You can switch users in bash by typing “su username” and entering that user’s password. It sounds so familiar that I bet I knew it once and then forgot it. [Image from UGO Movie Blog and maybe one person will understand why I chose this image.]
2009/07/14
2009/07/13
Brent Humphreys and His “Project Le Tour”
Project Le Tour is a really awesome project by photographer Brent Humphreys. I’ve seen some of these images before but they’re even better the second time. And you can’t look at that site without reading this interview with Brent. If you’re in Austin, you can see these in person at Mellow Johnny’s until July 31st. [The photo is "Labrador with Hat", number 34 on the Project site. Picked this up on A Photo Editor on RB's Google Shared Items.]
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What to Do About Chimpanzees
Here’s an older article from the NYT written by Charles Siebert about the state of research performed on chimpanzees in the US today, and what happens to them after they are no longer needed for that research. It raises some interesting questions and is worth a read. [Photo from the article; via wndrflu]
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2009/07/10
Keep It Simple! (Coffee, that is)
So. I usually brew coffee in a Chemex, of Pittsfield, MA, that I picked up right down the street here in Hyde Park at the Freehling Pot & Pan Company. I think they’re quite beautiful. JPDM’s dad brews coffee in one, has for years, and now so does CJR. (You can buy them here.)
I found this great filtercone coffee brewer on Sweet Maria’s this morning. I’ve been buying things from Sweet Maria’s of Emeryville, California for years now. When it comes to coffee, they really know their stuff. They have all kinds of information on roasting, brewing, and drinking coffee (I myself only have experience with the latter two). Their site is a real goldmine. I have a filtercone coffee brewer too, they’re cheap and simple, and don’t generate much waste if you use a reusable filter. (The benefit of the one pictured above over mine is that you can hold the hot water in the filter with the grounds for the recommended 3-4 minutes, rather than just pouring it through. Better coffee that way.)
I picked up my coffee grinder from Sweet Maria’s a few years ago, the Solis Maestro Plus burr grinder. Solis is now selling them as Baratza’s, but they look just about the same. This is a tremendous grinder, I’ve never had a problem with it: perfect grinds for drip and french press, and the grinder itself feels very well constructed. Sweet Maria’s has them. [Solis photo from UltimateCoffee.net]
If I was in the market for a new grinder though, there’s no doubt in my mind it would look a lot like this. It’s a Zassenhaus hand-cranked burr grinder. No electricity required. J’s got one like this one, it’s great. (Again! Sweet Maria’s sells ‘em.)
The world of making coffee is huge, even before you get to espresso and home-roasting and the rest of it. I like simple drip coffee, but there’s something to be said for electric drip coffee. The best coffee I’ve ever had was made in Clover vacuum machines, there’s one such machine at Z&H in Kenwood (just north of Hyde Park on 47th Street) and a bunch at Intelligentsia (which used to be a Chicago thing but I now here is the place to go in Los Angeles). There are some vacuum coffee makers for your house, I’ve never tried them but they look great. And then, the new darling of coffee devices, the Aeropress. I’ve never used one of these either, but they’re supposed to be the most anything can turn coffee making on it’s head for about $20. Good coffee makes you happy. It’s not expensive to make, and it’s fun. Go buy some coffee and get to it!
On Backpacks
Just like my dad, I have a sturdy collection of outdoor gear. I have a few things left that I could pick up (like a SVEA stove and a way fancy 4-season tent, but probably more like a way regular 3.5-season tent), but really, I’ve got it all. There isn’t much point to go to the outfitter any more except to get rope or more little Nalgenes, or find a new place to walk around in the woods.
Some things I have a lot of, like backpacks. I spent my childhood using Dana Design packs. My dad swears by them and he has a small collection at home in Vermont now. I came of age in the lightweight / disposable gear era (where you buy new backpacks every few months because the old ones have separated into their constituent parts, not to point any fingers). I have gone through four backpacks that became either unrepairable or so complicated to repair that I just couldn’t figure it out. The first big pack that I myself owned was an Osprey, shortly after their manufacturing moved to (I believe) Vietnam. The internal frame on that broke after 4 months, I tried to fix it with duct tape but it’s a pernicious problem and that pack doesn’t get much use any more. The Osprey had a single point of failure, these packs seemed to be points of failure themselves. One thing that never ripped was the shoulder straps; everything else was fair game. This type of backpack is pretty cheap, and I guess many people regularly replace this style of pack. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, we’re supposed to be behaving ourselves so that everyone can enjoy the outdoors way into the future, not enjoying it now ourselves fast-and-light and generating a lot of waste throwing something out that is produced quite far away.
So, Dana Designs, pre-K2. Their Bomb Pack is really good looking, durable and heavy. The material holds together so even if you do rip it, someone as unskilled with thread and needle as I am can fix it pretty easily. Dana Designs, of course, is gone now, but Dana Gleason is still making packs under the Mystery Ranch marque, a lot of them made almost completely or completely in the United States, and all nice, like this one.
I opted for packs that remind me a lot of the old Bomb Packs. I wound up with two that will last me the rest of my life, made by hand for me by Randy Rackliff in Jackson, New Hampshire with the Cold Cold World label. We talked it over last summer for a while and I got a big box in the mail one day containing a Chernobyl and an Ozone. The Ozone is my every day pack, I load it up for work, take it to the Dunes, use it as a carry-on and as an overnight pack. It’s made of thick black Cordura, 1000D all around. The only things wrong with it are my fault for not specifying (the top needs to be removable). The Chernobyl is the only backpack I use for hiking any more. It’s amazing. It fits well, is very durable, and is blaze orange. The whole pack. I am never mistaken for a deer any more. For longer trips, it won’t be appropriate, it’s just not big enough, but for anything up to 4 nights, you couldn’t ask for anything more. Both packs are the exact opposite of disposable. I would highly recommend them (other people feel similarly about packs Randy has made them).
And as for the picture above, weird stuff pops up on eBay all the time. That picture is of one of the rarest backpacks I’ve ever seen up for sale, one of Warren Chouinard’s Basically Absurd Technologies rucksacks. Easily 35 years old and it looks to be in great condition. Naturally it’s got a Buy-It-Now price of $350, but for good reason. Someone out there will get a piece of history, the rest of us can just get a look. Be sure to check out the BAT single point hammock the seller has a photo of, as well. Amazing!
2009/07/06
The Stella Ring
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Photoshop CS3 Crashes on Start-up After SilverFast Update
I updated SilverFast (EpsonIT8) to 6.6.1r1 at work this morning. Adobe Photoshop CS3 would not start after the update, quitting when it got to “Scanning for plug-ins.”
A quick review of the Photoshop plug-ins folder revealed the culprit: the SilverFast update had placed a file in the Import/Export folder called “SilverFast (EpsonIT8_CS3).plugin alias” alongside the alias that had been there before, “SilverFast (EpsonIT8).plugin”. Removing this new alias solved the problem. SilverFast works just as it used to from the “Import” submenu in Photoshop.
(This is using Mac OS X 10.5.7, Photoshop CS3 10.0.1 and SilverFast Ai 6.6.0 or something similar updated to 6.6.1r1, on a late model Mac Pro. Not sure if many SilverFast updates do this, or just this one, but I have updated SilverFast before without having this problem.)
2009/07/01
Switching to Fedora
My dad gave me a simple goal: get sound to work on my parents’ Windows XP computer. After 3 hours of foolishness (and an unusable XP installation), in went the Fedora 11 Live CD.
About 30 minutes later, the whole family is on Linux. So far so good. Full hardware support for everything right out of the box (including stuff that never worked on Windows, like sound and the back/forward buttons on the side of the Microsoft mouse). There’s now DSL out here in the sticks so a full update was feasible. It took a while with high speeds of 80kb/s, but that’s better than their 15 years of dial-up getting 2kb/s. Some quick fiddling: remove Evolution, Cheese, GIMP, and other things, install media support (Flash and MP3 support and things), and put Eyes in the top Gnome panel. I am very happy with how usable Fedora is on this old machine, it’s faster than XP was too. And, it’s easier for me to maintain remotely.
I had some issues installing RealPlayer 11, which they need for old Prairie Home Companion episodes. This post helped me out.
2009/06/19
Prisons
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