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According to this forum post it does seem to be possible to set and change your bootcamp default OS.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:17 PM on November 4, 2007

It's a bit of a stretch to even call mbox a "format" - it's just all of your emails concatenated together one after another, separated by the regular expression "^From ". Many other desktop unix mail applications have moved on to use maildir instead (which also solves the NFS locking problem). I'm not certain if this is what Apple is using, but the idea of breaking up your mailbox into individual files per email has been around for a while, and in general seems like a good… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:07 PM on November 2, 2007

Hmm, looking at your existing portfolio, I see that you're not doing web design, which maybe makes the Flash / non-Flash issue a little fuzzier to me. I personally wouldn't go with an all-Flash website, though; among other things it's easy to get bogged down in the scripting part if you aren't already used to that, and with straight HTML potential clients can print a page out to pass around with no additional work from you.

I'll second the idea of… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:55 PM on November 2, 2007

In principle I agree with a lot of the above statements, especially the idea that education in something and developing vocational skills are different, but not necessarily disjunct, sets.

In practice I need to temper it a bit, though, since I've also known someone who pursued a degree in what she loved at the time, and then later in life found that her interests had changed; she then was stuck with a degree that was neither vocational nor particularly appealing.… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:38 AM on November 2, 2007

I've seen very similar behavior to this under Vista - all my audio/video froze up, even VLC. I sort of assumed that some program or another had locked the audio card and anything that tried to access it was freezing up. In my case, a reboot fixed the problem, though as a more long-term solution I'm planning to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows XP. I would maybe check for updated audio drivers for your machine.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 11:33 AM on November 1, 2007

Daniel Johnston, mentioned before, has a side project called Danny and the Nightmares which is full of spooooky lyrics that would probably be perfect. It's all very garage-rocky, so it would probably fit in with the more raucous side of weird 60's rock.

Also, Halloween by the Misfits.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 4:56 PM on October 17, 2007

If you're looking for more accessible inroads, I would echo Gogol's short stories, and also We by Zamyatin (it's a dystopian science-fiction story, predating 1984 but very similar to it). But really, you can't go wrong with any of the classics. Even War and Peace, despite its length, is broken up into very digestible short chapters.

When I took a survey course in college we got a lot of historical and cultural information,… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 4:13 PM on October 17, 2007

I'm not really clear what you're asking about (specifically, what you mean by culture jamming in this context). Could you be a little more specific?

There was a MeFi post about a war protest inside the "America's Army" game some time back, and you might also take a look at the games + art tag.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 5:11 PM on October 15, 2007

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I've washed my mat and it's drying now. (Not sure why I didn't think about that before.) Having had a close look at the thing has made me suspect that it's near the end of its useful life one way or another - the plastic near the top and bottom ends is looking pretty smooth.

I looked into the yogitoes, but I couldn't find them nearby for less than $50, which seemed pretty spendy for a mat that only cost me $1 to begin with. What… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 12:26 AM on October 15, 2007

Seconding the Durutti Column, though it tends to be more slow and contemplative than you may be describing and they do use some (limited) percussion. Still, some very nice melodies. You can hear some songs on their MySpace page - "Sketch for Summer" is a favorite of mine.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 11:59 AM on September 18, 2007

I installed Vista about two months ago, and I hate it. Its performance for extremely basic OS tasks, like dragging some files from one folder to another, is abysmal, and as you note, it doesn't get you anything good in return. The only real improvement I've noticed has been the start menu upgrade, but even that isn't that cool, especially for the money you'll have to shell out. I've got a pretty beefy box (dual-core, lots of RAM, good video card) and Vista is incredibly… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 6:10 PM on August 24, 2007

Thanks all! As it turns out, the phrase I particularly had in mind when I posted this was the (Greek) cataphasis, which I found along with several other specific varieties of paralipsis at the Silva Rhetoricae site that firecupcake linked.

For some reason, almost every example I could find online involves a drinking problem of some sort.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 10:01 AM on August 21, 2007

er, "fiercecupcake", not "firecupcake," sorry...
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 10:10 AM on August 21, 2007

Here's a two-part article from 2006 about water-resistant inkjet media which I thought was fairly interesting (the site it's on seems to be geared toward those in the CD/DVD reproduction industry). Water-resistant inkjet media is apparently more expensive than regular printable CDs, but also quick-drying and not prone to smears. The second part of the article goes on to describe the differences between this and thermal printing technology.

I'm planning on moving to… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 12:55 AM on August 16, 2007

No, wrong. You most definitely should be alarmed of login pages that do not use https.

This is certainly a good rule of thumb, but it's possible to have a page served up over http that then contains a form which posts to an https page (if you view the source of Google's login page you can see this in action). In such a case your login / password info is sent encrypted over the wire.

Of course, nobody wants to view the source… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:49 AM on August 2, 2007

Just to sound a note of caution, back in the late 90s I recall seeing a web page, I think on Microsoft's site, that popped up Clippy the paperclip on top of your browser. (You had to be running IE and have and Office installed, and be willing to run some heinous ActiveX control, IIRC.) I can't find it now, but in any event, be careful what you wish for.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 5:52 PM on July 31, 2007

twill is an excellent web-automation package for python (which uses the aforementioned BeautifulSoup to parse its HTML). It's geared towards web testing, and comes with its own mini-scripting language for that purpose, but it's very easy to access from a Python script as well if you need to. It could probably help you with a lot of the more tedious navigational aspects of spidering, and it can fill out forms for you as well.

As a note, if you are a polite netizen you… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 5:42 PM on July 31, 2007

The "pick whomever gets closest to a random number" idea isn't really random, because the person who chooses first gets a big disadvantage (eg, you choose 50, I choose 51, and roommate 3 chooses 49). I agree that adjusting the price of all three rooms is likely to promote longer-term harmony.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:39 PM on June 22, 2007

For a more complex project, and if you are learning the language with an eye towards practical applications, I might suggest an RSS aggregator. I've also had some fun writing interpreters for some of the Python HTML templating languages, which has a nicely functional aspect (in that you have an input, some context, and an output, and you don't necessarily have to deal with HTTP and so forth per se).

But to echo chairface, it will probably depend a great deal on what the… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 11:22 AM on June 16, 2007

I'd also note that "/index.html" is not necessarily going to exist on all (or even most) sites these days, which could account for some of your 404s. You want to be sending "/" as the URI.

There's also the problem of virtual hosting, where hundreds of distinct sites might share a common IP address. You'll want to send a Host: www.whomever.com header along with your request. See here for more info.

(On preview: what they said.)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:13 PM on June 12, 2007

Hi all... sorry for the late response on this. Thanks for the suggestions. I did wind up buying Moock's Essential ActionScript 2.0 and it has so far covered most of the lingering areas I felt like I needed to know more about (although the first half of the book didn't cover all that much that I wasn't aware of, at a skim). The stuff on how to package code into a library / component / swf was especially helpful for me.

grumblebee, I agree… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 9:40 PM on April 15, 2007

*smacks head*

Thanks, that was easy.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:57 PM on October 14, 2006

Ok, I thought this was too easy. As it turns out, I still have a problem with some spam messages displaying inline images even when I have the "display messages inline" option turned off. Looking at the source, these images appear as

<img src="cid:000b01c6f2cd$4bdf7130$9a936dd9@FREDERIQUE" ...>

Can anyone shed some light on this? That isn't an encoded IP which causes TB to fetch the image from a remote host, is it?… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 11:01 AM on October 18, 2006

Examining the email a little more closely, the cid: identifier is then included in a Content-ID: header farther down in the email, followed by a base64-encoded dealie which is presumably the image in question. I suspect there is some kind of Thunderbird bug which makes it ignore the "display inline attachments" option in some cases, and my particular spammers have figured out how to trigger it. I'll try grabbing that Buttons extension and playing around with it, though, maybe it sets… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 5:51 PM on October 18, 2006

I think sonnets 43 or 73 might work in this context.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:56 PM on October 14, 2006

When I was first getting interested in studying poetry more seriously, I found David Perkins's book A History of Modern Poetry, Volume II to be enormously helpful in getting an idea of what the various movements and important figures in postwar poetry were (with the caveat that the book was written in 1987 and mostly covers what the canon was considered to be at that time). He's a very clear, non-showoffy writer, and he also talks about the major critics in various periods, so you can then go… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:31 PM on October 14, 2006

PS: Powerful Religious Baby, that's a compellingly zany site.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 8:41 PM on October 14, 2006

A friend of mine worked for a PI for a while, but has recently decided to get out of the business. Most of the time he was doing the kind of work AmbroseChapel described above; essentially he was videotaping people for insurance companies.

I think his sympathy eventually got the better of him, because during the course of following people around and observing them doing things that contradicted their worker's compensation claims, he would also realize that a lot of… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:35 PM on October 14, 2006

It's been a few years since I owned it, but I also had an IRiver model (a few models earlier than the SlimX) and thought it was pretty much the ideal device. It was my faithful companion and car audio device until I left it in the car one evening and had it stolen. These days I mostly use a junky Flash-based mp3 player (a SanDisk Sansa e140, which is cheap, portable, decent for music and the radio, and which I'm developing an ever-growing hatred for).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:22 PM on October 14, 2006

This is kind of late, but the incredibly good (except for the bizarre UI) MP3 tagger The GodFather used to have an interface where if you pulled up an AMG album page in an embedded IE browser, there was a scaper included which parsed out the artist/album/track/album art/etc info for you, along with some fairly AMG-specific information such as who was playing what on various tracks, composers, and so on.

AMG apparently noticed and asked TGF's author to disable this… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 4:00 AM on September 21, 2006

Hi all... Thanks for the advice. As some quick responses: the car doesn't have a roof-rack, and with my friend not willing to shell out for a truck rental, the chances of her getting one just for this purpose is pretty low. About the truck rental, part of the reason she's reluctant is that she's already moved basically everything except the mattress in her car; the mattress is about the only thing left. At any rate, we will likely attempt this little adventure tonight or tomorrow - I am… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:23 PM on August 2, 2006

Team We Are Going to Hate Working With IBM in Every Way, If Other Teams' Past Experience Is a Reliable Guide

Project Legacy System of Three Years Hence

/bitter
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 3:15 AM on June 29, 2006

I second the recommendation for Box Office Poison, which is about very ordinary people (and less annoying ones than the slack navel-gazers of Tomine, I think, though I like him). Alex Robinson has a newer book out as well (Tricked), which is worth a look if you like the first one..
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 11:51 PM on April 20, 2006

I second the Servotron suggestion. You can't go wrong with music actually written by malevolent robots. "Today is your birthday / We are going to kill you / Stupid celebration - there is no logic in it." If you look closely at the album cover freebird linked, you can see robots pitchforking more weak human bodies onto a bonfire.

I'm also surprised nobody has chimed in with the other great robot band, Captured! By Robots. Among J-Bot's many charms is that he… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 6:55 PM on February 20, 2006

Booting in safe mode (keep hitting F8 while it's starting up, before you get to the Win XP loading screen) and then trying to delete it would be the next step I would try, and might be simpler than te above (though they're all good ideas).
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 1:40 AM on December 23, 2005

It's probably not exactly what you're looking for, but back in the Usenet days, play by email games had a certain amount of popularity. The slow pace of play was probably as much due to technical limitations as anything else, but for some of them you'd mail in a big list of orders once a week.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 7:32 PM on November 30, 2005

Most of the ones I was thinking of have been mentioned, but here are a few good ones from a few years back. Shannon Wright's earlier band Crowsdell is pretty good in a 90's rock kind of way. There was a local SF band called the Trashwomen that played dirty garage / surf rock which I recommend to all you Yeah Yeah Yeahs fans, if you can manage to track down a Trashwomen album you can then throw out your Yeah Yeah Yeahs albums and your roommates will thank you. A lot of people seem to really… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 6:59 PM on November 30, 2005

Oddly enough, I am an alumni of JWS and have absolutely no recollection of these guidelines.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:42 AM on November 22, 2005

This is a book that always seems to be inexplicably overlooked while (in my mind) lightweight fluff artists grab the spotlight (I'm looking at you, Kolchaka!).

Box Office Poison has fairly cartoony-looking art, and the story takes a little while to get into, but it does end up being about fairly mature, well-thought-out characters in realistic relationships. (Disclaimer: it's been a year or so since I read it, but I was impressed.)

Hicksville… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:33 AM on November 22, 2005

Just as a note, your ISP's Terms of Service probably explicitly say that you can't do something like this (eg, open connections with the intent of sharing your bandwidth). Enough people are clueless about wireless security that you'll likely have plausible deniability for at least several years, however.

You may want to look into NoCatSplash, though you'll need a pretty good amount of technical savvy to set it up on your router. Basically, it will present users with a… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 2:07 AM on November 22, 2005

I've heard emac's support for LaTeX is good, so it would probably be worth learning for your purposes. I think I'm one of the few people who is agnostic on the whole vi/emacs thing, they've both got good things about them. (But I'm a vi guy at heart.)

I think the argument about vi being installed everywhere is a little anachronistic. In 1998, yeah. These days, I imagine that nano, pico, and their ilk are much more common as default editors. That's certainly true on… [more]
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whir at 9:22 PM on October 3, 2005