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

!!!

October 14, 2004

Okay, now this is one of the most useful things I’ve installed in a long time. Google has introduced Google Desktop Search, and boy does it work well. It’s installed and picking through my email and my machine, and the searching is just great. Outlook search is notoriously faulty, taking a long time to pick through mail, being keyboard (and not context) based, etc.

Well, this tool sits there, indexes your whole machine, and offers searches on files, contents of files, email, chats, everything. It’s *exactly* what I’ve been wanting for quite some time. You know how it’s always been easier to search the internet than your local machine… Well, now searching your local machine is just as easy. This makes me really, really happy.

computersmoved from livejournal

Mmm… Toxic!

September 29, 2004

Last night and I went wandering a rather interesting local park. This is Walden Ponds in Shelby Township, MI, which is located on part of the old G & H Landfill, which was a Superfund site. The restoration work is now done, and the wetlands have been turned into a Heron Rookery. There’s also an interesting trail which leads out the back of the park and eventually to Yates Cider Mill at 23 Mile and Dequinder. Oh, and you can’t forget the rather forboding water treatment plant which sits off to the side of the park, quietly cleaning up the filth.

Of course, we can’t forget an obligatory satellite photo of the site, complements of ‘s wonderful mapper.ofdoom. Set the format to Metro and the zoom to 0.5m/p for a good view of the site. This starts centered on the pond in front of the plant.

mappingmoved from livejournaloutdoors

Flattening Negatives?

September 23, 2004

Help! Could anyone who reads this who is familiar with photography stuff offer a suggestion? I’ve got some negatives I’m scanning, but despite being stored flat in sleeves for eight years or so, they seem to have a bit of a curl to them. Scanning them is producing a bit of distortion at the end of each negative, as can be seen here.

Does anyone know a good way to go about flattening negatives? I don’t have a tractor drive negative scanner I can feed them into, and the negatives slide into the carrier, not clip in. As such, it’s hard to fully keep them from curling. :(

acquired thingsmoved from livejournal

Digital Cameras

September 20, 2004

So I’ve been poking around online, attempting to decide which digital camera would be best to upgrade to. I’m personally a big fan of Nikon digital cameras, and I want something smaller than my current Kodak DC4800. It’s a great camera that has served me well, but I think it’s time for something new.

Thus far I’m considering either the Coolpix 4800 or Coolpix 5200. One is 4mp and the other is 5mp, but the 4mp camera has better optics and a much larger CCD. Unfortunately, the 4mp camera is also quite a bit larger and a bit heavier, but it’s still only 9oz (sans battery).

There’s some nice reviews of both of these cameras over at Steve’s Digicams: Coolpix 4800 – Coolpix 5200

Currently I’m leaning towards the 4800, with a 512MB Ultra II SD card, spare battery, and carrying case. This is all likely to run around $500 total. Sure, there resolution isn’t that improved over my current camera, but hopefully the optics will be a bit better.

That said, is there anyone who would be interested in buying my camera? I’ve got the camera, bag, two batteries, wall charger, power cable, USB cable, TV cable, two CF cards (64MB and 8MB), USB CompactFlash (CF) adapter, a lens cleaner, and a few other bits for it. I’m thinking $150… So, anyone interested?

And before you ask, yes, this is the camera I’ve used to take pictures for the last while. Some of the excellent sample images are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

So, yeah. If anyone’s interested, let me know. It’s a very fair price, and the camera works great. I just want to part with it so that I can afford another one. I’d also appreciate any insight people have into either of those cameras, or preferences for other ones or whatnot. The reason I’m hesitant to get the Coolpix 4800 is it’s physical size. It might not quite be pocket sized… But the smaller CCD in the 5200 is apt to produce noisier images… There’s a sample full resolution 4800 image here and one from the 5200 here.

Price isn’t really too much of a consideration, as the 5200 is only about $30 more than the 4800.

(Odd that I’d go from a DC4800 to another 4800 model. heh.)

acquired thingsmoved from livejournal

Roasted Corn on the Cob

September 13, 2004

[Crossposted to .]

So tonight I wanted something really tasty to eat… On the way home I swung by one of the local markets and picked up four ears of corn on the cob with the intention of roasting them. And, that’s what I did.

Well, not the only thing. ;)

As I have a habit of doing, I also took a number of pictures of the process, along with writing up a recipe entry for it. I guess I shouldn’t quite call it a recipe, as it’s more an outline of a process, but it accomplishes the task: showing people how to cook corn in one of the best ways possible.

It also gave me a chance to finally use my grill. As I haven’t been eating meat for almost a year now, I haven’t been grilling much. I tend to cook almost everything inside…

Anyway, here’s some of the other photo highlights (Click << and >> to move through the photos, or just go up higher in the gallery to see the thumbnails.):

· First Grill Marks
· Most of the Grill
· Done!
· Perfectly Colored, Ready to Eat!

So, enjoy the photos and this recipe, along with any of the other ones that I’ve got listed.

foodmoved from livejournal

???

September 7, 2004

Does anyone here have a preferred ftp daemon that they run? I’d use the one built into FreeBSD, but I’d prefer to have something a bit more stand-alone which will do authentication on it’s own with chroot support, as I want logins with no system accounts to access only very specific directories.

I’d run Apache 2.x and use it’s ftp module, but I’m still concerned about PHP compatibility with it.

computersmoved from livejournal

!!!

September 7, 2004

Man, my colo facility is f’d up. Well, not their facility… Or their service… Just their billing. See, I installed the server back in February and (except for a failed switch card which they quickly replaced) things have been working great. Except for billing.

After the server was installed, I was told that I’d be receiving a bill at the end of the month. No problem… Well, three months rolled by and no bill. After a bit of email being sent around, I received an invoice a few days later. Paid it, no problems.

Well, three more months roll past, and still no bills. So, I email them asking for the June, July, and August bills. After a phone conversation early Wednesday morning, the billing folks explain that they don’t know what happened, but they’ll send an invoice out. So, Friday comes and I receive an invoice. For September. Bah! Heh…

Fortunately after a phone call today with Bill, the person who was there when I put the server in, he said that I should just pay the September bill, and they will get the billing stuff straightened out and send me another invoice in a few weeks to clear it all up.

That’s fine with me… I just hope it happens. Heh. In the mean time I’ve cancelled the June and July checks, adding them back into the pool of float, and waiting for the next invoice. I’ll just send what was to be the August check as the September payment.

Heh… It’s just funny. Most places are rock solid on their billing while service suffers. This place provides great, fast connectivity with cheap colocation rates. Just…. iffy billing. :)

So, yeah. Need someone to host your server? Look up Waveform Technologies.

computersfinancesmoved from livejournal

Mmm! Pizza!

September 7, 2004

[I originally posted this in yesterday, but I figured people here might want to see it.]

So today I wanted some pizza… Well, there’s a local fruit / veggie market called Randazzo’s who has recently installed a pizza oven. To make a long story short, I ordered a pizza margherita, and this is what I got. While it’s not quite accurate, it still is good… The only problem is that the last time I ordered a pizza from there, a four cheese one, I received basically the same thing, but sans tomato.

I’m not so sure the guy making the pizzas knows how to follow the recipes… But it is good.

There is another shot of the whole pizza here if you’re interested.

Also, one interesting thing… I get there, and there is a big sign out front advertising buy one get one free pizzas for Labor Day. As I hadn’t asked about this, I just head inside expecting to pay the $6.99 for the pizza (did I mention this place is also very reasonably priced?) and the person behind the counter rings it up as $3.49.

Not bad at all… I can forgive the slightly not-to-order-yet-still-tasty pizza for the speed, price, etc. So, if you live in the Macomb Township, Michigan area, Randazzo’s gets a big thumbs up for it’s pizza (not to mention it’s veggies). Especially compared with the crap chains that surround it.

foodmoved from livejournal

..//..

August 7, 2004

Nothing like finding what appears to be a bug in your email system at 3am. When you are tired. Too tired to fix it now.

Here’s the problem: When vpopmail (the virtual domain mail management add-in for qmail) authenticates a user via pop3 or imap, it adds an entry to a database stating that the IP address the user coming from is allowed to send mail through the server, via SMTP. This all generally works fine, except when you are checking your email via POP3 with SSL.

Then, instead of the standard line like this:

68.60.89.18:allow,RELAYCLIENT=””,RBLSMTPD=”” 1091862544

You instead get something like this:

__ffff_68.60.89.18:allow,RELAYCLIENT=””,RBLSMTPD=”” 1091861372

As the second line doesn’t work, someone with an account on my mail server won’t be able to relay mail through my mail server.

So, I’m not completely sure what’s going on as of yet. I think maybe if I update vpopmail (qmailadmin needs it as well) things will get straightened out, but we’ll have to see.

Actually, I’m now starting to think that the problem could be with my config in general. It seems I overlooked something, and I currently have qmail doing POP3, and courier doing POP3-SSL. So, I may have overlooked something when I set my mail server up way back when, and this whole time I’ve been working around the problem without knowing it, simply by having just one of my accounts check via POP3 as opposed to POP3 with SSL.

Hmm… So yeah, if this is the case, I need to figure out how to have courier make the required changes to have POP before SMTP work with it, too.

I guess I didn’t do it right instead of the first place.

computersmoved from livejournal