The Glasgow Apple Store

23 Oct 2009 at 13:31

Robert

all posts, hardware

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…or as I like to call it “the place of Temptation, so tempting it requires a capital ‘t’”.

So I moseyed into the Apple Store, like I said I would. Pricing of the iPod Classic is in-line with the online Apple Store – £189. I wasn’t able to talk them down from that price as such; instead they let me know that they offer a 10% trade in, bringing the total to £170 ish. The guy in the store said the final price would be £161, and if they want to change me that that’s fine. I have student discount through my uni for the online store, but it no longer applies to music players, just Apple’s line of computers. Actually, the new MacBook is very steeply discounted (just over £110 off) which really, REALLY tests my willpower.

Now, the Geniuses upstairs in the store may be able to do something with my hard drive. I don’t know what they would charge for data recovery, and so I’m not sure if I’d be willing to pay; especially when I’m not sure of everything that’s on there. I think I’ll do my best puppy dog eyes when I go, and see if they at least offer to tell me what is on there for free.

A Cautionary Tale: I Broke My iPod Trying to Fix It

23 Oct 2009 at 02:37

Robert

all posts, pointless crap

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Well, it’s not really a tale, as a tale implies length. More of a cautionary anecdote… or cautionary aside. All right, a cautionary mentioned-in-passing.

I had intended to fix my iPod’s screen tonight. I’ve previously replaced a broken laptop screen, which has plenty of tricky, footery bits. However, in my attempt, I broke it completely. My humble, 4 or 5 year old player at least played music before… Now it just spins up the drive, has a quiet think to itself, then collapses into a sobbing heap on the floor.

I don’t want to put people off DIY repair, its possible to do. The screens are only like £10 ish. It’s not really that hard, even if the cables are footery, incompliant wee buggers at times. But it is very easy to mess up, especially if you don’t take care.

Also, really fucking important point here: no matter how confident you are of your repair skills, BACK DATA THE HELL UP BEFORE YOU START. Since the device was doubling as my portable hard drive, and since I’m occasionally a dribbling fool, I lost some important things. Mainly bookmarks from my portable Firefox installation and some documents I’d digitised. And some stuff I don’t actually remember putting on there, but believe me, it’s there. Or was. Or still is, just in inaccessible form.

Serves me right for not having a backup script for removable media in place. I will do that just as soon as I procure my replacement. I’ll mosey over to the Apple store tomorrow and see if I can’t haggle their price down from ridiculous to merely hideously profitable. If I can, then comes the act of restoring all my music and data. Joy of joys.

Spanish Adventure Update: Banks Aren’t Useless After All

22 Oct 2009 at 22:52

Robert

all posts, cool, life

1 Comment

Well, not completely useless. A follow up to my post from a few months ago.

–

So, by now I have decided to go to Barcelona. I will be entering medical school next September, so don’t worry, I haven’t given that up! I don’t have any particular job lined up, but I have heard from various people that teaching English is the way to go. Importantly I have a very useful contact out there who has been most helpful in answering my many questions about accommodation, learning Spanish, the city, and a million other things. Don’t worry; they will be suitably rewarded.

Anyway, I figured it would be useful to have a bank account set up out there. I’m not really a pick up and go type person (I’m trying), and I figure that paying a bank to spend my own money (overseas fees FTL) is a form of ridiculousness I don’t want to be involved in. So, I went and asked my bank about their subsidiary over cashing a couple cheques, and the helpful chap actually went and phoned the Spanish team, who very promptly sent me an information pack and application form!

I must confess at this stage I dallied a bit, partly because the form was all Greek to me (well, Greek would have been an improvement, let’s say, oh, Finnish*) and partly because having it filled in would mean I actually have to leave.

So anyway eventually I got my rear in gear and went back to the branch and had some help from the lovely John (I think… might have been Dave. Sorry, whichever you are) who was as helpful as helpful can be.

The next day I went back with a couple questions I missed. Sadly, on this occasion I got someone somewhat less helpful. She said there was uncertainty as they didn’t really get many people in to do the Spanish stuff, only yesterday John/Dave had said the exact opposite. He was in close contact by email with their contact on the Spanish end, he even serendipitously got an email with her phone number which he used to clarify a couple of my questions. Confusing.

Then I had to convince the person dealing with me to certify a copy of my passport. Never mind this is something the same bank said I needed to do to as a prerequisite for opening my new account. Part of the problem was I wanted to take it away with me, as I was intending to send my documents next day delivery due to an impending Royal Mail strike. More on that later. Anyway I finally got out of the bank an hour later after going through the rigmarole of the international monetary transfer. Did you know the FBI can get information on your transfer (and you) pretty much just by asking nicely? Or any other organisation, bound or not bound by Data Protection Laws. What fun. At least the person doing the transfer was quite pleasant, although she did question my being at university for 9 years – purely from a financial point of view, right enough.

Anyway, after all that, the bit that restored / boosted my confidence (apart from JohnDave and his helpfulness) was that I put a handwritten note in with my application saying essentially: “THERE’S A STRIKE ON, PLEASE BE CLEVER AND NOTIFY ME BY SOME MEANS OTHER THAN POST”. The next day, they phoned me and did just that. The system works. In this specific circumstance. For me, anyway. Kinda.

So now all I have to do is sort flights and accommodation. After that, I’ll probably do something even more fun, like self immolation.

HOWTO: Highlighting Kill Weapons In Battlefield 2142

19 Oct 2009 at 19:34

Robert

all posts, battlefield 2142, games

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I’ve been playing a little Battlefield 2142 recently. Because I notice little things, I missed the weapon highlighting that I was used to in Battlefield 2. In trying to rectify this, I found that it’s actually quite tricky to find out how to do this. Most searches include posts about the BF2 version, with 2142 in the text as they by happenstance have a 2142 forum whether the HOWTO was posted.

So! Here’s what to edit and what to change.

  1. Go to the 2142 install directory, then navigate to the mods folder, then bf2142, then finally the Localization folder.
    eg for me it is D:\Games\2142\mods\bf2142\Localization – just substitute C:\Program Files\ or whereever.
  2. IMPORTANT: Back up the file “strings.csv” in this directory. Copy it somewhere safe. Actually do this step – not having backups SUCKS. Trust me, I know.
  3. The highlighting code is |C1001. So, open strings.csv in Excel or OO.o Calc or notepad and search for the line: HUD_HUD_KILLEDBY_KILLS. The first entry is the English version. Change it from
    §0#PLAYERNAME1# [§1#WEAPON#§0] #PLAYERNAME2#
    to
    §0#PLAYERNAME1# [|C1001#WEAPON#|C1001] #PLAYERNAME2#
  4. Save and close
  5. (optional: if things didn’t work, restore the backup and try again… you did back up, right?)

Similarly, if you want to know what someone was killed with for teamkills (I do), go to the HUD_HUD_KILLEDBY_TEAMKILLS line, and change
§0#PLAYERNAME1# [§1Teamkills§0] #PLAYERNAME2#
to
§0#PLAYERNAME1# [|C1001Teamkills - #WEAPON#|C1001] #PLAYERNAME2#.
Voila! Highlighted, weapon’d teamkill notifications.

I haven’t tested it yet, but I think that other colours and size modifiers should work. Try codes used from BF2, replacing the hash (#) with a vertical pipe (|). Let me know if it works.

Count Arguments In A Bash Script

01 Oct 2009 at 15:34

Robert

all posts, linux, ubuntu

1 Comment

Another useful tip I’m sure most people will be familiar with, but in bash scripts $# stores the number of arguments passed to the script. Eg, combine with $@ (all arguments) for batch processing (what I used it for):


foreach $arg in $@; do
[stuff]
[compare with $# to tell remaining items]
done

Very basic stuff, but it was new to me yesterday, and it might save someone a bit of time searching.

Batch Rename or Move An Extension In Linux (Eg .JPG to .jpg)

30 Sep 2009 at 15:29

Robert

linux, ubuntu

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A short and easy trick, but one that is either not referred to or more complex examples given. I wanted to change a bunch of upper case .JPG images to lower case. Rather than writing a bash script or some such, I just used the ‘rename’ command:

rename 's/\.JPG$/\.jpg/' *.JPG

It may depend on perl being installed though. I don’t have a Linux machine to hand that doesn’t have perl present, so I cannot verify this. If this command doens’t work for you, please leave a comment to that effect below.

Another useful one from the manpage:

rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

To translate upper case filenames (and extensions by the looks of it) to lower case.

Bass

22 Sep 2009 at 00:26

Robert

pointless crap, rants

5 Comments

Ah bass, king of the gamefish. At home in both fresh and saltwater, one of the most sought after fish in the US, this fish has its sporting origins in the nineteenth century… No no no! What? Oh, not that kind of bass. Right.

Throwbacks to A Bit of Fry and Laurie aside, I feel a rant coming on. The flat below is having some kind of box social or mixer or shindig and where there is box socials, there is music. And where there is party music, there is an excess of bass. So sleeping is off for the moment… hence this rant.

I don’t know where my aversion to bass comes from though. I can tell you my subwoofer has its bass knob turned the full way down, and the software mixers on my various computers have bass set low (if applicable), and the music player equalisers have it similarly adjusted so as to de-emphasise the lower frequencies. I do like a good beat, but I find bass lines overwhelm and muffle the rest of the more important (in my opinion) instruments. It may completely fail to surprise you that I tweak up the treble response a bit too.

But anyway, before I get called Buzz Killington, buzzkiller, I should point out that these box socialites don’t even have the good grace to let us get used to a particular beat. The music is getting changed with about as much care as and ADD DJ. The reverberations are spasmodic, coming up through the floor for 30 seconds, then a change, then 2 minutes of something similar, then a minute of silence, then 4 minutes of something completely different, then 5 minutes of silence, then a few changes in quick succession. Concomitant with this joyous musical indecision is a grand variance in the volume of the music. As I write this sentence, I can feel the floor vibrating through the rug and carpet; earlier, I had to put my ear to the flow, then actually go downstairs to confirm the music was indeed coming from the flat below. Why there quite is so much variety I am not sure, perhaps they are playing some brazen, adult form of musical chairs that I wish to both remain ignorant of and take hearty part in.

I begin to ramble, partly because it is nearly half 1 and I am tired, while being subjected to weapons-grade bass and listening to songs with odd lyrics on Last.fm; and partly because there is a word counter right below this ever-growing wall of text, and I feel I have been short-changing in recent posts.

Anyway, the lovely people (can you feel the restraint that went into those two words?) downstairs have about half an hour before I strap on the kevlar and helmet and go SWAT on their music system.

How Not To Run a Poll

18 Sep 2009 at 23:31

Robert

cool

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There is a very good writeup by Paul Lamere of Music Machinery of how Anonymous subverted a major poll by Time. AKA “moot wins, Time Inc. loses“.

A number of things strike me:

  • Despite how obvious it is, Time deny that the poll was manipulated, stating they have safeguards in place, etc, etc. I guess humble “we fucked up” pie is hard to eat
  • For an influential (ie well-funded) publication they sure have no idea how to protect a poll
  • Anonymous are (as ever) a force not to be trifled with. Sure, they probably won’t topple regimes or enact social change any time soon, but if you draw their ire or attention, you’ll have a hell of a storm to weather.
  • reCAPTCHA wasn’t subvertable, even in the hands of these determined people. This is a Good Thing.

There’s not much else besides these scantly-150 words to say. The writeup is most detailed, although it would have been interesting if Paul had elaborated on how they determined Time’s ranking algorithm to eliminate the need for 46 000 votes. Well worth the read though.

Brown Apologises For Treatment of Turing

10 Sep 2009 at 21:45

Robert

all posts

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The British Government has apologised for the treatment of Alan Turing, convicted of ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to chemical castration under anti-homosexuality laws in 1952. In a statement responding to a petition on the Prime Minister’s website, Gordon Brown has recognised that the action taken against Turing was “inhumane” and “appalling”, and that he [Turing] should be remembered for his contributions to the Allied war effort and to humanity:

It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. [...] But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. [...] It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

Mission Failed

09 Sep 2009 at 22:05

Robert

life

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Drat! I failed my test. Did all the hard parts fine, but two silly things let me down:

  1. A failure to indicate while doing a reverse park… Didn’t know about this but hey ho, I do now.
  2. Went through an unmarked crossroads on Mitre Road, a road I am intimately familiar with. D’oh.

My intructor reckons it was just nerves that did me for the second one, but I think that I would have done that even just in the car with him. Problem is, that I know the  4-way junction in question is always always always really quiet, and so in my mind it’s a give way coming from the side street (rather than a 4 way give way). Ah well, lesson learned. An expensive lesson right enough…

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