fatvegan

One or both of the wheels will have a spoke that looks different to the others. It will be a tube built into the spoke and the tube contains a lug with a spring to keep it in place. The lug holds the wheel onto the axle. You can create a hole in the plastic cylinder so you can manually slide the lug away from the axle. The hole needs to be a reasonable size to be able to move the lug far enough but you don't want to destroy the cylinder. Depending on the state of the mechanism you may just be able to put the wheel back by hitting the centre with a hammer. But the spring mechanism will probably need to be in tact for the lug to stay in place.

The trackpad on my laptop has been broken for a year (since September 2008). I took it to the computer shop and they pulled it apart, but still couldn't figure out why it had broken. It has been incredibly frustrating. Unreasonably frustrating some would think. But lugging around this huge USB mouse everywhere is no fun at all. Especially on trains. I had even considered trying to find a new laptop.

However, today I discovered a cheeky work around. I pushed the "turn on the trackpad" button at the top of the keyboard. The trackpad did, indeed, turn on. It has given me much joy ever since.

Since I started using Google Contacts sync with my iPhone I've had big headaches with addresses. Addresses in the iPhone always end thinking they are in the United States no matter what I do in Google Contacts or on the iPhonee. I still don't understand exactly why this happens but I think it's probably to do with the fact that Google stores addresses as a big multi-line text block and the iPhone stores them as different fields. It's clearly a bug, but Google doesn't seem to think so and I'm not actually sure it's Apple's problem or Google's.

However, the problem improves if I use Nuevasync instead of Google Sync. And so far it doesn't seem to be any worse in other respects. So this is what I will do.

On Sunday I went to the city with one of my friends. We went to church in Broadway and then strolled up to QVB for some lunch and knife shopping. I ended up buying a very fancy set of Global knives at Victoria's Basement. For the very cheap costings of $275. Yikes.

They are very sharp knives and good. Rather hard to hang onto without dropping them on your foot. Because they have ergonomic handles. Apparently, you don't get RSI because they slip out of your hand every couple of minutes and drop on your foot. Or, as it turns out, slice off tiny pieces of finger or stab you in the palm.

The first night of knife ownership went forward without major mishap. There were a few scares, but no blood. However, the second day saw two crafty kitchen warriors fall to the unwieldy, unyielding blades. Kyung did lose a tiny piece of her finger and spent seven hours in the Emergency waiting room. Her left hand is now one giant bandage. Shameer stabbed himself in the palm and he is still bleeding today.

As the witless one who welcomed these weapons into our harmless home, I can't help but feel somewhat to blame.

This will be the fastest blog post I've made in ages because it's on our spanking new Optus Cable connection. Happy days.

I have started taking a giant thermal mug full of tea on my morning drives. The trip usually lasts a bit over an hour and the tea is still pretty hot when I get home. It really is a very big mug of tea. A whole double teapot stuffed into one giant mug.

I have been impressed by the thermal properties of the giant thermal mug. I had to drop the van off at the mechanics in the middle of a morning trip because the van started overheating. I thought it would be a quick job, but they had to keep the van overnight. Unfortunately, I left the giant mug sitting in the van the whole time.

The following day I went to pick up the van. I climbed in and noticed the giant mug sitting there patiently. I hefted it in my hand to check the weight. Hopeful. Perhaps recklessly hopeful, but still hopeful. I realised there was still tea in it. I wondered just how good these giant thermal mugs really were. They had proved to me in the past that they had some game. Well beyond any expectations I'd held. But could they seriously keep half a cup of tea warm overnight? The thought was preposterous, but that slowed my hand none as I brought the mug to quivering lips for a timid taste.

My fragile, budding hopes were roundly smashed. The tea was totally cold. I sat there for a moment, by myself, in a cold van, on a cold and grey morning, with a cold cup of stolen promise resting in my lap.

Then I drove home and made myself a pot of tea in the four cup teapot. Some would say it was immoderate consumption as means of escape. They may be right.

I just had an alarm for the same event go off on my iPhone and in Google Calendar at the same time. I reckon there was less than half a second between them. I think most of the delay was the time taken to switch tabs in Firefox.

That's the sort of harmony and precision that fills me with warm blisses.

Since I started buying expensive sorts of electronics that you're able to stuff in your pockets, I've wondered if carrying around these things has the potential to change my reactions to the world around me. In a negative sort of way. I'm often conscious of being careful with iPods or smart phones because they're expensive and frequently surprisingly fragile. I wonder if someone needed saving from drowning or truck collision if my reactions would be slowed having to carefully stow my iPhone or whatever, in my pocket or some waterproof case before lunging nobly to their rescue.

Since getting my iPhone a few months ago and starting at L'Arche, I've thought about this a little. There's a high rate of people falling over for not much reason at all and also not huge amounts of road awareness every time. Often I'll be walking somewhere with someone and talking to someone on the iPhone and I'll think to myself "I'd be a better and more useful walking partner if I had a cheaper phone in my hand, that I wouldn't think twice about dropping." There is plenty of time to think about any sort of thing when working at L'Arche and this is just one of the things.

However, I had opportunity to test my theory the other day. We just had a particularly hectic day and a particularly hectic attempt to meet up with the other two L'Arche houses at the Auburn tennis club. We'd largely failed. Certainly failed at meeting at the tennis club, and probably also mostly failed the day. But in the end I was at Auburn RSL Club, with three of the core members from my house and nobody else. Two of them struggle to stay up without holding onto someone, so both of them were doing that. The third was herding them along with throaty exclamations and gentle finger prods. It was a bit of a funny little ambling ramble we had going, but I liked it. We made it down some steps even, into the club and over to the elevator. As we walked into the elevator I was trying to call the houses we'd failed to meet on the phone, to explain that we wouldn't be meeting them. Not even meeting them very late, as had previously been the plan. Before they picked up the phone the least stable fellow let go of my hand and leapt into the elevator, tripping on the crack and starting a tumble into the elevator wall. My long-held fears were truly vanquished since not only did I drop the iPhone, but I flung it away so my hands would be free to grab my friend in a protective sort of stabilising buffer hug. The buffer hug worked wonders, but the iPhone was very cross. It did not work for the whole evening (although thankfully ended its tantrum later on) and there quite some cracks and oddities about it now. One side of the screen pushes in much further than the other, and the camera has starting turning photos all wobbly.

I also noticed how massively I missed the phone that night. I felt so stranded. I think that in future I may have to carry a secondary iPhone as an emergency backup when I leave the house.

So while I am sad that my phone is a bit broken now and sad to think that it is unlikely to survive the rest of its two year plan with continued mean flinging frequencies, I am happy to know that, even for minor tumbles, the phone doesn't inhibit brisk responses. In fact, one might even go so far to say that I exhibited a rather reckless disregard for the amount of time the plan has to run. But some sorts of financial recklessness are probably to be encouraged and cultivated.

I've spent a bit of time with the iPhone now, and I am surprised at just how crap all the mobile versions of sites are. Specifically sites like movie times and transport times. Yourmovies doesn't really have a mobile site and it's normal site is a beast. Yahoo is too heavy and difficult to use and it's mobile version is too anemic.

But Yourtime is good. Quick and straight-forward and you can bookmark all different handy spots. It does TV guide as well, although that's not quite as easy.

Hurray. Some silly, wonderful folk made a Blackbox for Windows called bblean. Good on you I say. Good on you indeed.

This kind of thing makes me laugh. There are people who will buy this for usefulness I'm sure.

Gmail has started marking some of the official internal spam as normal spam. It's very clever that Google's computers have a better understanding of what humans care about reading than many humans do.

A few days ago I started using Yahoo as my Firefox quick search instead of Google. I am happier with it and am going to keep it. I've never used Yahoo for search, even back when it was big. Now I reckon it is better though.

My new computer came today. It is well sweet. 3GB RAM and 160GB SATA disk. DVD burner. And only $320. A nice surprise was that it's a dual-core Pentium. I had expected that I'd have to scrape by on a single core. I now just have to think of something neat to do with all those cores. Perhaps I'll get one to do nothing but calculate prime numbers while merrily playing some high-intensity (but high FPS) Tetris on the other.

I would like to congratulate mum for getting her own ADSL internet after many years of sharing. I would also like to congratulate her on having a son so clever that he was able to set it up for her.

Amazon SimpleDB seems to mostly complete Amazon's nifty little setup. True to their word, it is very simple. But also rather handy. It's billed by the exact amount of machine utilisation and data transfer and lets you work out how much each transaction costs. You can imagine web services which are free up to some usage threshold after which you start paying for what you use plus 10%.

My 40gb iPod arrived today. I was expecting it to be dumped in box and probably to have scratches and stuff on it. "Refurbished" makes it sound second-rate. I wasn't worried though, because for $200 less I was happy to get a second-rate iPod.

But it is beautiful. It has everything you would need. It was all beautifully packaged. Each and every component has several layers of specially designed plastic wrapper. And the iPod itself is lovely. So shiny and sturdy.

I'm putting music onto it now. My whole music collection will fill up about a third of it. But even that is going to take many hours to move on my poor old USB 1 computer.

Update: iPods are truly wonderful devices.

Update 2: iTunes 6 is slow and crap with my iPod. iTunes 7 is better.

I made a gentle alarm with Dell BIOS timed start, TweakUI autologin, Windows Scheduler, iTunes and some nifty COM scripting. It starts playing music really quietly, and slowly gets louder.

/* iTunesAlarm.js / Version 2 */

var WshShell        = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
var iTunesApp       = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application");
var mainLibrary     = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist;
var mainLibrarySource   = iTunesApp.LibrarySource;
var alertTimeout    = 5;  // seconds
var alarmFadePeriod = 60; // minutes
var alarmClosePeriod    = 60; // minutes

// Turn it right down
iTunesApp.SoundVolume = 0;

// Play the "Alarm" playlist
mainLibrarySource.Playlists.itemByName("Alarm").PlayFirstTrack();


// Slowly fade in over alarmFadePeriod seconds
for (i = 1; i <= alarmFadePeriod; i++) {
    iTunesApp.SoundVolume = i * 100/alarmFadePeriod;
    if(WshShell.PopUp("Do you want to cancel the alarm?", alertTimeout, "iTunes Alarm", 32+4)==6) {
        WScript.Quit(0);
    }

    WScript.Sleep(1000*(60-alertTimeout));  // Quarter-minutely (25 mins)
}


for(i = 1; i <= alarmClosePeriod; i++) {
    if(WshShell.PopUp("iTunes will stop and Windows will hibernate in " + (alarmClosePeriod+1-i) + " minutes. Let iTunes continue playing?", 60, "iTunes 

Alarm", 32+0)==1) {
        WScript.Quit(0);
        break;
    }
}

iTunesApp.Stop();
WshShell.SendKeys("^{ESC}uh{ENTER}"); // Hibernate

I created a better version instead of doing my econometrics homework. This one has notifications which make it a bit more good. It also turns iTunes off (and hibernates) unless I tell it not to, for those days when I stay at mum's and forget to turn off the alarm. I am teh l33t h4x0r.

Update: [2007-08-19] I changed it so that the fade in lasts longer, and it sets the iTunesApp.SoundVolume to 0 before it starts play. Playing computer was sufficiently sleepy this morning that it was playing at full volume for a few seconds before it got to the loop where it reduces the volume. I got a bit of an abrupt wake up.

The old version is over the fold. (more…)

In my considered opinion and have examining the Adobe website for a good 10 minutes, I declar that Adobe Flex 2 is crap. Just like most Flash, it's trying to solve a non-problem, and solving it poorly. The open-source XMLiness of it is nice, but that doesn't make the whole thing any more necessary. Of course, I reserve the right to decide that it's actually brilliant in the future.

I'm now the owner of a Wikileaks domain. Let's hope doing that wasn't a bad idea. In the spirit of being transparent, let's also hope that putting my real name on everything was not as dumb as it feels.