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Thursday, December 12, 2002
Busted!
This is all over the Mac news sites today but I really enjoyed it so here goes.
Guy sells his PowerBook on eBay. Guy gets ripped off by the buyer to the tune of two grand. Chicago PD won't help guy. Guy enlists aid of the wonderful Mac-nerds of the modern interweb. Con artist now behind bars. Whoot!
My Tivo and I are eagerly awaiting the Law & Order dramatization.
Posted at 12:21 PM | Comments (5)
Sunday, December 08, 2002
Happy Happy Sunday Fun
So I got up fairly early this morning (well, 10am), kissed my boy goodbye (orchestra rehearsal, all day), made myself a cuppa, sat down to organize and wrap some Christmas gifts, and flipped on the ol' Tivo.
La la la, sipping tea, jotting down holiday notes, petting some cats, looking up cookie recipes, la la la, watching an episode of Law & Order SVU about some crazy daycare center full of child rapists.
[cue screeching sound of stylus being ripped off a record]
Oh Tivo, how you fuck with our heads.
Posted at 10:40 AM | Comments (6)
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
#1478 in a neverending list called Signs You Are (I Am) Getting Old
Walking through the university environs on the way to work, you think "Kids today don't know how to dress properly for the cold. Their parents should be very concerned!"
Sigh. Kill me now.
Posted at 09:47 PM | Comments (1)
Ever nerdier.
For those Mac folks out there giving Chimera a try: I got a very handy hint from MacOSXHints last night that has made using Chimera much nicer. I still have IE set as my default browser, but Chimera is getting closer to the platonic ideal the more I tweak it.
Mozilla lets you set a feature called Minimum Font Size, which helps prevent sites that use a 96dpi grid from jaggedly smushing your fonts down to miniscule size (Wired News, I'm looking at you). If you're like me and you prefer to browse the web with fairly small default text sizes (I usually use 11 point or thereabouts), you'll get sick of the smushing fairly quickly, but you probably can't stand Mozilla's bloated user experience.
So quit Chimera, open its user.js file if it exists (it's just a text file, crack it open with BBEdit; if it doesn't exist, create a new text file in the same folder as prefs.js) and add this line:
user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-western", 9);
You can add additional lines with additional encodings, or you can change the 9 to your favorite number.
Now you can start Chimera back up and browse lovely sites like What Do I Know at your text size of choice without having to deal with the jagged smushies. PS, while we're on the subject of WDIK, he just linked to a very cute Snowflake Screensaver that will almost certainly put you in a holiday mood. Now I just need one with tiny, tumbling Ellen Feisses.
Posted at 10:25 AM | Comments (3)
Oh TV, I hardly knew ye.
Christmas (and my birthday) came early this year. My boy (and some kind familial contributors) pooled their pennies to buy me the ultimate geek toy, a nice spanking new Tivo. And the boy let me open it as soon as it came
I've been pretty much chomping at the bit for one for ages and now it's ALL MINE!
After a few momentary snafus (one of the curiosities of living in Jersey City is that sometimes a call to a different area code is cheaper than one within our area code) it was all up and running. Within 5 minutes, I couldn't imagine using a television without it.
Pause Nigella to make some tea? Skip the commercials upon returning? Rewind to look at how weird her butt looks all squished into that girdle? Word.
It's miraculous. I may never leave the house again.
If only to make sure I can teach it not to record Designing Women: when I sat down this morning, there were FOUR episodes queued up for me to watch. Yech! I'm not that gay.
Posted at 10:03 AM | Comments (9)
Sunday, December 01, 2002
Assassination!
Warning! Incredibly geeky post ahoy!
So, I have just spent the last 8 hours (I should say 12 days, just as a coverup for my latest bout with non-posting) trying to install SpamAssassin.
I was armed with a handy printout of Ben Trott's fantastic set of OS X specific instructions and a fresh OS X Developer Tools CD.
Everything started out smoothly. The Dev Tools took half an hour to install and configure themselves, during which time I had some tea and watched my boyfriend paint. Very relaxing.
Once I actually got to *typing in the terminal*... well, things went a bit pear-shaped. So we went out for chinese food and watched Trading Spaces. Then I worked on assassinating some more spam.
SpamAssassin required the installation of a new version of perl, along with 14 module thingies -- actually, it required 15, one of which (HTML::Parser) wasn't listed in the instructions. I got 'em all going with the help of pigtails and some kind of folk on IRC: RandallX, Fugu and Mako (eep). Thanks all!
Basically, SpamAssassin now logs onto my mail server and downloads my mail like a regular email program. It goes through the mails and works its mojo, marking up the Subject lines in various ways to denote which mails are spam and which are not. Then I simply tell my email program to read the text file that SpamAssassin outputs, every time I hit "Check Mail".
Unfortunately, my email program, Eudora, doesn't read text files with unix line endings.
So now I'm stuck. I can convert the line endings fairly trivially by hand with BBEdit or a quick AppleScript... but I have to make sure it's in unix format every time the SpamAssassin background app runs, and that it's in Mac format every time I hit "Check Mail" in Eudora.
The only advice I've come across is "switch to Mail.app" but it seems the newest versions of Mail have removed the ability to read from a text file altogether. Plus I've always found Mail.app to be alarmingly slow when used with large mailboxes (I keep about 250mb of mail on hand at any given time).
Anybody out there nerdy enough to have a solution for me? I think what I need is some kind of shell script but I have no idea how to work 'em. Bleh.
Tuesday Update: I've given up on this momentarily and gone back to letting Eudora check my email the normal way. SpamAssassin's scanner was very slow (it took about 7 minutes to load and process 70 emails; I'd give it the benefit of the doubt by saying that most were large mailing list digests, but Eudora was able to suck in the same messages in a matter of less than 10 seconds) and changing the line endings from unix to Mac quickly got tedious, especially since folders like /var/mail are hidden from "normal" Mac applications. I would still love a good spam filter but right now I'm going to investigate getting something installed at the ISP level. I'm sure you're all devasted.
