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by Felix — Who am I?

Disassembly instructions for Seagate "Expansion" ST310005EXA101-RK 9SF2A4-500 external hard drive posted 2010-01-04

Eventually I'm going to set up a sort of knowledge base where I can dump articles on all the random things I discover while I'm working. Til then, I'm going to post this here because I couldn't find instructions for this anywhere on Google and it was a bitch to figure out without damaging the thing.

How to disassemble / open up the casing of a Seagate "Expansion" ST310005EXA101-RK 9SF2A4-500 external hard drive (PDF)

Downloaded flickr photo sorter posted 2009-11-07

So I had a substantial collection of unclassified, um, pictures, that I downloaded from Flickr, and I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to sort through all these pictures, I could just have them automatically sorted by username?"

So I wrote this perl script to do just that:
flickr_classify.pl

usage:
ls *.jpg | flickr_classify.pl [a flickr session ID cookie] > outputfile

It'll work without the session ID cookie, but on pictures that you need to be logged in to see it'll return "Dont_know" or "No_permission_to_view" (you'll see those on other photos too; usually it means they've been deleted). Then view the output file in your favourite text editor to make sure it worked out alright, flip the mkdir lines up to the top, and run it as a shell script.

I highly recommend you run this script on a COPY of your, um, photo collection and then double-check that nothing got overwritten/deleted before keeping the results.

Disassembly instructions for Lacie 301304U external hard drive ("Design by Neil Poulton") posted 2009-08-10

Eventually I'm going to set up a sort of knowledge base where I can dump articles on all the random things I discover while I'm working. Til then, I'm going to post this here because I couldn't find instructions for this anywhere on Google and it was a bitch to figure out without damaging the thing.

How to disassemble / open up the casing of a Lacie 301304U external hard drive (PDF)

Critical Mass Bike Ride, Victoria, BC posted 2009-08-01

I attended this event for the first time yesterday. First, Google, here are a number of things everyone needs to know about the Victoria Critical Mass ride:

Hopefully Google will index the above and it'll help other people who might (like I did) show up at 17:00 and wonder where everybody is.

Now, some commentary (things that didn't impress me about the ride):
The turnout was very small for a city this size. I mostly blame this on our nonstandard starting time and conflicting information posted on those few websites that have it. See above for the correct information.

I know that running red lights is kind of a standard practice for Critical Mass, and it makes sense for a parade-like event, but the execution on the Victoria ride this month was very poor. We ran red lights that were red when we got there, i.e. deliberately biking out into cross traffic and stopping it. I had originally intended to set an example by waiting at reds, but the turnout was so small that I wouldn't have been able to keep up with the group if I did that (especially since they wouldn't wait at the next red, either).

At least one person repeatedly went into oncoming traffic. I didn't think that was a good idea. Ironically, though, he had more chance of being run over from behind than in front — by the pissy car drivers who didn't want to take a few minutes out of their day and roared into oncoming traffic themselves to get around us.

We were very rude to the horses. Victoria, BC has horse drawn tour carriages, and while the horses are probably drugged (or very well trained or so psychologically broken that they don't care about traffic), being mobbed by tens of small, shiny bicycles probably sucked for them. Critical Mass riders also kept their horns and bells going when we passed horses, further startling them. Several trainers/minders had to reassure their horses after we went past the main parking spot for the carriages.

In conclusion, since this is a decentralized event there's no one to complain to about things. Instead, I'll be talking about them to the crowd before we leave on next month's ride (since I'm as much an organizer as anyone else).

Lamenting BC-STV
posted 2009-05-17

So we just had a big election in BC. From my point of view, we lost. It was the saddest I've ever been after an election — I'm used to the person I voted for not getting in, but this time we had a referendum on electoral reform and the thing I voted for didn't get elected there either. I'll moan more about it some other time, for now, here's a document I'm working on:

Why BC-STV failed (PDF)

Business Idea
posted 2009-05-01

As some who know me know, my strategy when I have a great idea for a business or a product is to immediately tell everyone I know. The hope is that someone with more free time, capital, or entrepreneurial drive will implement it so that I don't have to bother. I'm more concerned with bringing things into existence than owning and controlling them (which is why I hate patents and intellectual property in general).

Anyway, my idea is this: When you move, wouldn't it be great if you could just liquidate all your stuff instantly, and buy new stuff at the other end? No shipping, no worrying about stuff getting lost or broken on the way, and hey, a couch is a couch and a desk is a desk, right? (Obviously there are a few sentimental things that you'd want to really move, but the majority of our stuff really is just stuff.)

My idea is a kind of teleportation by logistics -- there could be a stuff escrow company (a national self-storage chain would be the ideal candidate, since they already have lots of space to keep stuff), that would record the transaction and then grant you all the replacement stuff when you get to your new city. Think of all the millions of litres of fuel and trucker time it would save.

Anyway, I'm going to go and tell a bunch of self-storage companies about this now; I just thought I should post it here first in case any of them got any ideas about patenting the process or something. Prior art!

Pun
posted 2008-11-27

So I thought of this all by myself last night, and was surprised to learn that no one's ever thought of it before! (Says Google.) So the riddle is — what animal is this?:

(Look at the image filename for the answer.)

Condoms in wallets
posted 2008-08-06

Why do people still do this? You'd think that several years of Google-assisted sex-ed would've put this (and a few other not-so-good traditions) to rest forever, but apparently not.

My boyfriend and I were on a bus back from the ferries the other night, when a fellow passenger sat on a wallet left by someone. In typically human fashion, he foisted it off on us as soon as we expressed any interest in being the ones to take responsibility, and naturally we started rifling through it.

(I'm the kind of person who likes to do his own detective work rather than turn stuff in to the lost & found — I believe [correctly or not] that I would put more effort into getting the one item returned than would the staff who deal in lost items by the bucketload.)

No useful ID, since the owner was a kid of 14 or 15, but we did find the clichèd condom. We did end up just passing it on to the lost & found, but not before I stole the kid's condom and left a note in its place:

Dude! Condoms in wallets = BAD IDEA
(Google it.)

On the one hand, we might've just ruined some poor kid's First Time (I imagine him, all genuinely and justifiably horny and nervous for the first time, fumbling awkwardly into his wallet for... a note from a creepy random stanger with an odd sense of humour), but on the other (says my boyfriend) he's probably better off without that extra baby. Besides, maybe he'll find it amusing too.

My own take on the condom-in-wallet tradition? I keep a fragment of the wrapper from my first time :)

I love the fucking Russians
posted 2008-07-26

So today I finally decided to make an attempt at converting my small selection of Liquid Audio files to something that I could actually play. Most of you are probably thinking, "Liquid Audio? What's that?" and you're right -- Liquid Audio was an obscure format in its peak, and has been a totally dead format since before my boyfriend graduated from high school.

However, for a brief few weeks, a younger version of me (who didn't fully grasp the problem of DRM and closed media formats) thought that Liquid Audio offered the best audio quality per bitrate of anything out there. At that time, it was easy to find a Winamp plugin (there were Winamp plugins for everything back then, and this was before Microsoft forced them to lock down the Disk Writer so it couldn't be used on WMA files). I also found the "Liquifier" encoder, which, being the content creator side of things, conveniently ignored all playback restriction flags.

Back then, I was also naive enough to assume that CD's would last forever and that (and this is a worse assumption) people I lent things to would always return them.

I put all of my Liquid Audio software on one CD. Somebody lost that CD.

I hadn't listened to those Liquid Audio tracks in so long that I'd set up a new computer and not bothered to reinstall the player, Liquifier, etc.

Liquid Audio failed, went out of business, and their downloads section disappeared from the web. Because they were a closed, proprietary, sue-happy company as much as the next one, no one else was providing copies of those programs.

Enter 2008, me running Linux as my main OS, and the fucking Russians (btw, I don't mean that to sound offensive at all; it's more along the lines of "Russians are fucking AWESOME"). After some Googling, I found one download link to Liquifier version 5, in Google's cache of an old Russian warez site. Those Russians -- they don't care about North American copyright law at all, and it's thanks to them that bits of our culture can sometimes be saved where they would otherwise have been lost to the intellectual property mongers.

I'm going to take this opportunity to return the favour, and help anyone else who might have Liquid Audio files still locked up in DRM obscurity. Here, as my first foray into posting content that might get me sued, is Liquifier Pro and some assorted utilities:

WARNING! For all their usefulness, Russian warez sites do sometimes slip nasty things into programs. There's no guarantee that these files are completely safe, so I strongly recommend that you only use them in a virtual machine.

Since Liquid Audio has been stone dead for years (at least as far as their player/encoder software goes), I don't think they'll care much. Also, for all its shortcomings, Canada's proposed copyright bill C-61 does enshrine violation of intellectual property for the purposes of interoperability, and I'd say rescuing people's dead music files counts.

Total Recorder seems to still be around so I might get a takedown notice from them, but we'll see. Hopefully they won't care about 7-year-old software that's 3 versions behind current and probably doesn't even run under Vista...

Stop bill C-61 please.
posted 2008-06-24 07:45 UTC

The Internet vs. the Library

Gary: "There was a famous quote at the time [1990's] that the Internet was like the Library of Congress, but with all the books thrown on the floor.

Felix: "Well, the Internet is still like the Library of Congress with all the books thrown on the floor, only now we have an autistic person who knows where he threw them — that being Google."

Update on the mudslide story
posted 2007-06-06 20:17 UTC

Turns out 2 people did die; buried under it in their truck. They were from Williams Lake and related to someone my mom knows. Archived here.

If I had spacial distortion technology...
posted 2007-06-05 21:30 UTC


...I would use it to put more stuff into my sandwich.

In other news, I wrote another short story (an episode in the Feline series); it should be up on AnthroArchives.org soon. It's called "Werecat!".

100 000 words!
posted 2007-06-03 03:09 UTC

Well, perhaps I will finish my novels within a year — I crossed the 100 000 word mark today in book 1. (For anyone not up to speed on that, I'm writing a trilogy of novels about werecats.)

I also tried to find something similar to what I'm writing in the library the other day, just to see what it was like. Apparently I was right when I said no one ever thinks of werecats — I can't find any examples of novel-length fiction that feature werecats that aren't just including them because they have werewolves and a miscellany of other werecreatures. Maybe I really am doing something new here?

Here's a picture of random girls in a field (at UVic):

(click for big)

Mud/Rock Slide Near Terrace
posted 2007-05-29 21:02 UTC
event in question 2007-05-28 15:30 UTC

The details, as I've heard them so far:

Pictures (click for bigger):

Archived news stories:
Opinion 250
Opinion 250 #2
Terrace Standard

Wouldn't it be easier to just find a real crab?
2007-05-29 06:18 UTC

Bay Street Bridge Fire
2007-05-29 02:18 UTC

So the Bay Street bridge caught fire Sunday evening; pictures:



More of the aftermath over at Google Photos...
Canada.com news article archived here.

Dream: (possibly related to watching The Fountain with my roommate last night): I dreamt I was in the plotline of Titan, but most of the cast were characters from Lexx., including me (I was Kai). I remember doing something like the tai chi dance scene among the background of stars from that scene in The Fountain (I'll get a still of it later) while singing the Brunnen G chant.

The Fountain: Good movie; I'd recommend it... my roommate and at least one of his friends call it the "best movie made so far;" I'd be a bit reluctant to call it that, but then again, they're Lit majors ;)   I will say that it has some of the things the best movie ever made will need, though (namely snow, a woman with short hair, love, death, and the aforementioned starry sky).

Favourite word this very minute: mondegreen

The Anuspout
2007-05-27 21:08 UTC

I bought this honey this morning that I just had to blog about: the non-drip spout looks like something out of Lexx.

Here it is passing gas:

...and here it is in action:

Here is the whole container, next to a tub of margerine with a questionable slogan on it:

No, Parkay, I don't know™... pray tell. They probably can't without upsetting the Butter Lobby:

In the United States, the color bans, drafted by the butter lobby, began in the dairy states of New York and New Jersey. In several states, the legislature enacted laws to force margarine manufacturers to add pink colorings to make the product look unpalatable, but the Supreme Court struck down New Hampshire's law and overruled these measures. By the start of the 20th century eight out of ten Americans could not buy yellow margarine, and those that could had to pay a hefty tax on it. Bootleg colored margarine became common, and manufacturers began to supply food-coloring capsules so that the consumer could knead the yellow color into margarine before serving it.
[from Wikipedia:Margerine. It's missing a citation, but we have a similar silliness in Quebec, so I believe it. If it were up to me, all food dyes that serve no purpose beyond changing a food's colour would be illegal — if our food is grey, then let our food be grey, I say! The truly ironic thing is that most butter is also artificially coloured.]

Favourite word this very minute: malapropism

Turn Signals a la xkcd

Watch the leading car in the left turn lane and the van behind it — sorry the quality's so bad, I took this freehand with auto-focus on, shooting through a dirty bus window, and with almost no space left on the camera.

Egg in the Microwave

This is from a while ago; mostly using it to test video embedding.