeks ago I pulled out the stuff that I thought had some potential and tried to sell it on-line. I sold a couple of barebones computers (one of them an AMD Athlon 1800+), a motherboard, a power supply, and a hard drive and a few other miscellaneous bits. I think I made $75 total. Today I took the rest of the junk out (including a Pentium 90 computer and a couple of old Macintoshes, and a SPARCClassic that I never got working) and put it at the end of the driveway for the scavengers to pick through.

The stuff I sold was probably worth a lot more than I sold it for, and there were a few things in the junk pile that would probably sell if I was willing to take the time and hassle to list it on eBay or take it to a swap meet. But hassle is the operative word here – I just wanted to get rid of it, because right now empty shelves are more valuable to me that potential sales.

However, it’s quite amusing to watch the scavengers at work. One of them drove past, slowed way down to have a look, and then sped off. A few minutes later he came back, and parked well away (like nearly 50 metres). He ran over, and furtively and hurriedly grabbed an armload of stuff and ran back to dump it in his trunk. He ran back and grabbed another armload. I swear he looked like a chipmunk collecting nuts, or a person worried that any moment I was going to run out of the house yelling at him for stealing my stuff. If I didn’t want you to take it, I wouldn’t have put it at the end of the driveway!

After he left, our neighbour phoned me to chuckle about his behaviour. Heh.

I’ve got some more stuff to put out later, including some even older Macintosh computers (a WGS-8550 and a LC-III), but I have to wipe the hard drives first. I think I’m going to wait for another time when I can watch out the window.

Blog update

I’ve never figured out whether the reason so many PHP sites are steaming piles of shit is because PHP is a horribly limited language with inherent flaws you can drive a truck through, or if it’s just the web equivalent of Visual Basic and so it attracts the weakest programmers on the net. But I do know this – unlike every other program on every other computer I own, this blog program is incapable of determining the correct local time and I have to manually change the offset from GMT when we switch from EST to EDT and back. So fuck it – I’m switching the time format to display GMT. Why not? I’m a pilot, I have GMT time prominently displayed on my watch. And it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to.

Arrgghh!

Because of that problem I have with my router losing it’s mind every few days, I decided to take advantage of a feature in the new firmware that allows you to schedule a reboot every day. I set it for 2 am. Last night was the first night.

I got up this morning, and nothing seemed to be talking to the outside world. I went to the router’s status page, and it showed no problems – the router had been up since 2am, I still had the same IP address, no indication of trouble. I clicked the “DHCP renew” button, however, and it gave me a new IP. That’s not good – that indicates that it probably hadn’t been talking to RoadRunner’s DHCP server since it came up. I guess there’s still a bug in the auto-reboot code.

Spam Karma 7, Spammers 0

It’s two months to the day since I switched from MovableType to WordPress, and the spammers finally found me. And SpamKarma deleted all 7 spams without a whimper. It even decided that one IP was a repeat spammer and banned them from my blog entirely. I checked and that IP has a http redirector on port 80, probably installed without the computer owner’s knowledge.

I hate spammers with the firey passion of a thousand suns. I’ve been waiting with bated breath for them to start spamming my blog again, and I’m quite relieved to see that SpamKarma handled the first onslaught with nary a whimper.

In other geek news, I’ve got good news: I’ve got Tiger on my laptop. It’s been running the CPU and disk for hours now indexing it for Spotlight. But Dashboard is pretty cool. I kind of wish it would have an option to display the widgets all the time like Konfabulator, but it’s a good replacement for it. I hope somebody fixes GnuControl soon.

And in other geek news, I’ve got bad news: My Linksys router did that thing where the wireless side loses its mind again. The new firmware didn’t fix it. I’ve heard there are hardware problems with the V2.2 hardware. I guess that’s why it was so cheap. I’m also guessing there is no way in hell I’ll get Linksys to take it back.

It’s still September

In my blog entry Rants and Revelations » 4166 September, 1993, I expressed some hope that with AOL dropping Usenet access, it might mean that Usenet would go back to being the place where only the clueful hung out.

As usual when I express optimism like that, I spoke too soon. There is a new scourge on Usenet these days. It’s people accessing it through Google Groups (or other web interface) who think that Usenet is an invention of Google, and that Google is in charge of monitoring everybody’s behaviour. Representative quotes from this new breed of wankers:

  • “I saw a couple of spams in this group. Where are the moderators?”
  • “I’ll report you to Google if you don’t stop insulting me.”
  • “Speak english, this is an American system!”