Nicked from Diana’s blog, here’s my list of 27 things that you couldn’t care less about. Oh, and about xmess too. Or christmas. Whatever you want to call it.
Yesterday I had some good old fun trying to replace the backup battery of an Acer Travelmate 803 laptop.
I thought that since this is a part that should be replaceable by the user, it should be reachable (like the memory, harddisk, you know). Guess again !
After flipping through the service manual (which I had luckily found), it seemed that there were no disassembly instructions for this battery. Looking on the blueprints of the motherboard, it showed the battery as being on the underside of the motherboard - ergo, requiring full disassembly of the laptop… wtf?!?
I’m damn glad that I had the manual, because otherwise I think getting this thing apart is not quite so easy.
Here are some after-disassembly-pics:
And here, the battery…
which ofcourse had to be of another type than the five we have in the house, so now I have to wait with the reassembly until tomorrow after I get the friggin’ battery!
*growl*
‘t is niet den auto, ‘t is de reis
niet de tafel, ‘t is de spijs
niet den oven, ‘t is de koek
niet het meubel, ‘t is het boek
niet de potten, ‘t is de pap
niet het lopen, ‘t is de stap
niet de letters, ‘t is ‘t gedicht
niet de lampe, ‘t is het licht…
‘t is niet den baksteen, ‘t is het huis
niet de muren, ‘t is de kluis
niet de netten, ‘t is de vis
niet het afscheid, ‘t is ‘t gemis
niet het werken, ‘t is ‘t geduld
niet de straffe, ‘t is de schuld…
niet de noten, ‘t is het lied
niet de rijmen, ‘t is ’t verdriet…
‘t is niet ‘t verlangen, ‘t is den drang
niet de tonen, ‘t is ‘t gezang
niet het schrijven, ‘t is het woord
niet het contract, ‘t is het akkoord
niet het getokkel, ‘t is de sfeer
niet het zingen, ‘t is het zeer
niet het koren, ‘t is het brood
niet het heimwee, ‘t is de nood…
‘t is niet den akker, ‘t is het graan
niet het ziek zijn, ‘t is ‘t vergaan
niet de bloemen, ‘t is den bloei
niet de regen, ‘t is de groei
niet de mane, ‘t is de nacht
niet de zunne, ’t is de kracht
niet de stove, ‘t is het vuur
niet de winter, ‘t is den duur…
‘t is niet ‘t geroddel, ‘t is de smaad
niet den oorlog, ‘t is de haat
niet de hoogmoed, ‘t is de schroom
niet de plannen, ‘t is den droom
niet het reisdoel, ‘t is de weg
niet het gelijk, ‘t is ‘t overleg
niet de bergen, ‘t is de kloof
niet de dogma’s, ‘t is ’t geloof…
dit is geen lied, ‘t is hakketak
dit is geen verhaal, ‘t is bric à brac
‘t is al geknipt, ‘t is al gelijmd
‘t is al geplakt, ‘t is al gerijmd
‘t zijn niet de regels, ‘t is het spel
niet het scheiden, ‘t is ‘t vaarwel
niet van buiten, ‘t is intern
niet de voorkant, ‘t is de kern…
Because I keep forgetting them, here’s a list of buttons you can press during a Mac’s boot to change behaviour:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| C | boot from CD or DVD |
| N | Attempt to start up from a network server (NetBoot) |
| T | start up in FireWire target disk mode |
| X | force Mac OS X startup |
| Shift | boot into safe mode |
| Mouse button | eject CD before booting normally |
| Command-S | boot into single user mode |
| Command-V | verbose boot |
| Option | choose startup disk at boot time |
| Option-Command-Shift-Delete | Bypass primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume (such as a CD or external disk) |
See also Apple article HT1343
At work we regularly have to send over files to $vendor. $Vendor has two ways of accepting files: FTP, and Webdav (over https). Since our company’s policy is to not send things out unencrypted, we have to go the webdav way. It’s also the policy to send things over our internetproxy if possible.
After some searching for a console-based webdav client we ran across cadaver, a lightweight client that seemed to do the trick. It has proxy support, so great ;)
What isn’t so great is that it doesn’t have any way to supply the proxy authentication in a non-interactive way, which is crucial to allow us to script this file transfer.
Today I took the time to create a patch that allows just that - setting the proxy info in advance. It also includes a parameter to trust the server certificate implicitly, otherwise it was yet another step where cadaver would come and ask for user input.
Now it works like a charm! :)
… waking up at 6 in the morning, because you hear a certain sound you associate with water that’s coming under high pressure from a tap.
Upon closer inspection, the tap in the shower was spraying hot water from one of the sides. Luckely, the shower door was closed, or the bathroom would have been flooded.
After shutting down the water flow and removing the tap, we found this:
It basically cleanly split off from the tube, causing the place to be sprayed in hot water. Fun, not. Goddamn shoddy quality products!!
For my PVR/HTMAC project, I wanted to auto-mount several shares from my NAS. After some searching I ran across this hint on the Mac OS X Hints website, which works perfectly:
Basically, you add the shares you want to mount to the /etc/fstab file, with this syntax:
excalibur:/music x url net,automounted,url==cifs://guest:@excalibur/music 0 0
excalibur:/photos x url net,automounted,url==cifs://guest:@excalibur/photos 0 0
excalibur:/videos x url net,automounted,url==cifs://guest:@excalibur/videos 0 0
That way, those shares will allways be mounted under /Network/Servers, and always available, starting boot-time. Works like a charm ;)
Brussels
5°
Madrid
3°
