[openbook booknumber=”0060523867″]
The Confusion is a part of the Baroque Cycle, three long books centered around the late 1600’s. They highlight some of the changes occurring around that time, like the development of money and science. While I enjoyed this book, it took effort. Had I not been so intent on finding out more about Enoch Root from Cryptonomicon, I wouldn’t have made it through any of the Baroque Cycle novels. I did like this novel better than Quicksilver.
[openbook booknumber=”9780765316981″]
Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi is set in his Old Man’s War universe. It’s a bit like Ender’s Shadow–it’s a part of another book retold from Zoe’s point of view. It has a bit more of a young adult feel than Scalzi’s other stuff. It isn’t bad.
I’ve been playing around with git and github recently, and out popped this little project, episode filer. It files your tv shows into proper directories, taking just a little bit of monotony out of your day.
The project page is at http://feelslikeburning.com/projects/episode-filer/ and it’s on github at http://github.com/adamwolf/episode-filer/.
Recently, Dreamhost began cracking down on people using their space to store personal backups. The policy states that only website-related content is supposed to be stored in your webspace area. They provide a 50GB area for you to store any files–called the Backups user. Previously, you could only SFTP into it or something–you couldn’t rsync to it easily, so it was approximately worthless to me. However, Dreamhost has a place where you can vote for features and changes, and one of them I was voting on was allowing rsync over SSH to your backups user. I got the email this morning saying it was completed, and decided to play around with encrypted, incremental backups using Duplicity.
I use duplicity to maintain my offsite backups with a “backups buddy,” someone I trade backups with. I don’t want to allow them access to my files, even if I trust them. What if they get pwned and my files end up on the internet? No thanks!
Duplicity is Free, open source, and relies on some nice standards. It uses gpg, and has a variety of endpoints supported, like Amazon S3, Gmail, and of course things like rsync servers and file servers.
Instead of me walking you through setting up GPG and SSH keys, why don’t I point you on over to rsync.net’s tutorial on duplicity, and add a little discussion.
First off, security. They export your gpg passphrase. That doesn’t really hide the passphrase from anyone who is logged on to your local machine. Is that ok? That’s your call. Assuming your gpg keys for backups aren’t the same as your normal keys, and assuming you don’t let other people log into your machine, and assuming you run a tight shop normally, that might be ok. This doesn’t lower the security of the remote site. If the Feds or Dreamhost or whoever try to open your files from the remote (Dreamhost’s) end, without access to your computer, this doesn’t lower the security.
There is discussion around the ‘nets about turning off signing might allow you to not have to export your passphrase. I haven’t tried this, but it sounds like it might be a worthwhile tradeoff. Increasing the security of your gpg keys but eliminating the chance you can cryptographically prove your backups weren’t tampered with in their encrypted form is a call you’d have to make.
Next, Dreamhost has a 50 GB limit on the Backups user, and instead of stopping you at 50 GB, Dreamhost will charge you 10 cents a gigabyte per month. You’ll have to monitor that yourself.
To actually use their tutorial, replace the destination of the commands to backup.dreamhost.com, and replace the user with the user that Dreamhost gives you when you activate the user through the pane.
Pretty nifty, Dreamhost, pretty nifty…
[openbook booknumber=”9780060593087″]
Quicksilver is a part of the Baroque Cycle, three long books centered around the late 1600’s. They highlight some of the changes occurring around that time, like the development of money and science. While I enjoyed this book, it took effort. Had I not been so intent on finding out more about Enoch Root from Cryptonomicon, I wouldn’t have made it through any of the Baroque Cycle novels.
Recently, I set up my Macbook to boot OS X, Ubuntu, and Windows XP, with a large common partition that they all can natively read and write. Then I decided it’d be nice to be able to interact with these other systems through OS X in VMware Fusion, so I set that up as well. This took many tries, and a lot of experimentation. In the spirit of science, after I had everything working, I documented it, and then started from scratch to verify my instructions. I wrote up my instructions along with a dabble of theory. They follow.
This is what shows up when I boot.
If you try this, make sure to have a backup of everything.
Ingredients:
There are many ways to get this working, but also many ways that do not. One way that works is this:
sudo fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0At this point, if you don’t want to be able to use those installs in VMWare while booted into OS X, you’re done! Otherwise, trek on, my faithful reader.
In OS X, install VMWare Fusion. There’s nothing special about VMWare Fusion over any of the other products, its just the one I already have. Start VMWare Fusion, and ignore the “Boot Camp Partition” entry. There’s a bug filed at VMWare to allow people to remove it. There’s not a real reason why you need to ignore it, but I’m going to teach you how to do it manually. You’re going to have to do it manually at least once to get Linux working, and its pretty easy.
To create a VM that points to a partition on the disk, so we can use a partition to boot into as well as run in a VM, we need to do the following.
vmware-rawdiskcreator is a command-line program that allows VMware VMs to directly address partitions instead of using a file as a hard drive. It can only address the MBR, so there are the same restrictions on which partitions can be pointed to as with Windows. At this point, I’m going to copy and paste the help.
tredegarh:~ wolf$ /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator –help
Usage:/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator print <diskDev>
Print the partition table of a physical disk./Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator hasBootCamp <diskDev>
Check if a physical disk has an Apple Boot Camp partition (exit
code is 0) or not (exit code is non-0)./Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator create <diskDev> <partNum> <virtDiskPath> <adapterType>
Create a VMware virtual disk backed by a partition of a physical
disk.<diskDev> is a disk device, e.g. “/dev/disk0”.
<partNum> is the partition number as printed by the “print”
command, e.g. 3. 0 is special and means “the Apple Boot Camp
partition”.<virtDiskPath> is the path of the virtual disk description file to
create, e.g. “~/Virtual Machines/My VM/My Raw Disk”. Two files
will be created: “<virtDiskPath>.vmdk” and
“<virtDiskPath>-pt.vmdk”.<adapterType> is the virtual disk type. It must be one of “ide”,
“buslogic”, or “lsilogic”.
<virtDiskPath>.vmdk is a human-readable parameters file. It identifies the vmdk as a raw disk and points to the device representing the partition. When we’re done with this, the booted VM is going to see this raw partition as the only partition on a virtual device. What’s going to happen when the VM wants to read the MBR and partition tables of the virtual hard drive? Those aren’t stored in the partition we’re pointing to. This is where the second file comes in–the <virtDiskPath>-pt.vmdk. According to my experiments, this file is a copy of the drive’s (<diskDev>) MBR and some modified partition tables. This is created when vmware-rawdiskCreator is run. It isn’t dynamic. This is why we have to remember which non-OS X partition we booted last. rEFIt marks a partition active/bootable when we select it from rEFIt’s menu. If we make a raw disk file pointing to a non-bootable partition, the bootloader won’t start right when loaded by the virtual machine.
Back to the doing!
Assuming we’re following my partitioning layout, and assuming we booted Linux last, we run
/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk0 2 linux ide
Now we need to create a VM. Open VMware Fusion, and create a new VM. When it asks about install media, skip with “Continue without disk,” then “Create a custom virtual machine.” Pick the closest OS you can, then finish the wizard. Then VMware opens up the System Settings. In the Hard Disks section, remove the automatically created hard disk. If you want, remove the automatically-created vmdk files inside your VM. You’ll have to close the virtual machine from inside of VMware in order to remove some lock files. To remove the rest of the files, you can use the Finder or the Terminal or however else you want to remove files. Virtual Machines are just directories but they look special to the Finder. The VM will appear as a bundle (just like applications) probably inside of your Documents/Virtual Machines directory. You can right-click on the virtual machine icon inside of the Finder and “Show Package Contents” to get to the contents of the virtual machine, or else you can just use the Terminal. Everything ending with .vmdk inside of this new virtual machine directory is safe to remove at this point.
This is a good time to disable snapshots and suspending from this VM. To do this, edit the .vmx file in the first level of the VM bundle. Add the lines:
suspend.disabled = “TRUE”
snapshot.disabled = “TRUE”
and save the file.
Open VMware Fusion again, and get to the Hard Disks section of System Settings of your new virtual machine. Add a new disk. Choose an existing disk, and navigate to the place where you saved the .vmdk and -pt.vmdk file. Select the .vmdk file. Copy it or move it, depending on which you’d rather do. Apply, and then start the virtual machine.
A common error at this point is “Missing Operating System” or VMware Fusion complains that there are no bootable devices. This can be a problem with the raw disk files. To fix this, remove the hard drive, rerun vmware-rawdiskcreator after rebooting into the OS through rEFIt and rebooting back into OS X in order to get the boot records correct.
At this point you can install VMware Tools.
To set up the VM for the other OS, reboot into it through rEFIt, and then back into OS X. You could also use fdisk -e like we did earlier, but this way lets you verify that the other OSes are still bootable. Once you’re back in VMware, create the disk for the other OS through rawdisk-creator and follow the same process we did for the first OS.
Now, you might notice an issue with the share partition. The share isn’t accessible from more than one OS at the same time. This is for filesystem consistency reasons. If more than one OS were editing the drive at the same time, corruption would likely occur.
How do we fix this?
We can use file sharing through something like Samba or NFS, or Shared Folders through VMware for the VMs. Windows and Ubuntu will still be able to access the share when they’re booted natively, and through Shared Folders when they’re in a VM.
At this point, you should have a triple-boot Mac OS X / Windows / Ubuntu Linux system. From inside OS X, you can open the Linux and Windows partitions as VMs. Each OS can see the share partition when natively booted, and the virtual machines can see the shares if you set up Shared Folders.
Why did I choose this partitioning layout?
It was a lot like a logic puzzle, with little facts teased out after repeated installations.
Let me know how it works out for you guys.
A few months ago, my headphones broke. They were Sony MDR-NC6s, pretty cheap but the noise-canceling really helps cuts out the HVAC in a cube environment. They failed when I stood up and the cord was wrapped around my chair. The cord pulled out of the bottom of the headphones. I took them apart, and saw that there was probably enough room to fit a headphone jack in if I used a Dremel and some creativity. The cord now goes out the side of the headphones instead of the bottom, but the repair only took an hour and didn’t cost more than five dollars either. I now use an audio patch cable to connect my headphones to audio sources, and if I stand up with the cord tangled, the cord pops out of either end without damage.
I posted some pictures of the process on Flickr at the photoset Repairing my headphones.
The only real lesson learned is that I wouldn’t use the Radio Shack 3.5 mm stereo jack. It doesn’t grip the cable well. I will have to replace the jack next time I order from digikey.
(The photos are located at Adam’s Workbench)
I live in a pretty cool apartment building in south Minneapolis. While I’m lucky enough to have room to use a second bedroom as an office, the office doesn’t have enough space for a workbench. Even if it did have enough space for a workbench, I wouldn’t be able to keep work in progress on it without the room getting too cluttered. So I’m stuck hauling out a box labeled “Soldering Stuff” to the kitchen, constantly fearful of damaging the the kitchen table. I’m pretty handy with a soldering iron, but hey, fear is the mindkiller. I clean up after myself pretty well, but any stray lead solder bits that found themselves in a digestive tract would be dangerous.
When I lived in a 13×13 dorm room with a roommate, I used a lab bench I made from a melamine shelf on a pair of plastic saw horses. This was cheap, and fit under my bed when it wasn’t being used. The melamine held up well to solder burns and really added to the work surface. Once again, however, the bench needed to be put away or the room was unusable for anything else.
The time cost of setting up and breaking down an electronics workbench has been so high it had essentially eliminated my hardware tinkering–until now.
The office closet contained a half-height chrome wire shelfing unit, purchased at Target shortly after we moved in. It held around twenty clear plastic boxes, each about the size of a shoe box. These were labeled, and contained computer parts, electronics, and tools. Next to this was a toolbox, a tackle box I had already hacked to carry solderless breadboards and their projects, and a bunch of empty space.
I figured I could put a table in this space, use some clip-on lights as task and background lighting, and have a pretty functional work area. As long as the table didn’t stick out, I figured I would be able to close the sliding doors. With this, I would finally be able to have a workspace I could keep a project in progress on.
After measuring the space (33″ x 25″ x 65″), my fianceé found the Galant table at Ikea. It came with a melamine finish and fit inside the space perfectly.
While at Ikea, I grabbed a power strip with an on-off switch. Another department store had reasonably priced whiteboards. After I hung the whiteboard on the back of the closet and ziptied the power strip to the side of the wire rack, the workspace was complete.
Well, almost complete. I printed out a few pictures (1, 2) of everyone’s favorite DIY science heroes, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters and stickytacked them to the wall.
I now have a pretty functional work bench that fits inside the closet of my apartment. I wouldn’t have thought such a tight fit would have produced the nice results they did, but I’m pretty impressed. I can just open the door, roll my office chair over, and work on my very own bench. When I’m done, I can close the door and put my chair back at my desk.
My favorite part that I didn’t anticipate? My soldering iron is much less of a hassle when the cord is out of the way, over my head, looped over the closet bar.
I’ve got more photos at the photoset Adam’s Workbench.
What tools are my favorite? Oh, I replaced my Radio Shack iron with a $45 Weller, and am amazed at how much more I solder things when I don’t have to wait 10 minutes for it to heat up. I also got a Panavise Jr. for Christmas (Thanks, Mom!) and it’s a dream for soldering to boards, because its so easy to flip the board over.
Last Saturday marked the finale of the third season of the new Doctor Who. To celebrate, Amanda and I made a cake–a TARDIS cake, with Jelly Babies.
I had an easier time than I expected finding Jelly Babies. Our local grocery store had them in their tiny British section.
We used Betty Crocker “Party Rainbow Chip” cake mix. This is the Betty Crocker version of Funfetti, the best cake in the universe.
Amanda cut the Jelly Babies up in to little pieces, and we mixed them into the batter.
When the cake finished, we flipped it over. The Jelly Babies had melted, coloring the cake. The melted Jelly Babies kept the cake moist, and when they crystallized, the cake was almost crispy. Yum!
We cut the cake into the shape of the TARDIS, using some reference photos from the Internet.
Because we haven’t had a lot of cake decorating experience, I wanted to minimize the amount of detail work we’d have to perform upon the cake itself. We melted almond bark to make the letters and the windows. For the letters, I put the almond bark in a plastic bag and pierced a corner to make a piping bag. For the windows, I lined the bottom of some tin tea canisters with aluminum foil, and filled them with almond bark.
Although we weren’t able to match the blue of the TARDIS perfectly, we did as well as we could with a lot of blue and a few drops of red food coloring.
After spreading the frosting on the cake, we piped lines for the doors and other details.
We then added the white windows made of almond bark, the letters, and outlined the panels.
It was delicious. The melted Jelly Babies really added something special to the cake. A little Huon energy or something.
Next year, or perhaps for the Christmas special, we’ll have to do a few things differently. I’d like to match the blue better. I’d also like to use dark chocolate and white chocolate to make a proper “Police Box” panel. Maybe we’ll get fancy and use fondant and gum paste.
I have more pictures (and a slideshow) on Flickr.
I recently installed Linux on my Macbook with Boot Camp. I recently decided to use a virtualization solution instead, and wanted to get that space back. When I ran Boot Camp, it wouldn’t combine my partitions together, possibly because I put Linux on there, instead of Windows, and it changed the partition type.
Using this article, I fixed it and successfully combined everything.
IF YOU FOLLOW THESE INSTRUCTIONS, AND YOU LOSE ALL YOUR DATA AND YOUR MOM MAKES YOU MOVE OUT, IT IS NOT MY FAULT.
If you decide to do what I did, please understand what you’re doing. Please read all applicable man pages, and have recent backups.
I booted into the Mac Install CD, and opened the Terminal. Using gpt show disk0 and diskutil list /dev/disk0 and diskutil info /dev/disk0, I confirmed a little bit about how my disk was being managed. My Linux partitions were /dev/disk0s3 and /dev/disk0s4, which corresponded to gtp indexes 3 and 4.
I used gpt remove -i 3 disk0 and gpt remove -i 4 disk0 to remove the gpt entries.
I ran diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 limits to find out how large I could make the original partition. I then tried to run diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 *maximum size* but diskutil told me it couldn’t resize it. I rebooted, back into the cd again, and ran the diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 *maximum size*. It succeeded, I rebooted, and I had my space back.
