Category: Geekery

I Has a Monitor!

48 hours without the net. How did I manage it?

My new 24 inch LED monitor has been courier delivered to the office. Assuming that nothing goes wrong between now and when I get home, I am back in the 21st century! Hooray!

I also picked up some new speakers to replace the rather old and decrepit ones that have served my last three computers. Nothing special, but they do have a rather frightening looking sub-woofer. Not sure where I’ll put it.

Ah! Technological bliss!

On that subject I’m thinking of formatting my Asus Eee and installing Linux on it before I head off on my cruise in the new year.  It’s not powerful enough to handle Windows 7 in any useful way, and I don’t like the idea of wandering around parts foreign running XP. I’ll only be using it to write, to store photos and to access the net when nothing with a bigger screen is available, so Linux should serve all my needs admirably. I’ll need to do some research…

Forciable Detox

My monitor has forsaken me!

Well, my home computer’s monitor has finally crapped out on me.

It’s been dying for a while. The power button hasn’t worked for about six months, and for the last few months it’s been refusing to wake up once it goes into sleep mode. I’ve been dealing with both problems by rigging up a monitor extension lead so I can directly cut and restore power without getting out of my chair, which has been serving to wake it up again. But yesterday morning nothing I did could get an image to appear. Dang.

Apparently the thing that most often goes bye-bye on Viewsonic monitors is the capacitors. These can be replaced, but unless you’re willing to do the work yourself the cost for parts and labour is generally about that of an entirely new monitor. So I guess I have some shopping to do.

On the plus side, this enforced break from using my home computer (I don’t have a spare monitor, so I can’t do squat) will serve as a nice detox from Fallout: New Vegas, which I’ve recently got back into and have been playing way too much. I’m getting seriously tetris-affected – I saw an agave plant in a garden over the weekend and had a sudden urge to harvest it. Not good. Not good at all 🙂

(As long as I don’t start seeing people’s body parts highlighted I should be OK though :))

Over and out.

All Good Things

The end of the story of what happened next.

Well, FreakAngels is finished. A good, sensible ending where people take responsibility for their actions and things finally start to get better. Bravo Mr Ellis, Bravo!

On the other hand, what am I going to do with my Fridays now?

At the same time Warren is taking his leave of Whitechapel. The new landlord has moved in and is making himself at home, but it remains to be seen how things are going to go. He seems a reasonable sort, but nonetheless, things are going to change.

But hey, that’s a concern for the future. Let’s all just raise a glass to an amazing achievement – three and a half years of a high quality, FREE webcomic, and the building of a unique online community. Here’s to Warren, Paul, Ariana, the often forgotten about colourists and Avatar Press. Well done guys – even if you didn’t feature Miki anywhere near enough 😉

Thoughts on “Visitation”

Poor, poor Eli…

You know, Eli doesn’t have much luck with women. First he falls for a girl who just wants to be friends (and starts turning into an alien), then he falls for a girl who gets murdered, then he starts chatting up another girl and her head explodes.

Seriously, the women on Destiny would be well advised to keep their distance. The guy’s a major jinx.

Kitten Attack!

OMG Kittinz!

So I’m at work today and I need to prevent a directory of pdf files from being accessed outside of links on a specific page. Now to anyone who knows anything about Apache servers the solution is obvious, throw something together in an .htaccess file.

So I did. I used modRewrite to detect the referrer, and redirect any unauthorised requests. And because I wanted to make sure it was working (modRewrite is, after all, essentially electronic voodoo) I decided to redirect said bad requests to KittenWar. You know, like you do.

All well and good. I confirmed that the redirect was working, ranked some kittens, and then edited the .htaccess file to remove the redirect. Then I tested it again.

I got kittens.

I checked that I’d edited the right file. I had. I re-uploaded it, checking that I was uploading the correct file as I did so. I tested the link.

Kittens.

I deleted the .htaccess file off the server, checked the link to confirm it was broken,  re-uploaded and tested it again.

Kittens.

I telnetted in and examined the .htaccess file on the server. No mention of kittens anywhere. I got the other guys in the office to test the link on their machines. No kittens. I tested it on my machine again.

Kittens.

Realising that it had to be a browser issue I closed Firefox and restarted it. Twice. I checked the link again.

Kittens.

It was at this point that I discovered that ALL attempts to access ANY part of the website were redirecting to KittenWar, which would seriously complicate any attempts to get it finished for the important meeting tomorrow. With no other ideas I uninstalled Firefox, then reinstalled it.

Adorable kittens.

I rebooted, and reinstalled Firefox again.

More adorable kittens, mocking me with their adorable eyes and pink little noses.

Finally in sheer desperation I tracked down and installed an extension that would flush the DNS cache. I had no idea how an .htaccess file could poison my DNS cache with kittens, but I couldn’t think of anything else to try. I installed it, rebooted, ran it, and checked the link.

No kittens!! Finally!!

Then it was time for lunch.

Goddam kittens… ;D

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