Author Archives: Donncha

Ballintemple on Sullivan’s Quay.

If you go over to Google Maps and click on the location of the now demolished IDA building you’ll be told that you’re in Ballintemple, somewhere that is a few km to the east.

A neat way to quickly get home if you happen to live in that area, but awkward when Google Timeline thinks I’ve been in Blackrock every time I head into town ..

Odd things:

  • The popup marker shows the old building there.
  • Clicking on it will zoom out and mark the real Ballintemple on the map.

Hopefully it’ll be fixed sooner rather than later as I remember this showing up several weeks ago but forgot to report the problem before now.

Firefox printing with no headers and footers

First it was Netscape, then Chromium, on to Chrome and now (back) to Firefox, but the paperless office is still a pipe dream for me and most people.

Printing from Firefox can be annoying. I don’t like seeing the title, URL, current time, etc in the headers and footers so I would change those settings each time. Since I don’t print that often I’d always forget to find out how to save those settings, until today.

Turns out it’s quite easy, but it does require some tinkering with internal Firefox settings!

In Firefox, type about:config.

  1. Search for print.print and list of entries will appear.
  2. Look for:
    • print.print_headercenter
    • print.print_headerleft
    • print.print_headerright
    • print.print_footercenter
    • print.print_footerleft
    • print.print_footerright
  3. Double click on each one and remove the text in the (value) box.

This will remove the header and footer information when you print.

Next time I tried to print a page the headers and footers were both blank!

Retro Reading in 2019

Reading about retro computers in 2019!

You can be nostalgic about something for a lot longer than that thing was current. So it is with the Commodore 64, the Speccy and early computers in general.

I had a rubber keyed Spectrum 48K for a couple of years followed by a C64 that I used every day for another 4 years or so and here we are in 2019 and I’m reading about those ancient computers. I’m not the only one. There are vibrant communities around both computers and it’s great to see!

Somehow I can’t see myself feeling the same way about Windows 3.1, but I have to admit I have maybe not so fond memories of tuning autoexec.bat to get a few KB more memory in the DOS days…

What are the books I’m reading and where can I get them?

  1. The latest issue of FREEZE64 fanzine.
  2. Crash Annual 2019.
  3. The story of the Commodore 64 in pixels_.

error: btn: invalid btn_btree.bt_key_count

I recognised the symptoms:

  1. Excessive disk trashing.
  2. General slow down.
  3. Backblaze and Time Machine causing the rainbow spinner.

My filesystem needed first aid. I think I can trace this back to the latest macOS update. I swear that half the updates cause filesystem corruption of some sort, but it also feels like I’m running First Aid at least once a month anyway!

Unfortunately for me, the error this time was:

error: btn: invalid btn_btree.bt_key_count

Apparently Diskutil can’t fix that error. The only thing you can do is erase the drive, reinstall MacOS and then restore your data. I was dreading it.

I have a Time Machine backup but I decided to make another backup of my home directory, while logged into another account. Lucky I did as an IO error showed up in Library/Caches/ – thankfully I think in an Apple app I don’t use.

I expected the business of restoring everything to be awful, but in the end the MacOS installer fired up Migration Assistant which let me restore my last Time Machine backup.

With that done it was time to install Brew again. The first package to go back in was coreutils but “brew reinstall” has a bug where it won’t accept parameters. I should have used “install” but “reinstall” with  “–with-default-names” doesn’t work. Also coreutils and related packages are “keg-only” now so no symlinks to /usr/local/bin are made. You have to run “brew link” to link all the commands. It was a simple job then to rename each file, removing the “g” prefix.

I’ll find more things as I go that aren’t configured I’m sure, but thankfully restoring from Time Machine made the job much easier!

Mission Impossible: Ireland

The IMF team visited Ireland, in 1988. This is no Tom Cruise movie. This is the 1988-1990 remake of the 70’s hit TV series and I was glued to it.

Shame about the awful Irish accents but this was around the time of Far and Away when Tom made an appearance alongside Nicole Kidman with some really dire accents.





The Antarctic Whale Hunters

Photo: A whale on the flensing plan at Grytviken, South Georgia, 1914-17 (Photo by Frank Hurley/Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge/Getty Images)

One of my favourite podcasts is Witness by the BBC World Service. In each episode they talk to people who were there at moments in history. There are some amazing stories in their archive. Each episode is an easy to digest twelve to fourteen minutes long.

In the latest episode Gibbie Fraser talks about his time on a whale catcher in the Antarctic in the 1950s and 60s.

Other episodes that stand out for me:

There are 2348 episodes in their archive, so something for all tastes.

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