chuma.org

Author: chuma

  • Cats In Sinks

    Cats In Sinks

    What more do you need?

  • Sleater-Kinney is coming back to Toronto

    Too bad they are opening for Pearl Jam, and tickets are $60. But they are also playing the Ear to the Ground Festival the day before…

  • mmm, themes

    So after a lot of digging around the net I found a nice, fluid design called Giraffe. Not only is the code purty nice to play with, but it comes with a plugin to manage some basic settings. Sweet! Now I just need to find a good randomizing plugin or write my own. You may have noticed that there’s a random line from a song that appears in the header, but it’s only from one song (and a hack of the “Hello Dolly” default WordPress plugin). I’d like to have tbe ability to add entire songs and have random lines appear, with full artist/title and linking capabilities. Yeah, in my spare time 😛

  • gotta hack this page design

    So now I’ve got WordPress installed and it’s nice and all that, but the default theme is driving me bananas. Why? It has a static width.

    I hate static width webpages. It’s not that hard to use a design that scales gracefully from 800×600 all the way up to 2048×1536. So the first thing I’ll be doing is hacking a nice liquid layout into this theme. Then we’ll be getting somewhere, and I can go on to recreating all the old pages from Movable Type.

  • shazam!

    We be back… running WordPress.

  • busted device blues done got me down

    There’s really no point in carrying my Newton around anymore. I haven’t opened it in weeks. I need to figure out where my sites are going to move to though, since I’m going to have to bring my server home by the end of September and I don’t just want those resources to go away.

    My GBA Flash card hasn’t worked right in a long time… the save function on it is still really wonky, I’m sure it’s not the battery now, what it seems to be is that most of the time writing to the save area just doesn’t work. This could be due to a damaged pin, short, or bad solder joint somewhere on the card but I can’t fix problems like that, nor do I have the tools. It just sucks that I can only play the first level in most games, because I can’t save my frickin’ progress!! Urgh. For brief shining moments it does work, so it’s not completely broken, it just pisses me off!

    When the Pepper Pad comes though, I will be porting many emulators over to it and then my GBA will be moot, because I’ll be playing GBA, NES, SNES, whatever games I want, and be able to keep them all on the internal hard drive. Unless I leave it at home for Sandy to use, of course. I can share!

  • About hardware, and avoiding “lock-in”

    I’ve been asked and also been asking myself the same question, over and over again, over the recent weeks and months:

    Nintendo DS or Sony PSP?

    I’ve finally come to a decision, and it is: neither. This is the reason:

    I don’t like hardware of software that makes decisions for me. I don’t want to be locked in to stupid, expensive formats (Sony UMD or MEMORY STICK PRO DUO ULTRA HYPER MAGIC MARK II), crippled capabilities (802.11b/g wireless that doesn’t talk to any other devices, hellooooo?), or only be able to run code that Sony or Nintendo wants me to run on their devices. I like being in control of where I get my media or software, and how I play it. I don’t want to buy stupid UMDs or have to resort to stupid hacks like the PSP memory stick swap hack that came out today.

    I’ve drooled over the Pepper Pad before, and it’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a hardware platform (with the exception of ubiquitous handwriting recognition). My only question was: how hackable would it be? Now I see that there is already a Pepper hacking site, and it makes me warm inside 🙂 Warm knowing that yes, this device will “just work” out of the box, but people can also extend it without having to resort to ridiculous hacks like the NDS and PSP hackers are currently doing.

    So we’ve started saving for one of these – it really fits the bill.

  • How come every other continent gets the cool appliances first?

    Yeah yeah, so some guy in California invented the Segway, I still haven’t seen one on the street yet. Big deal, what I want is a Dressman shirt iron by Siemens. It’s an auto-iron for shirts: you put a shirt on it, press a button, and it inflates to fill the shirt, and then irons the thing automatically. I think I would – no wait, I would kill for one!

  • Entering The Woods

    Finally got my copy of Sleater-Kinney’s new album, The Woods today. Whee!

  • Government finally realises that young drivers are being discrimiated against

    CBC News: Nfld. bans insurance rates based on age, gender – Duh! If you’re under 25 and you own a car, you know why your insurance rates are so high: because insurance companies think you are “high-risk” because of your age. Doubly so if you are under 25 and male. Well Newfoundland finally got a clue and realized that insurance companies shouldn’t be doing this!