Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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1080p Mac Mini Mayhem
I have caved in: after over three years of voluntary exile from normality, I have dragged myself back up to the technological heights of the twentieth century, and bought myself a television. Indeed, I’ve gone further that that, and splashed out on a shiny, 32″ Full-HD LCD job, because I think if you’re going to do something, you may as well buy nice gadgets with which to do it. Naturally, the universe being the contrary and complicated place that it is, my new telly didn’t actually work as desired, and I was required to perform varied rituals in order to appease the gods of consumer electronics so that it would play nicely with my Mac mini. For the sake of other lost souls like myself, those doomed to a lifetime making things that should Just Work actually work, I record below the various problems encountered and the solutions I used to overcome them. (more…)
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Securing MAMP
MAMP is a really easy way of running recent versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL on your Mac for development purposes, something that can take quite a lot of effort if you attempt to set things up on your own. There is one major drawback, however: the default install is really rather insecure, with Apache serving pages up to all and sundry, including the configuration sections of the install, meaning that anyone who happens to spot that port 80 is open can do things like drop databases at will, which would be somewhat irritating to say the least. This tutorial from Eric Keil covers some techniques for securing everything, but I went about it a little differently. (more…)
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Facing The Flag by Jules Verne
The latest novel in my now slightly obsessive quest to read as much Jules Verne as possible, Facing The Flag is a typical Voyage Extraordinaire. We encounter high-tech weaponry and transport, nefarious pirates bent on mayhem and destruction, and a hyper-intelligent eccentric inventor, all seen through the eyes of a slightly dopey French narrator. It even has an island submarine base hidden within the empty magma chamber of an extinct volcano, the third such example I have encountered in the Voyages so far. The story is well paced and culminates in a satisfying conclusion: classic Verne, and thoroughly enjoyable. (more…)
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The Adventures of a Special Correspondent by Jules Verne
This anonymous translation of Claudius Bombarnac, entitled The Aventures of a Special Correspondent may not, I suspect, be the most faithful rendering of Verne’s original text. The eponymous narrator travels from Tbilisi to “Pekin” via the Trans Caspian Railway and assorted other rail and boat connections in search of a story to send back to his newspaper in Paris, and as far as the basic story is concerned, the novel is entertaining and enjoyable. (more…)