User Blogs

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.

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. I figured it was just the cord. The girl I talked to on the phone said that servicemen carry that kind of part with them, which turned out to be a lie, shock amazement.

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.

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.

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. Here are simple instructions for installing GoogleCL under Windows.