Tatiana Azundris

MacBook, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways!

Surviving the Mac, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the 'book (A guide for emigrants from X11-based unices)

Updating Snolo contendere

There is no 'from.'
Not in the sense that one is immersed in, influenced by a single defining culture anymore, save maybe that of the 'net.
We are jet-setters, internetters;
we've all moved for work and for love, time and again.

My culture is cosmopolitan.
My friends are online.
My home is the internet.
—ID:cyborg updated to v1.1

--giants; /* */

If a hospital makes a fortune off products derived from blood samples you gave while they were treating you, should you get a share? Or are bodies special?

If we believe in redistribution of wealth to help the poorest, should we also do that for surplus organs like second kidneys? Or are bodies special?

etc.

The most important lecture you will hear this week.

Anne Phillips @ LSE
Bodies as possessions and objects
45 minutes + 30 minutes Q&A

Useful and amusing stuff on my Android phone. Check out screebl etc.!

Since this question comes up every now and again …
The naming of my machines.

My Sun U5, my first work machine, was slow as sin. (Hence it was the original sin – hahaha, I never noticed the pun). The linux PC that replaced it freed me from the slowness, so it was my salvation. There was a Windows instance on it because sometimes to do business, you gotta make a sacrifice. Then I got the linux laptop which is nice, but has slow disk, and the Sun had gone since, so that laptop became the new sin. If it's cable-bound, that is. If I come in via wireless, I end up on a different subnet, and then the same machine is the blasphemy (that IP was originally reserved for another Windows instance, hence, again, the name). The file-and-compile server, the white (named for the white old-style case), since got a new (black) box to live in, and hence is the noir. So yeah, the user-facing machines are a little biblically themed in a way, but there's also a method to my madness. Oh! And I have a Sun instance, which is the invictus. As in Sol(aris) Invictus. Har, har.
The latest addition to the zoo is a Mac (a 15" Macbook Pro, as it were), which of course is the vanity. If all the terrible Mac-ness gets too much, I can withdraw into a virtual linux, the sanctuary.
The Mac was this close to becoming the pain, by the way – for the obvious reasons (it being my work-machine, thus supplying le pain quotidien!).
Get it? Get it?

And now you know!

So I was over in the park, knee-deep (well, up to 3") in snowy seeds, took a wrong turn, and found myself in a minor forest fire.

It's kinda hard to take seriously a fire that's all of three inches high, but still, it seemed to cover a good portion of the eastern slope. And of course, Google Maps failed to get a good lock on my position that we could have given the fire brigade. You gotta hate when that happens.

In other news, having to chain three sshs to tweet that seems … suboptimal.

But yeah, it's the barbeque season, what do I even expect.

I heard the sirens off in the distance as I left the park.

I was writing this here article, collecting some outtakes — lines that were just too evil, or that wouldn't fit in with anything I was writing/drawing at the time —, but somehow, it never came together. For instance, how do you know you're done? So I guess that means I've finally found a use for twitter …

When Superman grew up in Russia in an alternative history, he was Red Son. Who would Alfred be, Red Butler?

There's such a duplication of concepts in superhero comics. Plastic Man and Elongated Man, for a start. Then, Starfire and Fire are both flying models with big breasts and a ranged energy attack, of course. Corona is another one, a fire elemental from Aquaman. And what's with those ice-themed villains? Killer Frost? Captain Cold? Mr Freeze? Lady Skifahr?

See twitter for more throwaway rubbish — now also in the sidebar!

My new tablet (Wacom Intuos 3 USB — the much larger than it looks A5 variant) has arrived, and I got it to work.
On Linux.
The trick is to throw out the stock kernel modules and use the linuxwacom ones instead. Edit xorg.conf (yast2 doesn't add a pad section for the tablet's expresskeys and the strips), configure the strips and expresskeys using wacomcpl (written to ~/.xinitrc / ~/.xsession), enable the new inputs in GIMP and inskcape (without worrying too much what the funny numbers or the "disabled" buttons mean), set up a good work environment in the GIMP (like you've been meaning to forever — I'm left handed, so all the tools and dialogs go to the left so I can rest my hand while drawing if I want; for me, that's tools, custom colour palette, brushes/fonts/gradients/patterns in the leftmost colum; paths, layers, tool options in the next column, and the rest of the screen estate for the actual image), and you're ready to roll: Then, it's just a matter of learning to draw on a tablet again …

artwork by Azundris, original photo by Isotopp; used by permission.

After all those years of trying to make my synthesizers sound like a guitar, I ended up making my guitar sound like a synthesizer.

(Strat knockoff played through Fender amp with overdrive, then souped up in audacity, totally love its speaker sim. Sounds like Carter USM or Armageddon Dildos, I reckon. That said, anything music is still a major pain on Linux; for instance, that's not quite how the riff goes, but play-through doesn't work right so I couldn't hear myself while playing. (For the non-musicians among my readers, playing without a monitor is like painting in the dark.) Also, don't read too much into it, this is just something that happened while jamming, I doubt it's going to be my new sound. But I'm busy explaining a joke, ain't I? Anyway, I'm half-tempted to go out and buy a Mac, as an appliance only, put Cubase or Logic on it (which I keep calling Live for some reason), and have at it.)

It started out pretty simple. And with a real world case, too. I'm debating a new keyboard, as this one starts to act up — I'm sick of wireless, I'm sick of batteries, I'm sick of PS/2-to-USB adapters, and it seems the hardware starts failing me, too. That said, I was very happy with the ergonomic ("split keyboard") Logi — it was good to my wrists, it held up for ten years, and it certainly is one gorgeous keyboard —, and if the SafeType doesn't do the trick for me, I'll be looking to get a variant of the Logi that's not wireless. Anyway, the SafeType is also a split keyboard, but they mean it. It's like hacking a typewriter in two in the middle, and then putting both halves of the keyboard upright so they keyboards aren't horizontal, they're vertical. When you type, your hand are not parallel to your desk, but orthogonal to it. It did wonders for me when I tried the "upright mouse", so I think the keyboard may be beneficial, too. The rub is, you don't have cursor keys that way. So I needed to find a way to put the cursor keys on the main keyboard.

So, I'm in the middle of something. DSL goes down for no apparent reason. I don't see any WLAN I could share (and in fact NetworkManager has been behaving very weird since the update; if I don't kill -STOP it, it eats all my CPU — just plain killing it also tears down the net; this problem can be googled — a solution, not so much). So, UMTS. On this, pppd fails, giving unrecognized option '/dev/ttyUSB0'. This is the most obscure way they could find to say, You upgraded the kernel and haven't rebooted yet, so I can't find my shit. So, I reboot. Or, I try to. The upgrade from 2.6.25.3 to 2.6.25.4 plain broke my system (broke as in, EDD check, then BUG: INT14 CR2, dead before I get even the most basic boot messages). It is at this time that I notice that I haven't got a boot-manager installed that won't let me pass kernel options without excessive pain.

Way back, I got the Motorola RAZR v3, a very sexy phone. It had a stunning design, a nice display, and pretty good sound — and not much else. I've been hoping to upgrade for a while, but the next generation RAZRs took long to arrive, and did not entice me right away — the RAZR's design was so perfect that any change from it seemed to be for worse, while keeping it seemed more of the same. A rock, and a hard place. At the same time, the technology seemed OK, but not all that impressive, and the fact that the interesting features seemed spread out over a confusing trinity of next-generation rather products rather than being united in a single unit didn't help.

One contender was the LG Shine. I ultimately decided against it because its killer feature, its look and metal body, was offset by every review mentioning how it's "all fingerprints" after half an hour (give or take some complaints about the user-interface). I still think this might possibly be a great phone to have, especially if you wish to spend a little less.

Another contender from LG was the Prada-phone which in some ways anticipated the iPhone; with more up-to-date technology (or even just more memory), it might have likewise have been a serious contender. By now, it's sold on shop channel, so any exclusive air it may have possessed is gone.

Speaking of the iPhone itself, I'm pretty sure I'll want one. iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3.0, something like that. This one? Not so much — no 3G, no voice dial, no MMS, crap camera, no flash, no Java, no Bluetooth stereo, no video-recording, the list goes on. Add to that that it comes with a plan and I'm not sure I want one (I'm not even sure when mine expires), and that you can't change the battery yourself, and I'm put out.

Then came the Samsung Soul.

The Good

Well, for one thing, the SGH-U900 (video) is very chic, obviously. This is one seriously beautiful phone — the shell, the (brushed metal) theme, even the touchpad if configured right. The menus are more straight-forward than the RAZR's, the display's resolution is higher of course, and so is the camera's. It has more memory, and can be expanded further. Like the v3, it has the downer of some token plastic in that "full metal shell." And at first, it feels awkward to hold while making a call. But is it the "new RAZR"?

Below the fold: The Bad

Being a woman, I tend to find a half-dozen friend-requests in skype each morning. Aside from those who like my picture, I presume some are looking for free English lessons. Some also tell me about their private parts — goddammit, this is skype, not the bloody bananaphone, is that so difficult? —, and maybe some actually liked my profile. Yeah, a girl can dream. One thing though: guys, what are you thinking (well, are you?) sending me friend-requests when you don't have a picture, don't have a profile, don't even send a hallo to go with the request. Or in short, "Friend me." You've given me no reason to be interested in you. Or shorter still, "Friend me; I won't tell you who I am." What is it with those people?

I don't flag Skype me!
I don't flag Online.
I'm normally set away of busy.
That doesn't mean anything.

I never really thought much of it, they make an offer, I'm not interested, no harm done, can't blame them for trying. Right? Well, in fact I find it a little rude when the person's not flagged Skype me!, for one thing. But with at least one of a filled-in profile and a little something about you in the hallo-message (that should be both literate and not about your sexual prowess), I might relent. "Unsolicited" seems less bad when it's polite otherwise. And when it's not commercial.
article originally written on 2007/04/29
Amendment: The skype status explained! (Not sure I actually need idle and very idle; I'd have preferred I'll get back to you later (what do not disturb does now), and I'll take your call/message now, but only if you're a friend, otherwise, don't even try to get friended.