Last week in Gran Canaria, I…
It can be done on Windows, too!
If you’ve ever had the “pleasure” of configuring and sharing a printer between Windows machines, you probably know how tedious it is to get one machine to send a print job to the printer connected to another machine. And don’t even get me started on how to do that on a Linux machine, or any mix of these two systems.
Disable Windows Native Zip support
If you have large or many zipfiles in a folder, windows seems to lock up when opening the folder containing the zipfiles. This is because Windows is “smart” and decides to pre-scan the zipfiles and display them as folders. Installing free zip tools like zipgenius will not change this behaviour, although you would expect that.
To unregister the Windows zipfile support service, use the following command (Start -> Run…):
regsvr32 /u zipfldr
To enable the Windows zipfile support again (I can’t imagine why), use the command:
regsvr32 zipfldr
Source of this brilliant tip is dans blog, which I found after some googling ofcourse.
Funny pricelists
Some bike repair shops have funny price lists on their walls:
| ENGINE REPAIR PRICE LIST | ||
|---|---|---|
| PING-PING-PING | € | 35.00 |
| PLUNK-PING-PLUNK | € | 55.00 |
| CLUNK-PING-CLUNK | € | 125.00 |
| THUD-KLUNK-THUD | € | 200.00 |
| CLANG-THUD-KLANK | € | 325.00 |
–
| LABOR RATES PER HOUR | ||
|---|---|---|
| IF YOU WATCH US | € | 55.00 |
| IF YOU GIVE US ADVICE | € | 65.00 |
| IF YOU HELP OR ASSIST US | € | 85.00 |
| IF YOU WORKED ON IT BEFORE | € | 105.00 |
Lathe Spindle rebuild, part 1
Past few weeks I noticed that the spindle bearings of my lathe were becomming warmer than I liked, particularly when working with higher rpm. Last weekend I decided to take the spindle out, clean the old grease out, and rebuilding it. It turned out to be more work than I expected. The tight fit of the pully made me use the hammer-and-wood trick on the spindle, which I did not like. After a few hours of tapping and fiddling, the pully came of. The spindle gear and the left hand bearing were no fun job either.
Anyway, the whole thing is apart now, and I cleaned out all the grease. I test-fitted the spindle sundaynight, but I can feel a slight “bump” when turning it, I think the grease must have picked up some dirt, most likely a wood chip from the bench. So I have to take it apart again, it has to be perfectly smooth.
After I re-fit the spindle, I have to adjust it with my micrometer to have a play of between 0.004 and 0.005 mm, no more, and no less, while being able to turn it by hand. Sounds like an interesting excercise which will take up more than a few minutes 🙂
Phrack still in ASCII
It is a long time since I read this stuff, but I stumbled upon a paper discussing the non-executable stack on OSX (a trick to prevent buffer/stack overflow exploits). Ah, the good old days. And with all this markup, it’s good to see that Phrack magazine stuck to their format. It’s still the same as over 20 years ago… Well written articles, focussed on correctness and content, for the coders out there who are not afraid experimenting with some assembly. The amount of (nightly) hours that go into the research and proof of these articles are unbelievable, and it shows.
iPod Synchronization techniques
Wherever I go, my iPod nano goes. With a “smaller” disk like on the nano, it’s sort of important to make sure you are carrying the tracks you’ll want to hear. I have a couple of smart playlists, and leave the rest to iTunes. Syncing takes less than a minute, is fully automatic and I’m very happy with the results every time.
We need more lolcats!
From wikipedia: “A lolcat is an image macro featuring a photograph of a cat with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption”.
You can find good lolcats all over the web, and I just found out that you don’t even have to have photoshop to do this. Make your own lolcat with the lolcat builder. Go with Impact and outline, this will give the best “real lolcat” feeling.
Have fun!
TomTom One v2 earphone modification
TomTom decided to remove the earphone plug from their newer version One. This blog entry will describe how you can add your own.
Why would TomTom remove the earphone plug? There are a few simple reasons, one being that the new version has a slimmer formfactor with less room for plugs, and the other being that they probably don’t want it to compete too much with the XL and Rider versions.
Movie: The Worlds Fastest Indian
If you like motorcycles, wrenching and racing, you’ll probably like this movie. It’s the life story of New Zealander Burt Munro, who spent years rebuilding a 1920 Indian motorcycle to help him set the land-speed world record at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats in 1967.
The movie is nicely done, good quality video and audio with very good clean and calm cinematographics (much unlike you see nowadays). It’s really a feel-good movie and makes you want Burt to succeed, even if you know that Burt really did so in real life. Anthony Hopkins really plays a very fine Burt Munro, and the producers have gone great lengths to make everything look like the real Burt Munro (the real story). The movie is a “bit besides the truth” every now and then, but not much and only to keep the story interesting.
Very nicely done, and a must see in my book.