This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.
Best girl. I don’t even know where this is from, but it’s about time to find out!
From Amiami | TERA - Elin School Swimsuit ver. Complete Figure(Preorder).
This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.
She doesn’t look quite as menacing here as she usually seems.
A quick but severe warning to those who have Amazon Wish Lists and move house. Changing your Amazon address does not change your Wish List address.
To do this:
Unfortunately, we learned this the hard way. Earlier this year, the Official Rubenerd Patron ♔ Sir Novak bought me a gift. Despite updating my Amazon address months earlier, it still shipped to my old one.
Thanfully, @JamieJakov pointed out the issue, and now we know why!
Happiness is helping one of your best friends put on a fun Pokémon–themed quest for his girlfriend. Then, retreating with your own girlfriend to an art deco café for a Cherry Ripe slice and a cup of coffee, with the rain lightly tapping the glass dome above the arcade where you sit.
2014 hasn’t brought much change for me so far, but what it has introduced is more clarity. And with that, a greater appreciation for the luck ➊ I do have and the people in my life. Times are challenging, and there are things I wish I had turned out better, but things are just so much better than before.
Happy Sunday.
➊ As a scientist I ascribe fortuitous circumstances to the term luck, but that’s far less succinct and fun to say.
With the latest Slashdot Beta site being compared unfavourably to Digg 4.0, an alternative community of nerds craving stuff that matters have formed around a new site. Dubbed SoylentNews, the site runs from the same codebase as Slashdot but with a layout and theme that preserves the traditional threaded comment system.
As a worried Slashdot lurker and occasional commentator, I've had a poke around and it seems technically promising. Leaving aside the seeming inability of FLOSS communities to brand themselves (though to be fair, Rubenerd isn't much better), it has all the ingredients that made the original Slashdot so much fun to read over all these years.
Ironically enough, all that's missing is the people. Time will tell if a meaningful number make the switch, or whether the site provides the impetus to Dice to listen to their adopted community. Either way, right?
As I sit here on this overcast, drizzly Sydney afternoon, I'm keeping myself warm and alert with a steaming cup of Darjeeling tea. I've sampled many fine brews over the years, but none match the refined, gentle taste or aroma of this tea from the Darjeeling Valley of India.
One of my fondest memories is sharing a pot of this tea with my beautiful departed mum in the Dôme cafe in KLCC. As with Singapore, Kuala Lumpur is extremely humid and warm, but in the late morning with a gentle breeze wafting through the open windows at the front of the café, we could have sat there all day. It was a wonderfully relaxing reprieve from the oncology ward, yet it also sparked so many fascinating conversations.
Now I have another reason to like Darjeeling! Clara and I have yet to see Girls und Panzer, but the premise looks fascinating. From their Wikia:
Girls und Panzer is set in an alternate universe where a sport known as "Panzerfahren," or the art of fighting tanks, exists. The sport is practiced entirely by girls and women and is considered feminine. The series follow the girls of Ooarai Girls Academy as they learn about, operate, and battle with all kinds of tanks against other tanking schools while forming bonds with their machines and each other.
One of the supporting characters in the series is Darjeeling, a graceful British tanker rarely seen without her eponymous beverage. Among her famous British WWII mottos, this stands out as my favourite:
"No matter how fast we go, or no matter how many hits we take, I will never spill my tea.
This attitude apparently also applies to her obligatory beach outings, made famous with numerous official artworks in the usual art magazine suspects. I ask you, what could be classier than drinking tea from fine china on a beach?
Late last year, we got news that Darjeeling would be receiving a Beach Queen rendition. Donning her braided hair and frilly white mizugi, her resemblance to her official art (pictured below) is uncanny. And of course she comes with a cup of tea, and a picnic basket presumably to store more tea.
Honestly, would someone that classy be seen wearing anything else?
Wave's Beach Queen figure line has earned notoriety for generic designs that seem less about expressing character, more about parading as many people as possible in swimwear. That said, they are capable of brief bouts of brilliance, such as this Saber who Clara was nice enough to surprise me with last year. It may be worth researching the sculptors for each of these to see who makes these standouts.
Time for some more tea, me thinks. Maybe I need to get some white board shorts.
Earlier this month, I didn't use Tiamo's replacement 32–bit bootloader to allow me to install OS X 10.9 Mavericks on my Mac Pro 1,1. At the end of that post, I said:
[..] there's no reason Apple couldn't change your lovingly replaced boot.efi with a future software update. You'd be wise to keep a bootable memory key with the altered boot.efi available in case you ever need to boot with it and swap it back.
With 10.9.2, this happened. Unsurprisingly, the solution is to overwrite the updated boot.efi files with Tiamo's replacements again.
If you installed the update and now your Mac Pro can't boot (as I may or may not have done), you can replace the updated boot.efi files with your Mavericks boot key, or any other bootable Mac volume.
After booting, use the Terminal to replace these files with Tiamo's:
/Volumes/[Your Boot Drive]/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi /Volumes/[Your Boot Drive]/usr/standalone/i386/boot.efi
If you get an error, you may need to unlock them first:
chflags -R nouchg boot.efi
And we end with another agreement that what you do to your machine is your own fault and responsibility. I didn't do this, and neither should you.
Did you know there's a commonality between East and West with regards to the day we presently find ourselves living through?
I could have phrased that better were I not slightly delirious from a long day. I could have also baked a chocolate cake with salmon chunks, or written a recursive algorithm to solve an iterative problem, but I don’t hear you saying those. Think about that for a moment… do you realise how ridiculous your assertions sound?
According to the almighty Wikipedia:
The name is derived from Old English Wōdnesdæg and Middle English Wednesdei, "day of Wodanaz", ultimately a calque of dies Mercurii "day of Mercury".
That doesn't quite make sense to my tired head, but I'll give the contributors to that article the benefit of the doubt for now. What I do know, the plot thickens when we find out this:
In Japanese, the word Wednesday is 水曜日(sui youbi), meaning 'water day' and is associated with 水星 (suisei): Mercury (the planet), literally meaning "water star". Similarly, in Korean the word Wednesday is 수요일 (su yo il), also meaning water day.
Water star sounds quite beautiful.
As an illustration of both mercury and water, the above Pixiv image by Nardack of Sailor Mercury manipulating the aforementioned aqueous solution is included. I knew I'd get an excuse to post an image of my favourite Sailor Senshi again one day.
Uh oh, we've reached Headline Word Wrappage on my new site design. I should have just titled it PNAELV.
Since Red Hat Linux was split into Ret Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora last decade, those of us without the financial resources to purchase ongoing support used CentOS. FreeBSD remains my server OS of choice, but CentOS has been the most reliable, predictable Linux distribution I've ever used.
As of last year, it was billed as such:
CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendor's redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free.
That first line became the worst kept secret in the Linux world. Everyone knew they were referring to RHEL; even the most oblivious system administrator would see the replacement "Red Hat" branding packages fly past in a yum update. Or favicons.
To the credit of the CentOS team, they performed their stated role admirably. With few exceptions, software and repos built for RHEL worked flawlessly. The OS allowed me to adopt the knowledge I was gaining in the Red Hat ecosystem from Fedora to a server OS, which was personally invaluable. I liked desktop Fedora, but was weary of deploying it as a server OS.
Earlier this year, Red Hat surprised nerds everywhere with the announcement that they were "joining forces" with CentOS. Along with the commercially supported RHEL and leading edge Fedora, CentOS would become:
[..] a community-supported and produced Linux distribution that draws on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other open source technologies to provide a platform that's open to variation. CentOS provides a base for community adoption and integration of open source cloud, storage, network, and infrastructure technologies on a Red Hat-based platform.
The announcement was light on details, but suggested CentOS would be more than just a "free" version of RHEL. Instead, it would become an officially sanctioned base for specialisation, something the commercially supported RHEL with its consistent updates and standard environment couldn't easily be.
Personally, while I never thought CentOS would be going away any time soon, a small part of me breathed a sigh of relief at the announcement. While I'm well versed now in the Red Hat universe way of doing things, there was always the risk this "PNAELV" could change things up just enough to render CentOS impractical. Then where would we be?
On the other hand, that "Red Hat universe" may have kept CentOS safe. As conspiracy theorists stated with Windows piracy, Red Hat may have tolerated free CentOS users precisely because it kept them versed in their architecture. In this light, officially supporting CentOS would be the next logical step.
Why bring up this two month old story now? One, it was a draft I never got around to publishing. Secondly, new spiffy website, with a new tagline that made me beam from ear to ear. I never thought I'd see their Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor mentioned:
The CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, manageable and reproduceable [sic] platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
I've finally found ways to use for Dropbox, and in the process discovered its true strength. Spoiler, it's not capacity, upgrades or features.
Shortly after we got home broadband at home (the location one would expect to have home broadband), I began looking into online storage. Only the newer computers at school had Zip drives, meaning any larger files I wanted to present for assignments had to be painfully split across floppies.
The system I ended up using was Xdrive. Looking back on it now, it was poorly desined and insecure, but as a split floppy disk replacement it was faster, easier and more reliable. To be fair, your service would have to be pretty terrible not to have those benefits compared to floppies, but there you have it.
Since then, I've maintained a keen interest in online storage services. In Australia most people still have to contend with quoats and terrible upload speeds, but they're still an interesting service category.
With its own security and privacy issues, I abstained from using Dropbox long after it became the darling of the tech world. One the one hand, the idea of having my data stored on a remote server I didn't control didn't sit well with me. With a cheap VPS and rsync, I also thought it largely redundant.
This changed when I started using sparsebundles and iOS apps with syncing.
Sparsebundles are OS X disk images you mount like any other, but consist of fragments rather than one contiguous file. In the context of automatic syncing, only modified portions of the image need to be synced, rather than the entire image each time. If you configure a sparsebundle with AES encryption and host it on Dropbox, you have portable, private online storage even Dropbox can't decrypt.
(My 2009 post on Mac Encrypted Disk Images has been one of my most popular, with links from Stack Overflow and its ilk. Pity I can’t cash in on that for reputation or other gamified nonsense)!
Perhaps closer to more typical use cases, the other thing that changed was my use of nvALT on my Mac, and Byword on iOS. I've started keeping general study notes, blog drafts and images, grocery lists and such in nvALT notes. These files are located in a Drobox folder, which Byword on my iPhone and iPad accesses. It sounds fragile, but Byword has always prompted for which version I want to keep in the rare event of conflicts.
All this hasn't changed my preference for a simple VPS with rsync or webdav under most circumstances. Like all things though, it comes down to the right tool for the right job.
There are certainly plenty of tools giving Dropbox competition, from the original Box, to SugarSync, to Microsoft's OneDrive. Many offer increased storage over Dropbox, greater referral incentives, more features. By those metrics, it should be a cut and dry issue.
Which gets us to mindshare, arguably Dropbox's greatest asset. No matter the superiority of other services, Dropbox is adored by developers and demanded by users. A search on the iOS App Store will return hundreds, if not thousands, of productivity apps that use Dropbox as its back end, or as an export option. Dave Winer’s online Small Picture services use it.
When used appropriately and with the right considerations, it's quite a flexible system. It's simple, ubiquitous, and works. It just took me seven years to figure it out.
Just make sure you opt out of that whole arbitration thing, whatever little that matters to us living outside the US.
