drink's blog

Dragon's Call

I have of late been playing Dragon's Call, an HTML/Flash MMORPG. It's free to play but players willing to spend some money can advance more quickly. Some of the best players haven't spent a cent.

Hacking Magellan Maestro 4xxx series

At the Santa Cruz Flea Market I got, among other things, a Magellan Maestro 4050. I already have a slightly later unit, but this one has bluetooth. They run WinCE 5 which means most relevantly that they have persistent storage. WinCE 4 and earlier devices almost uniformly have only volatile memory, so when your battery runs out, your device resets itself to its factory settings. This was likely the best design decision Microsoft could have made, because WinCE 4 was an unreliable pile of debris that would corrupt its own installation at the slightest opportunity.

Sears Service == Incompetent

Last June 5th we broke down and bought an air conditioner. We went to Sears to buy it, because they had 'em and nobody else in town has much selection. This turned out to be a gigantic mistake. We used it throughout the summer, and then put it away in the back room. When I brought it back out the GFCI-equipped power cord's breaker decided to blow every time the unit was plugged in.

Stop a Linux password from expiring

After installing plugbox linux on my Dockstar I found that new users' passwords expired on login and forced a logout forever. To fix this for a single user use this script:

#!/bin/sh
chage -d 1 -E -1 -I -1 -m -1 -M -1 -W -1 $1

Call it with the username you want to fix. It sets the last change date to a day after the epoch but it works.

A brief note on series hybrids with turbines

Chrysler Turbine

It is often asserted that series hybrids are not as efficient as parallel hybrids (citation needed) but this is only because they are being built with inefficient reciprocating internal combustion engines. The obvious solution is to use microturbines.

Install GoogleCL on Windows

GoogleCL is a python-based command-line utility for accessing Google. It uses gdata-python-client for the google interface. No Windows release is planned, but this is largely irrelevant because python runs fine on Windows, and so do gdata-python-client and GoogleCL.

embedding evince in Chrome

One of the big problems with Google Chrome is the lack of inline PDF support on most platforms. Google has added preliminary support for PDF to Chromium but so far it has not come to Linux. It may come tomorrow, but until then, users who would like to avoid using acroread may use the following hack, at least on Ubuntu Lucid. As always, your mileage may vary.

Extensions for Chrome

Well, it has finally happened. The apparently-dethronable Firefox has been replaced on my desktop with Google Chrome, a browser based on WebKit.

Custom F250 Turbo Diesel intake

My Custom F250 Intake

Here are some pictures of a custom intake I built for My 1992 F250 diesel with ATS turbo kit. The intake was originally adapted from a MY1997+ Subaru Impreza intake to fit my former 1993 Impreza LS.

Where did my XBMC go? Oh, there it is.

When I switched to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) I discovered that the team-xbmc PPA did not provide any packages for Lucid. The answer, as found from sources too numerous to mention (Try google) is the team-xbmc SVN PPA.

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