nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category computers

Aperture v1.1

April 13, 2006

Just so everyone knows, Apple has released Aperture v1.1 and dropped the price to US$299 (US$149 for students). Everyone who purchased it before at the higher price is eligable for a US$200 e-coupon. (US$100 if EDU was purchased.)

With the educational price being so much lower, I think it’s time that I pick it up. Canon’s DPP is nice, but Aperture seems ideal. Also, Canon has told me that they currently have no information on when a Universal Binary version of DPP will become available.

Hmm, now, do I buy a 4GB memory card (about US$230) for the upcoming UK trip, or do I buy a 2GB and a copy of Aperture? I think Aperture + the 2GB is a better idea…

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

Sequencer Project

April 9, 2006

Hrm. It seems that I may need the $400 version of CadSoft Eagle to lay out a PCB of the size I need. The free version can only do 100mm x 80mm boards, and the $200 version can only do 160mm x 100mm.

This is disappointing. I guess I should figure out if there is another way I can do it.

computerselectronicsmoved from livejournal

Oh No…

March 27, 2006

This is really bad. I think I somehow screwed up and never saved the artwork I drew for making the above drilling template. I think that I thought it was saved, made some other experimental (post-drilling) changes, then said not to save.

Uggh. This is really, really bad. Now I’m not completely sure where everything is drilled at, and because the drilling was without a jig, I can’t just measure to see.

Fortunately I still have my notes at home… I hope I can remember which number was which, and I can re-figure the hole spacing and such and re-draw it all.

Guh. I feel really, really bad about this.

I would have sworn that I saved it somewhere…

UPDATE: Found it! So I didn’t screw up as bad as I had thought. I had forgotten that I did a ‘Save As…’ with the file over to my G5 at one point. I must have kept working on that file, so I was saving my changes all along, just as I thought. It’s just that the file was being saved over to my G5 and not to this laptop. Thusly it didn’t show up in ‘Open Recent Files…’ or anywhere on this machine.

I SSH’d home, WOL’d the G5, SSH’d over there, FTP’d the files up to nuxx.net and poof. There they are. I feel amazingly relieved.

computersmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Waveform

March 9, 2006

This sort of response to my earlier inquiry about a possible power failure is why I like my colo provider:

The contractor doing the inspection of the halon fire suppression system
(fire codes require an inspection every 6 months) managed to trip the EPO
(Emergency Power Off) for our Troy facility and shut down all power. Total
outage was about 5-10 minutes, at which time we began the process of
restoring everything. Most all services were back by 3pm, most customers
before that -- we restored our own equipment (that not needed to serve
customers like our webserver and the like) last.

Not a fun day.

-Bill

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

Illustrator Question

February 28, 2006

Could any of you who are good with Adobe Illustrator help me out with something?

First, I download the Illustrator template (Mac or Windows) from the bottom of Maverick Label’s page about Control Panels. Then I open it in Illustrator and use Page Setup to change the artboard to 8.5″ high and 11″ wide. Then I get the dotted line seen here seen here in place of the original borders of the artboard (page?) which appears to be a Page Tiling mark. I can hide it, but I can’t figure out how to make it right.

Can any of you tell me what I need to do in order to get everything rotated properly so I can lay out my label on a landscape page? I’m not sure if this is something I need to worry about or not, but it really doesn’t seem right to me…

Or, if you can point me to an appropriate resource which explains this, that’d be great too. I just don’t understand what’s going on.

Thanks!

computersmaking thingsmoved from livejournal

eBay Phishing Scheme

February 9, 2006

Upon sitting down at my desk just now it appeared that I had email from an eBay user named ‘yuki668’ asking simply “Hello,do you accept PayPal?”. This seemed a bit fishy, so I decided to dig into it a little bit.

Come to find out, it’s the best made phishing scheme that I’d not yet seen. It appears to look like valid email from eBay, takes you to a look-alike login page, allows one to compose a reply, and even appears to send the message, then offering to redirect the user to My eBay and various other pages.

Here are some screenshots of this message and the hosted false pages:

· Original email from ‘yuki668’ asking a ‘question’.
· Fake eBay login page.
· Fake message composition page.
· Fake sent message confirmation.

I have to say, with my actively selling something on eBay, this almost fooled me. The way I knew it not to be right, is the original email message was sent, it didn’t say that it was a question about a particular item…

Anyway, here is the full header if the email, if you are curious: Clicky Clicky

computersmoved from livejournal

MovableType

February 7, 2006

Movable Type is pretty nifty once you get past the hurdles of getting the damn thing installed. It’s poorly documented and requires a lot of CPAN modules.

Ah well, at least it’s working. (No, not for me, although I may start to use it at some point.)

Also, I wish whoever was working on the AdSense module for Gallery 2.0 would finish it. I’d love to be able to allow people to add banners there. It might also finally prompt me to caption my photos properly and with keywords and such.

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net