Defamer catches dyslexic Fantastic Four skywriter
Flying planes and spelling at the same time must be hard.
See the pictures here, both the dyslexic one and the corrected one.
Blog
Blog Fixed & Flickr Update
Seems since I did the security update late last week, that one of the fixes changed the permissions on the file that controls the comments, so it errored out and wasn’t accepting comments.
That’s now fixed. For the record, the error was:
Warning: comments_template (wp-content/themes/default/comments.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in (wp-includes/comment-functions.php on line 28)
According to the to the fix on the WordPress Codex it required adding a line to the style.css sheet of a theme so it looked like:
/*<br />
Template: mad1<br />
Theme Name: No Named Art Seed
However, that didn’t work for me.
SSH’ing in, and going to my wp-content directory and typing:
chmod -R 755 themes/ however did work. I don’t know if it’s a permission error on the comments file itself, or the directories, but comments are back.
In related news, I’ve come across some of last years digital photo’s and am in the process of uploading them to Flickr, including the ones from Packer Training Camp last year. So some of the timelines will be out of date for a few days, as I upload them and I’ll finish ’em off with this past weekends Fourth of July photo’s to back in to real-time.
My favorite Packer photo is Robert Ferguson making a spectacular one-handed catch at full extension in the air:
Trent Reznor gets it
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails gets it. It being the remix culture.
Mr. Reznor has released the second single, Only to be remixed. The Hand That Feeds was the first single released, in Garage Band format only at the time.
This time around, it’s been released in 4 different file formats, including Acid Express and Garage Band so Windows users have a shot at remixing this time. I have a copy of the former around somewhere, and the latter on my Mini. I might try my hand at it this time.
It’s very cool of NIN to give back to the community. I downloaded a few of the remixes for The Hand That Feeds last time, and some were pretty good.
Lego Star Destroyer
I remember when the Lego Star Destroyer came out in Christmas of 2002. I begged my wife for one for Christmas. At $300, it was the biggest Lego set to ever be released at over 3000 pieces. I had a vision of assembling it and never taking it apart and setting it on a pedestal…somewhere.
Alas, I never did get one.
Via Wonderland, an old blog post but a good one.
This couple did get a Lego Star Destroyer, and using their webcam at 5 second intervals, took over 4000 shots of them putting it together over 10 hours, including a dinner break. It’s a classic blog post from Jan. of ’03. Alice is right, someone desperately needs to put that to music. At just over 4 minutes, it would be a perfect music video.
Medium and large versions of the video are available here.
Smart Advertising
I live about 35 minutes from downtown Minneapolis, pretty far out in the suburbs, in a town of just under 20,000 people called Chaska.
As I’m driving back from dropping the dog off at the kennel (which is really far out there), I see a billboard just outside the Chaska limits for an upcoming GI Joe toy convention in downtown Minneapolis.
Now, I don’t know if they did any market research about who exactly lives in Chaska, or just couldn’t afford a real billboard closer to downtown, say on a busy highway, but I can’t believe that that billboard is going to be effective at all.
Just to give you an idea of how far out I live from Minneapolis:
BurnIt Club
How cool is this – the Burn It club?
I came across Kymberlie McGuire via her Flickr site.
The Burn It Club looks very cool – every quarter she picks a theme, past themes have included driving music, remixes, and school, and you email her to join a group. She puts you in a group of 4, and you make 5 mix CDs (all different artists and songs, just follow the theme), one to keep, one to send to Kymberlie and each person in your group, and you get one in return.
I’ve bookmarked the site and definitely want to join in on that the next time it comes around. What a cool idea.
Security Updates
WordPress 1.5.1.3 is out, and site is updated.
phpBB 2.0.16 is out, and the forums are updated.
Cursed, I tell you
I’m cursed I tell you, cursed.
It’s a well known fact in my circle of friends not to let me build PCs. Something always seems to happen. I’d guess I have about a 30-35% success rate on the first try that PC’s I build work.
One of my major goals this week on vacation was to rebuild a few machines, including:
- My server
- Athlon 64 box
- Music backup box which (I think) had a bad video card
- Rebuild my wireless network, including my wife’s laptop with a MIMO card
Well, I’ve had a 25% success rate this week. Some vacation.
To recap:
The server: I’ve watched the server die a slow death all week. From the first hard drive failure 6 months ago, I’ve seen the CMOS reset, the BIOS reset a few times, and now booting from the DVD drive isn’t working. I looked into buying a 1U rackmount server today to replace it, but can’t seem to get wife approval yet.
Athlon 64: Swapped out processors and video card (got a sweet deal on a 6800 OC), now getting a 25 or 52 error on the Abit uGuru machine. Need to take the memory out and troubleshoot. Figures.
Music backup box: Success! Swapped out video cards (took the 4200 out of the Athlon 64 since it got a 6800) and bam, no more lockups. Yay.
Wireless Network & Kelly’s laptop: Success and then oops. Wireless network swapped out, got WEP up and running, and went to install the MIMO card in Kelly’s laptop (my old one). Followed directions, installed the drivers first, then put the card in the PCMCIA slot, and the card wouldn’t power on or be recognized. Very weird, as especially for the last year I had been running an Atheros card in that laptop when it had been running Linux as Broadcom built-in wireless sucks. Flashed the bios, and bam, machine won’t power on. HP told me to take it in for service. Wife not happy with me at all, as she wanted it on our trip home this weekend.
Success rate this week: 25%. To top it all off, I had powered off my desktop to do some cable management, and when I powered it on to go to HP’s site for support, I got 2 non-system disk errors. Was reaching for a LiveCD when I rebooted one mroe time and it came on. I was pretty livid at that point.
Moral of the story? Don’t let me touch your PC. Ever.
Playing with Panorama
There was a huge storm Monday night, and the sky was 3 different shades of colors.
Attached are two (attempted) panoramic shots of the sky from my backyard. Unfortunately, on both attempts, you can clearly see the stitching lines, but you can see the sky changing colors.
The big one above was made with Microsoft’s Digital Image Suite 10, and the second, smaller one below was made with The GIMP with just the first two photo’s.
Podcasting now in iTunes
Sheesh, I mention the other day how I’ve gotten in to podcasting in a big way, and then Apple goes and makes it mainstream just to copy me (no, really!).
Apple’s iTunes 4.9 now has Podcasting support. Windows users can download Apple’s iTunes 4.9 here. Suppose I should fire up the old Mac Mini and take a look.
And for the record, I’ve been downloading podcasts for the last year intermittently, and burning them to CD for long car rides. Just hadn’t done the whole automated thing.