My friend Sumana Harihareswara is working on a geeky standup comedy routine (“about project management, Linux, relationships, Agile, public transit, science fiction, and These Kids Today”), and needs an audience of science fiction and computer nerds in front of whom to practice it.

To that end, she’ll be performing for half an hour, starting at 7 ( Read more... )

I have successfully raised my computer from the dead.

Seems it was just the hard drive. I swapped out the old, dead 100 GB drive for the 320 GB drive I had sitting around. There were a lot of screws involved, and I had to zip out to the hardware store at one point to get a better #00 Phillips-head screwdriver than the one I was using, but aside ( Read more... )

So I hauled my laptop to Tekserve (saving NYC Mac-owners' asses since 1987), and the helpful guy at the repairs counter was successful in getting my machine to boot off a network volume. He ran some diagnostic tools (fsck?) and concluded that my hard drive is horked. He was unable to figure out why I couldn't boot from an install DVD; that's ( Read more... )

With LiveJournal’s new owners announcing that LJ will no longer allow the creation of new Basic accounts, lots of people are upset over the prospect of having to look at ads. For those of you lagging behind the leading edge of web browser technology, here’s a solution:

Step 1: Firefox if a free open-source web browser available for Windows, MacOS ( Read more... )

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For a while (a few days, I think) my email address is going to be:

agrumer and then
an AT and then
gmail and then
a DOT and finally
a com, and man isn't that a pain in the ass.And not long after that I'll be looking for yet another domain registrar. And holy crap, do I not recommend Dotster ( Read more... )

One of the things I’ve been fiddling with over the past few months is seeing how many of my computing needs I can offload onto some free or cheap web app that I can access from home or work, on whatever operating system is handy (provided it’s got a modern browser). The ones I’ve been using a lot are:
gMail Google’s free email service, which I ( Read more... )

Best political blog post of the month: “In Other News, the Check is In the Mail” by Jim Henley

Best browser add-on of the month: Destroy Target by Sergi Meseguer, which strips target="_blank" out of links. I’ve been wanting this since about ten minutes after Netscape introduced frames. First get Firefox, then install the Greasemonkey extension. ( Read more... )

From Steve Lambe: the best picture of Mr Magoo ever.

Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox that lets you run arbitrary DHTML in viewed pages. In other words you can add stuff, delete stuff, change function, fix bugs, whatever, on whatever pages you want. People have written a bunch of user scripts already that you can install with a simple ( Read more... )

My roommates were just listening to a filk concert being webcast live from Consonance. How long before we get live webcasts of open filking, and people listening from home (probably Tom Smith, typing so fast he melts his keyboard) compose new songs and email or IM them to people with laptops at the filk, who then perform them ( Read more... )