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

Alignment of Saturn, Mercury, and Venus

June 22, 2005

So it seems that as seen here Saturn, Venus, and Mercury are aligned tonight.

Well, on the way home from my parents house tonight I grabbed a shot of this alignment. The shot is just a quick RAW snapshot that I quickly converted with dcraw, dumped into photoshop, tweaked the color, the exported to a JPEG.

If you’d like to see this image, take a quick look here: http://www.nuxx.net/images/saturn-venus-mercury_alignment_test.jpg

I’ll probably get a better one uploaded later, but you can clearly see the alignment in this shot.

I would have just posted the image itself, but it doesn’t look good too small, and I want to go watch some Frontline right now, not mess with the image. So, just click the link.

UPDATE: Better version behind the cut, or at this link: http://www.nuxx.net/images/saturn-venus-mercury_conjunction_wide.jpg

Click for a nice version of the aforementioned photo… It’s not huge, but I don’t want to post a 1024px wide image to people’s friends pages.

found thingsmoved from livejournaloutdoors

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June 21, 2005

Just a warning for friends of mine using Windows… If you use iTunes for Windows and come across people mentioning a “plugin” for it called BadApple which purports to add Podcast support right into iTunes, don’t install it.

Well, maybe install it, but read this post which I made to first.

This is not a “plugin” and it’s borderline malicious software. While it appears to do what’s claimed, it’ll also make a good number of unintended changes to your machine.

computersfound thingsmoved from livejournal

nuxx.net

June 21, 2005

Okay, the POP before SMTP issue seems to be sorted out now. If you normally send mail through nuxx.net and you currently (or suddenly) aren’t able to, please let me know. Things should be working as before, where if you check your email with POP, then your IP is allowed to relay through SMTP for the next 30 minutes or so.

Yes, I know I dragged my feet on this, but I was being lazy.

Also, I need some help from someone who knows command line stuff better than I. I just can’t figure this out:

The command cat < file1.txt behaves as expected, echoing file1.txt to stdout. However, cat < file1.txt file2.txt does not do what I expect, and instead prints just file2.txt. What has to be done in order to pipe both file1.txt and file2.txt into cat? I just can’t seem to figure it out. Thanks. :)

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.net

!!!

June 17, 2005

Wow, so Dry Creek Photo offers color profiles for various labs’ digital color printers. If they don’t have location profiled yet, you can have the store print a particular file, then send it in and they’ll profile it. Turns out that most Costcos have already been profiled, which is just *great*. Heh… And I thought their prints looked good already.

Turns out there’s a bunch of info online to help one target their images to particular company’s printers. Like this.

found thingsmoved from livejournal

WTF?

June 15, 2005

[Cross posted to and …]

Anyone want to chip in some advice on this weird problem? It seems that for the last while, each time I wake my PowerMac† from sleep, it plays some jazz. Good jazz, but unknown jazz.

And yes, I’m serious.

What happens is that a few seconds after waking up I start hearing some quality jazz being played out of the normal audio out. Then, just about 10 seconds of music play before it suddenly stops and the machine functions as normal.

Because I’m so confused / flabbergasted by the problem, I made a video of it happening. Feel free to download the video from here. It’s a 5.9MB h.264 video just simply dumped from my camera then encoded…

Running apps that could maybe do this are iTunes (it’s not playing, and there is a different kind of music currently queued), QuickTime (nothing open), iChat, and some Vidi (TV tuner app, but the audio isn’t the currently tuned channel on the external tuner).

I’m going to go attempt to nail down what it is, just because I’m really, really confused. Google’s turning up nothing, and I don’t have a single piece of music that is the same as what’s being played.

†Original Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5 / 2x 160GB disks / 1.5GB RAM / OS X 10.4.1

UPDATE: Problem solved. It seems that RabbitRadio, a poorly functioning Dashboard widget for streaming NPR stations, was the cause. See, I installed RabbitRadio and had some issues with it not working for more than a brief period of time. Well, it seems that each time I wake my machine from sleep, it (while running in Dashboard) was firing up and playing my selected NPR station (WDET) until it crapped out — for right about 10 seconds.

Conveniently when I was doing the sleep-wake-sleep-wake cycles and killing off apps, one of the periods of audio happened to be Ed Love‘s (scroll down) distinctive voice, whom I immediately recognized from WDET. It just so happens that the times when I wake my computer since installing RabbitRadio have happened to all be after 7pm on weeknights, during Mr. Love’s show.

I still don’t know why RabbitRadio doesn’t work right for me, nor why it would actually start playing whenever I woke my Mac, but the problem has at least been solved. Part of me is rather disappointed, though. I was sort of hoping there was some deep mystery or easter egg which caused my Mac to spout forth really quality music. Ah well.

computersmoved from livejournal

Rochefort 10 Clone

June 7, 2005

[Cross posted to and .]


Click for more…

Well, despite partially spilling it before tasting, I managed to pull a sample of my slightly modified Rochefort 10 clone from the secondary tonight. It’s been in there for three weeks and there are three more to go… Then ten weeks in the bottles.

Tonight it measured out to a nice 1.023, which figuring against it’s original 1.120 gives me right about 13%. Not bad for all stove-top partial mash. It also tastes really good… There’s a slightly sharp edge to it still, but it’s definitely good. It holds real promise for after it’s done aging another four months from now.

All that’s left to do it, come end of June, rack it to secondary on top of some fresh yeast (I’ll just squirt a tube of pitchable in), let it sit for three more days, then bottle it with some DME.

Wow. I’m really looking forward to this… It’s tasty already.

beermoved from livejournal

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June 7, 2005


Click for huuuuge…

As one tends to find out this time of year, the A/C at my house is fuX0r3d. Judging by the frosted over line shown above, it looks like low refrigerant again. In an hour of running as a test tonight, the line gained 5mm of frost on the outside of it. I guess it must be pretty humid out there. Anyway, in case you care, this is how the line is supposed to look when the compressor is on or off.

So, someone is coming by tomorrow afternoon to take a look at things, and then I’ll see how they are going. I just hope it doesn’t cost too much… I believe the leak is coming from the valves (large nut-like things you see in the picture) so perhaps the repair person can swap the seals.

It really bothers me that I can’t do this work myself. I don’t have any of the tools, nor do I have the refrigerant. I’m really, really tempted to learn how to refill the system and purchase some R-22 and a gauge set off of eBay, just to save some money…

Ah well.

Oh, I made some lemon ginger sun tea today because it’s easy and tasty. Now I just need to wait for the ice to finish hardening in the freezer.

UPDATE: I seem to have found this site on troubleshooting A/C issues, and the appropriate tool on eBay. Now to source some R22…

around the housefoodmoved from livejournal

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June 6, 2005

Well, in case anyone hasn’t heard yet, Apple is moving to Intel CPUs.

This is for serious, and in my opinion, probably a good thing.

Read more here: http://www4.macnn.com/macnn/wwdc/05/index.html

computersfound thingsmoved from livejournal

Juice Box

June 2, 2005

As mentioned in this Slashdot post yesterday, there is a rather interesting toy called the Juice Box which runs μcLinux and can display photos off of an SD card.

$12/ea at Target, plus another $11 for the SD adapter and a 32MB SD card. Should be interesting to play with…

And… Of course… The first image displayed on it was this one.

acquired thingselectronicsmoved from livejournal