I’ve had a number of instances lately where I needed to manually set the date on a UNIX machine that didn’t have internet access, so I made a little page to generate the date setting commands with the correct current time.
https://robobunny.com/unixdate
There’s a setting to force the date a little into the future (5 seconds by default), to give you time to paste it into a command prompt and still be pretty close to correct.
I recently finished up a bartop arcade cabinet that I’ve been working on for a while. I got the basic design from this instructables post, and tweaked it a bit.
I’ve recently switched from Firefox to Chrome, but I don’t care for the default Chrome “New Tab” page. The Firefox version was never quite what I wanted either, so I decided to make an extension for Chrome to work the way I wanted: a grid with giant buttons for my most visited sites. Here’s my requirements:
So here’s the result: Spartan New Tab. I have a few features to add, but it’s usable as it is.
Spartan New Tab page
I ran across a unique guitar stringing technique today at a pawn shop. Somehow they managed to run all the strings backwards. I don’t know how they’re attached at the other end. I wonder what they thought those little circles at the end were for. It’s a left-handed guitar, so maybe someone told them they had to string it backwards relative to a right-handed guitar and they misunderstood “backwards”?
When I was in Brazil last year, I took a bunch of pictures of the view from Cristo Redentor and stitched them together into a panorama.
It was a clear day, but the image gets a bit cloudy in the distance. It’s still fun to search around for interesting details. It’s like a giant Where’s Waldo.
I’ve posted version 1.10 of weatherspect. It just fixes a bug that caused the program to die if certain weather data was missing.
You can download the new version from the project page.
I ran across this artifact from a bygone era the other day, and went searching for the story behind it. Surprisingly, I could find no pictures of it, so I decided to record it for posterity. Now future generations will know that terrible computer jokes existed long before facebook, when cavemen had to physically pass the jokes to one another like the very floppy disks the DiskProtek was made to defend.
The only reference to the DiskProtek that I’ve found at all is this trademark registration. It looks like it’s expired and is available for the low price of $159 if you’d like to enter the lucrative Archaic Computer Novelty business.
It hasn’t held up very well, but it’s probably close to 20 years old, so it’s a wonder it isn’t a bag full of dust at this point. Obviously the DiskProtek corporation produced a quality product.
Read on for the text from the back.
If you search for instructions on cropping in Audacity, you’ll get a lot of people explaining how to do two things that you don’t want to do:
1. Remove a selected section (that is, cutting, the opposite of cropping)
2. Save a selection to a file
If you just want to select a range and remove everything on both sides, neither of those pieces of advice help. The confusion is caused by people answering questions they don’t understand, and the fact that Audacity uses the term “Trim” instead of crop. Of course, if you read an article like this one, you will be even more confused, because he uses the term “Trim” to mean Cut!
Anyhow, all you have to do is select the range you want, then Edit -> Remove Audio -> Trim. Or just hit Ctrl-T.
Update: Newer versions of Audacity moved Trim to Edit -> Remove Special -> Trim Audio.
If you’re annoyed with the startup chime of your Mac, my friend Dan Tullis has developed an app that will cool your rage: Start Ninja will disable the startup chime so you won’t have to remember to turn your volume down before you shut down your machine.
The English language extender
Generate GUIDs and convert between formats
The World's Greatest mortgage calculator
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