Hate to admit it, but XKCD is right on the money in today’s comic:

All to often it is a case where a company is telling you how you’re allow to use the products they sell. You see this with the media companies (music, Hollywood, etc), and even with the hardware companies (Apple, Microsoft, etc). If I buy a product, I should be free to use it any way I damn well please. I paid money for it, and if I want to tinker with it, as long as I’m not making a profit off of them, then what’s the issue?

For example, my iPhone. Apple says I can only run their software upon it, or software they approve of. Well, bugger them. I decided to jailbreak my iPhone so I could play with it and customise it how I wish. I paid for the damn thing, so I should be free to tinker with it as I please. I’m not making a profit off of it at all. So far, I just wanted to change the background to something a little more aesthetically pleasing to the eye than the standard boring black background. One of Apple’s slogans was “Think Different”… well, I’m seeing people with iPhones all over the place now, and I want mine to LOOK different (why this isn’t an option within the official iPhone OS is anyone’s guess). As for future changes, who knows? It’s not like I’m trying to hack it to make free calls or anything.

By forcing people to conform to some idiotic copyright rules by use of DRM, you’re not solving the problem, you’re encouraging people to find a way to circumvent the DRM itself. The average person won’t know how to do this, but you can bet that they have an uber-nerd one phone call away who’ll know how to do this.

I’m not ashamed to admit it: I like the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” advertisements. Some of them are silly, and some of them are downright hilarious.

Personally, my favourite one is the one where the Vista security guard keeps asking for permission to do things (“Cancel or allow?”), which if you are not familiar with, you can see here:

http://movies.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac/apple-getamac-security_480×376.mov

(The above link is a *.MOV. You’ll need Quicktime.)

There is a new one that just kills me. The PC guy is hiding in a pizza box in an effort to lure college students over so he can “get them”. The way he keeps popping out of the box is amusing, but I laughed out loud at his last line: “…come eat me… I’m a delicious pizza…”. Totally appeals my warped sense of humour. Check it out:

http://movies.apple.com/movies/us/apple/getamac/apple_getamac_pizzabox_20080818_480×272.mov

(The above link is a *.MOV. You’ll need Quicktime.)

Some may claim that I am an Apple fanboy… and I guess I am. It’s hard to not be one when you appreciate such great products.  

As per usual, once I get my head wrapped around the desire to tweak the settings of my site, I’ll sit here for hours until I get it just the way I want… or eventually give up as things aren’t working as how I expected them to. In this case, I finally fixed an issue that I’ve had for months.

For the longest time, I wanted to have a different header image, chosen at random, whenever the site was loaded up. Some may find it irritating, but I’ve always liked them. Gives the site a bit of randomness, and I also get to chose a number of header images that I like. However, with this theme, I couldn’t figure out where to implement the code. I found some sites with some suggestions, where they said to place a bit of CSS after the stylesheet was called, yet my attempted “randomness” was always ignored. It drove me nuts, and the worst part is that I’m not really a PHP/CSS expert, so I got irritated when my poke-and-see-what-happens method of updating the code didn’t work.

Fast forward to tonight, things just seemed to make sense. Perhaps it’s some experience in PHP/CSS that I might have gained without realising, or just because my head was clear or whatever, but I figured out where the hidden extra call for the stylesheet was, and took it out. Voila! I now have random images. Now the only issue is figuring out what images to use. I have three to start off with, and we’ll see how long it takes to get some more together.  

Other than that, little things that I’ve been meaning to do that I finally got done:

• Bring the “Daily Shots” out of their own page, and put them in with my regular posts. I found that I updated the daily shots more than I posted regularily, yet they were hidden away. I like how I’m taking daily pictures with my iPhone and am able to post them up when I feel like it, so I’ve made it a regular thing on my main page. Woohoo.  
• Enable Lightbox for the “Daily Shots” category. As I am posting my daily shots from my iPhone, I don’t have the ability (or desire) to add the code to have Lightbox bring the images up nicely when they are clicked. I hated how they would be enlarged on a separate blank page, and so I installed an updated version of Lightbox that will do it all for me. The gallery will still be displayed with Thickbox, until Lightbox has proven itself to me.
• Ensure that the comments are always on by default. A while ago, I set it so that I would have to enable comments on the posts I wanted. This was when I was mainly updating my blog with my “Meals & Activity”, and didn’t see the need for comments to be submitted for those posts. I kept forgetting to turn them off, so I set them to be off by default. However, as I started to post more and more outside of my eating habits and daily activity, I would occasionally forget to enable comments. Not a big thing, as I don’t get as many comments on my site as I used to, but still… it irked me.
• Added a link to a larger graph. When I started to track my weight and have it displayed in a graph, it was fairly legible. However, as time went on, and more data was entered, the graph started to look more like a blob than anything else. I still want to keep the starting weight, as I like seeing the decline, but I figured that a larger version of the graph would make it easier to read, so I included a link.

Anyway, just a few updates, and I guess I’m mainly posting this blurb about them for myself so I can keep a record of what I did.

Aren’t you glad you wasted some of your precious time reading about inconsequential tweaks to my site?

I am. 

…well, he saved the early morning, at least!

This morning, there was apparently a complete power failure up at my Dad’s place where my server is located. This is different from the usual brownouts that occur throughout the week… small 2-3 second blips that would be enough to trip out the server. They were getting mighty annoying, and so my Dad and I bought a UPS which I have since named Thor.

Anyway, checking my email this morning, I had two alerts sent via the UPS monitoring app I have running. I’ve stripped most of the data to the most important info:

• callisto Power Failure !!!
  DATE     : Fri Aug 01 02:41:46 EDT 2008
  HOSTNAME : callisto
  UPSNAME  : Thor
  MODEL    : Back-UPS RS 900
  UPSMODE  : Stand Alone
  STATUS   : ONBATT
  LOADPCT  :   9.0 Percent Load Capacity
  BCHARGE  : 100.0 Percent
  TIMELEFT :  71.4 Minutes
• callisto Power has returned
  DATE     : Fri Aug 01 03:44:55 EDT 2008
  HOSTNAME : callisto
  UPSNAME  : Thor
  MODEL    : Back-UPS RS 900
  UPSMODE  : Stand Alone
  STATUS   : ONLINE
  LOADPCT  :   9.0 Percent Load Capacity
  BCHARGE  : 024.0 Percent
  TIMELEFT :  19.9 Minutes
  XONBATT  : Fri Aug 01 02:41:44 EDT 2008
  XOFFBATT : Fri Aug 01 03:44:54 EDT 2008

That’s SO cool!! This is the first time that we’ve had a power failure since we bought and installed Thor, so it was great to see that everything worked as expected. I still have yet to test a complete train of Thor’s battery, which should result in the UPS monitoring app initiating a shutdown, but I’ll do that when I have the time and under controlled circumstances.

Thanks to Sparky for helping me with my initial configuration, and thanks to Thor for kicking ass!!!

One of the perks about Leopard (OS X 10.5) is that it comes with a feature known as “Time Machine“. Basically, it is a built-in backup solution, runs in the background, and mirrors your drive to another drive via USB or Firewire, and even over your network, if you have Apple’s Time Capsule.

Personally, I have no need for another wireless router, even if it comes with a hard drive, as it is one more thing on my network to worry about, maintain, and the thing ain’t cheap to begin with. Yes, this is a gadget that I decided NOT to get due to cost. How weird is THAT!? 

Anyway, last week, the drive for my work Macbook died. When I say ” it died”, I mean the type of drive death where it clicks, clunks, grinds, and won’t mount. Basically, I can’t do anything with it, so everything I had on it is gone. Was I backing it up? Nope. After setting up everyone else’s machines to backup their data, I never got around to setting up mine. Not much is gone, I use IMAP at work so my email wasn’t stored locally, but all the images, documents, and other things I’ve worked on for the last 3.75 years was lost. Either it hasn’t hit me yet, or I just don’t care. Dunno. But, it made me paranoid about my own machines, so I figured I might as well set up Time Machine at work, ensure it does the trick, and then set it up at home.

I heard rumours about people being able to set Time Machine to use standard SMB (Samba) mounts using 10.5.2 or higher, which makes sense, as OS X is based off Unix, and pretty much operates within the same standards. Sure enough, I came across this site, and it was easy as pie:

http://www.stocksy.co.uk/articles/Mac/getting_time_machine_to_work_how_i_want/

A quick snippet of what was involved:

Within Terminal:

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then:

sudo hdiutil create -size [number_in_GB]g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname “Time Machine” -fs HFS+J -verbose ~/Desktop/[mac_network_name]_[eth_mac_addy].sparsebundle

Transferred *.sparsebundle to desired remote directory.

As I have a few Linux boxes that are there only for storage, it made sense to set up Time Machine on my Mac Mini to use one of them rather than spending a chunk of cash on a new device. I had to reinstall Leopard as years of upgrading left me with an operating system that had issues with permissions over network mounts (the weirdest thing), so I backed up my Mac Mini to my Macbook, and started from scratch. After Leopard was installed, it took no time to set up Time Machine. The initial backup took FOREVER, as was expected, but since then, all has been well. I’ll move over the important documents as time goes on, but for the moment, only 14GB on the Mac Mini was used. I’ll have to clear some more space to be able to back up the Macbook via Time Machine, but that shouldn’t be too difficult.

So, long story short: if you’re not backing up your data, you might want to look into that. If you want to use Time Machine, and you have a machine on the network that you can use as a network mount via SMB, check out the link above, and save yourself some cash. Why Apple doesn’t allow you to do this by standard, who knows, but I’m glad that the process to do so wasn’t too much of a hack.

Thanks to Stocksy for the instructions.