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!
Author Archives: Donncha
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!
What colour do you see?
It’s odd how this picture has gone viral. I saw it on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and even on a blog, which just goes to show. Blogs are still hip.
Anyway, I see blue and black, but some people see white and gold. My son looked at the exact same screen I was looking at, but at an angle and said he saw brown and white. When he moved around he said he saw some blue but it was still mostly white. Odd.
Steven Novella has written a good post on this and explains why our brains see this difference. Wired have a good article too. It’s an optical illusion. Just like these:
At least we can all agree on one thing: The people who see the dress as white are utterly, completely wrong.
Power Rangers
The first time I saw the Power Rangers was in the early nineties while I was an exchange student in France and I thought it was pure violence, because you know, I couldn’t understand any of the dialog. Not that the dialog in modern iterations is any better.
https://vimeo.com/120401488
Oh, how wrong I was. This is a very dark deboot experiment. NSFW. There’s also a Youtube version that according to the Vimeo site is safe for work but really, they have a funny definition of “safe for work”. I found it hard to hear the dialog, must be a Power Rangers thing, the sound effects tented to drown out voices.
Neither version is safe for kids to watch. You’ve been warned! (via io9)
Galaxy S5 Lollipop Root without Tripping Knox
If that headline makes no sense to you apart from the “Galaxy S5” bit and you own that phone here’s why it’s important:
- Gaining root access to your phone lets you have more control of your phone. It’s like the difference between having access to the engine of your car instead of the bonnet being welded shut. (I said “it’s like”, analogies are never 100% accurate!)
- Lollipop is the latest version of Android that’s rolling out to Samsung Galaxy S5 phones right now. I’m still not happy that there’s no real “silent mode” any more. The developer of Llama, the app I use to switch to silent each night, includes silent mode in his list of Lollipop bugs and gotchas but he has released an updated apk with a fix for this Android bug so hopefully that works.
- Knox is the security system Samsung uses to stop people messing with their phones and installing custom software like a new firmware on them. Once it’s tripped a yellow warning triangle appears on bootup and your warranty is void. Samsung KIES does not work either, but there are better backup solutions out there.
If you’ve had your phone for more than a year then you don’t really need to worry about Knox as your phone is out of warranty. You may not like the warning logo on bootup but how often do you boot your phone?
I found a great guide that explains how to root the Galaxy S5. You need to backup everything as your phone will be downgraded to an earlier version of Android that can be rooted and then upgraded again to an already rooted Lollipop ROM. You also have to splash out the $5 required for Mobile Odin Pro to flash Lollipop again without tripping Knox as it’s flashing a custom ROM. From what I’ve read, Odin running on your PC will trip Knox when you flash a custom ROM. I have no idea how the mobile version doesn’t.
Installing Towelroot to root your 4.4.2 install of Android brings up this ominous message. I thought it was funny they didn’t escape the apostrophe correctly..
Oh, you’ll need several hours too. It took me an evening to do it which includes backing up files and apps and restoring them afterwards. If you use Google Authenticator, install Authy instead. It’s much easier to restore it. On the plus side, since Knox isn’t tripped, you can use KIES to restore your data!
A must-have app for Android users, rooted or not, is Greenify. It hibernates apps on your phone when you turn off the display to save battery. It works without root, but if you have a password or PIN on your lockscreen it won’t work automatically. You’ll need to use a launcher shortcut that automatically kills the apps when tapped. Facebook is always the first app I add to Greenify!
The Lollipop ROM linked from the guide above doesn’t have quite as much Samsung bloat installed by default. I use some of their software like the camera and S Health but now I can completely uninstall apps like ChatOn and almost anything else.
A final word of caution: you may soft brick your phone when you try to root it. It’s not for the faint at heart. It worked for me, but YMMV. Once rooted, apps have to ask for root permission, but once they have it they have free reign over everything so you have to be sure to only use root apps you trust.
#Jeffwecan
Jeff, the diseased lung and hopefully new mascot of Marlboro. Thanks LWT.