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

Category computers

USB 2.0 High Speed CF Reader

September 23, 2005

Does anyone here have a USB 2.0 Compact Flash reader which I could borrow / buy / have? I’m specifically looking for one that is extremely low profile, somewhat similar to this. I’ve found them on eBay from the UK, but I need one here. :\

Oh, I got one of the iPod photo adapters, and based on a test of 185MB of photos copying in just around seven minutes, I should be able to do a full gig in around 45. Well, that’s straight off the camera… I’d like to use just the reader and the iPod in order to save the batteries in the camera.

Thanks!

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Printing from XP -> OS X 10.4

September 13, 2005

[Cross posted to and for archival purposes…]

Last night I ran into an interesting issue with regards to printing from an XP machine to an iMac running OS X 10.4, and I thought people here would want to know about it.

First, the Mac has an HP Deskjet 952c connected to it, using the queue name which was automatically created when the printer was plugged in.

Second, the client machine is running XP SP2 and has simply mapped to the printer over the network and has the appropriate driver loaded.

The problem I was observing is that the XP machine would send a print job, and the Mac would report it as completed, but nothing would have actually been printed.

The solution to this problem is to access the CUPS web-based management stuffs (http://localhost:631) and edit the printer so that it’s queue name has no spaces in it. In my case I just removed the spaces and replaced them with underscores. Next I deleted the mapped printer on the XP machine and reconnected it, and everthing was fine.

I’ve been told by a friend that OS X Server actually warns a user about such potential issues when creating a print queue, but I can say that the client version of the OS doesn’t present the user with any sort of notification.

So, yeah. I hope that helps someone.

computersmoved from livejournal

Pagefile on OS X

September 12, 2005

[Cross posting this from because of smarter people here. Please delete if inappropriate.]

Does anyone here have any pointers to good info on OS X’s pagefile? It appears that it is all handled by dynamic pager (8), but I’m having a hard time finding info beyond simply moving the pagefile to another disk.

The reason I’m asking is because, in my experience, one can greatly improve paging performance by allocating pagefile space on multiple spindles. As I’ve got a pair of disks in my G5, that’s exactly what I’d like to do.

As it is, it looks like dynamic_pager can only take one argument for the base filename for the pagefile. Hopefully this isn’t the case…

computersmoved from livejournal

512MB? Bah!

September 5, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

I know this rant will probably get me flamed for being somewhat off topic, but hopefully some folks will find it useful:

512MB of RAM is not enough for OS X!

I suppose I should have know this and planned accordingly, but I didn’t and now I’m suffering the consequences.

See, I normally have 1.5GB in this machine, but when running the Apple Hardware Test the other day in order to determine if my Airport Extreme card was bad, one of my 512MB DIMMs tested bad. No problem, it’s a Crucial part, so it’s got a lifetime warranty. Well, I pulled the RAM to ship it back to Crucial, and now this machine is borderline unusable. I cannot wait for the RAM too get back here… Hell, maybe I’ll order another GB in the mean time, just so I can have something usable!

(Note: I could not do a cross ship as I purchased the RAM through a vendor. Crucial still handles the warranty. The machine is a dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5, and I installed the extra RAM after unboxing before it was ever powered on, so I hadn’t ever realized low memory would be this painful.)

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PC Needed

August 27, 2005

Can someone help me find a particular PC? I’m looking for an older machine, so long as the CPU is passively cooled. Yeah, I mean one of those giant heatsink things just hanging out there…

I also want to stick a dead quiet hard disk in there and finally have a silent firewall. Mine’s getting old and noisy.

acquired thingscomputersmoved from livejournal

rez.nuxx.net

August 23, 2005

Just FYI, the websites on rez.nuxx.net will be inaccessible for a brief period of time tomorrow. I hope for this to be in the morning, and for under a minute in time. In short, I have to replace the version of cronolog I installed earlier today. The current version (from ports) defaults to writing all files as root, which isn’t good. Fortunately this patch from 2002 seems to have it flop to whatever UID/GID one specifies before writing the files.

I want to move to this version… This should be a quick, seamless switch. Add the appropriate flags to the Apache config files, stop httpd, replace the binary, set appropriate permissions on existing files so they can be appended, start httpd, done.

I’m just paranoid, and I wanted to give people a heads-up in case things seem slightly amiss for a few minutes tomorrow.

Oh, and yeah, the whole new way of rotating logs seems to work great. Parsing all logs generated since ~5pm today took under a minute.

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