Inheritance and anti-bork steps in progress

I appear to have inherited a digital TV that is also a VGA monitor. So I wanted to try it with Hexie, my laptop with the smallest built-in screen (1024 by 600 pixels). There is a fairly well-known trick here to stop screen-borkage when external monitors are plugged into hackintoshed netbooks. Even better, there’s an app for that.

However, it appears not to work under MacOS 10·6·7. I recall it working under 10·6·3, so I’m waiting for CarbonCopyCloner to safeguard Hexie’s current full install. Then I’ll put 10·6·3 back onto Hexie and see if the anti-bork app still works.

Resolution mismatch

Meanwhile, I note that the digital TV has 1440 × 900 (= 8 × 5) resolution. This doesn’t really suit a normal mac’s range of resolutions. For example, Pismo can supply the following:

• 640 × 480 (= 4 × 3)
• 800 × 600 (= 4 × 3)
• 1024 × 768 (= 4 × 3)
• 1152 × 870 (= 4 × 3·02)
• 1280 × 768 (= 5 × 3)
• **1280 × 960 (= 4 × 3)
• **1280 × 1024 (= 5 × 4)
• **1344 × 1008 (= 4 × 3)
• **1400 × 1050 (= 4 × 3)
• **1600 × 1200 (= 4 × 3)
• **1792 × 1344 (= 4 × 3)
• *1856 × 1352 (= 4 × 3)
• *1920 × 1440 (= 4 × 3)

The asterisked resolutions aren’t accepted by this monitor. The double-asterisked resolutions don’t use the full depth of this monitor. (None use the fill width.)

Last term’s marks have been confirmed: D1 (lowest level of ‘distinction’, 75 to 70%) for Software Development 2 and P5 (highest level of ‘mere pass’, 70 to 74%). I feel disappointed now but was amazed and pleased when the unconfirmed marks were first published.

Marks infographic remains unchanged.

So we’ve finally got around to upgrading the kitchen:

• There’s lots of sawing and banging from the kitchen.
• Most of the kitchen stuff is in the spare room, so that’s unusable as a bedroom. We’re cooking on a wee electric ‘camping’ hotplate.
• The kitchen table and new units (which arrived assembled, not flat-packed) are filling the lounge.
• Washing up is being done in the shower.
• Today a new dishwasher arrived, so that’s also in the lounge.
• Also, a new fridge-freezer arrived, so that’s in the spare room too. The food that should be in it is in a cardboard box in the spare room because the new appliance can’t be used for 24 hours after delivery.

Meanwhile, I’ve set up a blog, twitter feed and Facebook page for my summer project. So I can try to be professional there and keep my personal, opinionated guff here!

Oh and tomorrow we’re off to Arran to take the last stuff from my hostess’ parents house. She’s picking up a van at 7am and then going to work, then driving to Kilmarnock so she can go on the early ferry (because there’s no space on later ferries on Saturday). I’ll help her load packing materials into the van before she goes to work, then will go to see a potential employer (part-time mac IT support), then will cycle as far west as I can be bothered with, then go by train and ferry to Arran so I’m ready to help with the clearance. (Also, it allows me to avoid having a restless night in a hotel in Kilmarnock and setting off at stupidly-early o’clock on Saturday morning for Ardrossan.)

Progress, I guess!

Wanted to set up a blog for this project but LJ isn’t sending the necessary confirmation emails, either to my Napier account or to my personal email. Yes I have checked junk/spam filters!

To be honest, for this research blog I’d prefer a blog that allows me to allow other folk to post. Any recommendations?

Despite being a pacifist vegan with serious lentil, peanut-butter and figure-hugging cycle-tights habits, I love this!

Why are people so stupid? According to one measure, the most popular password is ‘password’. Aarrgghh. Has there been a Darwin Award related to password insecurity yet? I do hope so.

There’s a reasonable-looking password tester here. My personal passwords would take about a decade to crack, this site claims.

My uni passwords would take a little under 4 months. I keep nothing personal in my uni file-space, and back it all up to personal spaces so this ‘short’ time doesn’t bother me.

Paxman pronounces ex-England manager’s name as ‘Sven Urine Erikson’.

‘If we are to accept that people choose to live in different places for reasons linked to the places themselves…’
Nearly complete bullshit if you read this to mean we all have perfectly free choices. We don’t!

Rant

Most folk live

• in the holes in which they were spawned because they can’t afford to move away or feel family ties (i.e. not the place but people: subtle but important difference)
• the best they can afford to crawl to
• where the work they can do is – or within commuting distance thereof.

I live in a Victorian stone-built basement flat not because I like it but because it’s what my partner chose and I want to be with her (family) and because I can’t afford to be elsewhere. (Edit This doesn’t mean I don’t like the flat [I do, when it’s not playing up] or that I’d choose to be away from her, just that my options are very limited and if we broke up, I’d be back in the gutter.)

This is similar to people crapping on about culture, another bollocks term. People do what they do either because they don’t know any better or are comfortable with old habits, because that is what the physical or human geography demands they do to survive or because it’s what the powers that be permit/brainwash them into doing.

Grrr!

Despite a gut-feeling that social networking in general (i.e. Twitter and FaceBook in particular) are loathsome, I’ve resurrected my Twitter account to help with my summer project.