Monthly Archives: March 2015
Sabermod on the Galaxy S II
The ageing Samsung Galaxy S II still has plenty of life in it. It runs Minecraft PE and Terraria perfectly well!
It might be old, but there are still developers hacking at it and releasing firmware upgrades with modern versions of Android. I decided to try this unofficial build of Slimkat i9100 Sabermod. My previous install barfed and half the apps on it disappeared somehow!
Sabermod installed easily. I already had TWRP installed so it was only a matter of installing the various zip files through it. Give it a go if you have this old phone, especially if you’ve never messed around with ROMs and have this phone lying around. The usual caveats apply. YMMV and you might soft-brick your phone.
Building the BBC Micro
I never used the BBC Micro much but it was a prominent feature of schools across Ireland the UK in the 80s and early 90s.
I love that Professor Steve Furber’s admitted they didn’t know why certain chips worked or the work arounds they needed to get other bits working!
How to fly to the space station
Have you ever been curious about how people fly to the ISS? If you’ve played Kerbal Space Program you probably have a pretty good idea but for everyone else this video dots a great job of explaining orbital mechanics!
There’s more sugar in skim milk
If sugar is the new bad guy, taking over from fat, should we drink skim milk?
If you take out the fat, everything left behind is more concentrated, so you get marginally more sugar per volume of liquid. I guess it really matters if you’re consuming liters and liters of milk per day but it probably won’t make much of a difference to your porridge and a few cups of tea.
Some tips to make Mac OS X Finder easier to use
Making the switch from Windows or Linux to Mac OS X is not without pain. The extra CMD key plays havoc with muscle memory, and the “Windows Explorer” of Mac OS X, Finder, is quite a different beast to what you might be used to in the Windows or Linux worlds.
About two weeks ago I decided to make the switch again to Mac OS X and I lamented the difficulty in using Finder to do simple tasks. I’m still not 100% happy with Mac OS X it but the tips on the following pages made things easier:
- Home and End keys work on a line, not a document, silly.
- Disable natural scrolling.
- Switch CMD and ALT if you’re using a PC keyboard. I have a lovely split keyboard but the default configuration hurt my fingers.
- Change the keyboard layout if your keyboard doesn’t work the way you’re used to. I still haven’t got this set up exactly as I want it to. In my terminal some keys act differently I think but I haven’t set aside time to work out which. I need to swap ” (shift-2) with @ (key to the top/left of right-shift). My muscle memory gets them mixed up all the time.
- Automount SMB drives automatically. I haven’t been able to get the fstab method to work yet because my password has spaces but the “User Login” one works well enough.
- Change Finder search so it searches the current directory by default.
- Type the path into Finder.
- 9 tips to improve Finder.
- Sorting and arranging in Finder.
- Right click on the directory name in Finder and show a dropdown of the path to that directory.
- Install Mac Ports to get a working copy of Rsync and a better ls that lets me put parameters after the filename.
There are still oddities. When Mac OS X mounts an SMB share it does so with permissions that only allows the current user to edit files in the share. That’s perfectly understandable but it messes things up for Rsync when I’m syncing directories with a remote host. I’ve had to resort to using the “–size-only” parameter of Rsync so it won’t attempt to sync every file each time. I need to figure out if that can be fixed somehow.
I’ll update this post from time to time as I come across more oddities.
A Muppet Wicker Man
Remember the film, The Wicker Man? (Apparently there was a modern remake of it, go see the 1973 original)
Here’s a comic version of it featuring the characters from the Muppet Show! Crazy. Well done Paul O’Connell for creating this masterpiece! 🙂
We Quit Sugar
Before I watched this video and looked up her name I had no idea who Sarah Wilson is but apparently she’s an advocate of eliminating sugar completely from your body. Ridiculous. It’s another quack diet. Eat everything in moderation and that includes sugar. Eat too much sugar and of course you’ll suffer. Bah.
Batman Vs Darth Vader
A slightly shorter version of this short movie did the rounds a while back but this one is a hell of a lot better.
Batman, Superman and Darth Vader all in one clip? Great stuff!