Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
-
JavaScript and UTF-8 in Eclipse
For some reason the usually excellent Eclipse IDE sets the default encoding of JavaScript files to ISO-8859-1, which is pretty much wrong and can be problematic. The correct path to configuring things so that they are right is rather non-obvious; Google failed me in the quest to fix things this time. It’s a small but irritating problem, and apparently I’m not alone in seeking an answer, so I’m posting my solution up here for future reference and for any other frustrated Eclipse JavaScripters that might be out there. (more…)
-
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…)
-
Automatically launch eMusic .emp files from Safari
I use eMusic’s download manager to handle album downloads from that website, and on one of my computers I haven’t bothered to install Firefox, and instead use Safari. Safari 3.x on OS X Leopard (10.5.x) restricts automatic opening of files downloaded from the internet, which is a bit annoying if you want an application to do its thing without a lot of irritating clicking about. Automatic opening is restricted to “safe” files by default, a setting that can be overridden in Safari preferences, although removing this restriction seems to simply prevent any files from opening automatically at all, which is even more useless. There is a way to work around Safari’s overbearing nannying, though. (more…)
-
14.1″ G4 iBook Hard Disk Replacement
Let’s consider the following situation: someone has dropped their beloved iBook G4, and has failed to mention this fact to their designated household geek, preferring instead to continue working on said laptop. This they are able to do for a surprisingly long time, until the machine tries to swap some of its memory out to disk, and encounters an area of the drive’s platters which was scratched in the impact, at which point it crashes horribly and thereafter refuses to boot despite numerous threats and coaxings. What happens next?
The household geek gets to take apart an Apple laptop! Hooray!
(more…) -
Xtightvncviewer and keyboard focus
This may only apply to xtightvncviewer in Ubuntu Edgy, but it was an annoying enough problem that I want to make a note of it. Xtightvncviewer doesn’t capture keyboard input properly with it’s default settings, meaning that you can’t type anything on remote computers, and you can’t access the F8 menu to quit or manage the VNC session. If you’re in full screen mode you have to terminate the process manually from a VT, which is hardly elegant. Happily, there’s an easy way to get round this problem.
(more…) -
Windows Mobile 5 WPA Key Input
I just acquired a new smartphone, with all the bells and whistles, including WiFi capablility, and upon trying to connect to my office network I discovered a particularly stupid piece of GUI design: it is impossible to paste a network key into the wireless key input box. You are forced to type it in manually. If, like me, you have a stupidly long and meaningless 63 character key for security and paranoia purposes, this is rather a pain. In combination with the fact that the input is completely replaced by asterisks it’s borderline impossible. After about four attempts to input my key manually, I gave up and formulated an alternative solution.
(more…)