Minecraft! On Ubuntu! It actually runs great, once you actually get it to run, but there were two little things mere mortals can’t be reasonably expected to debug. Can’t connect to minecraft.net My Internet connection worked, minecraft.net was up, friends were able to connect just fine, but I couldn’t. Running it from the terminal via […]

I got my MSP430 TI Launchpad more than a year ago simply because of the price. It was (and still is) $4.30 (with free shipping!) for a development board, two MSP430 microcontrollers, external crystal, and USB cable. Unfortunately, Windows was the only supported OS at launch time with a couple proprietary bundled IDEs. It still […]

I’ve noticed that I have a habit of changing to a directory and then immediately listing it’s contents. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could do it in one command? My goto for shell automation is usually shell scripting. Shell scripting is nice because I can use any language I want, and I don’t have […]

“To perform the requested action, connection information is required.” My earlier post on WordPress with NearlyFreeSpeech.net was too hastily written. There are more issues than WP not wanting to use the direct upgrader, and editing WordPress code is not the right way to solve it either. Problem 1: WordPress doesn’t want to use the direct […]

By now, we know of a few requirements for viewing video on iOS (iPhone/iPad et al.). The video codec should be H.264 or another “standard” MPEG codec, and the audio should be AAC. AC3, as far as I know, is not supported. That’s all fine and dandy, but subtitles have been one of the trickiest […]

I originally wrote this in 2009 as a cheatsheet for processing black and white scanned sheet music. It’s a collection of tips for converting and processing scanned images to ultimately get a nice, high-quality PDF that you could archive. The programs convert and mogrify are part of the ImageMagick suite and the program pdfimages is […]

I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 minimal on a server and it’s great. $ less -bash: less: command not found $ man bash -bash: man: command not found $ tree ./ -bash: tree: command not found $ whois google.com -bash: whois: command not found $ curl –help -bash: curl: command not found

Scheme’s power to simplicity ratio makes it a fun target for implementation. Today, I introduce a couple new ways of running Scheme powered by Javascript. The first is an online Scheme interface that I’ve been working on sporadically for the last few months. Inspired by TryHaskell, it began as a series of patches to jquery-console, […]

I recently moved an old website to a new server. For performance reasons, the new server is running nginx instead of Apache, and didn’t have nginx set up to use PHP. (The optimal way, apparently, is to use PHP-FGM, which currently requires you to patch and build PHP yourself, at least until PHP 5.4). That […]

If you are using the Android SDK on a shared computer, you might run into the awesome “NAND: could not create temp file for system NAND” error. This is because “/tmp/android” is hardcoded into the emulator as the directory to start temporary files during emulation, and somebody else has likely claimed it first. The easiest […]