The Suboptimal Way Archive

Update:  I upgraded one of my machines from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9, and it started using tiny fonts.  Tom Horsley on the Fedora list explained that now the X server is actually using the display resolution (dots per inch) from the monitor’s EDID data to choose default font sizes.  On NX sessions I was [...]

I was just watching some of the “Get a Mac” advertisements on the Apple web site yesterday. They’re quite entertaining.
Before I went to bed last night, I told iTunes to download a bunch of the iPhone development videos. After the first one had finished downloading, I watched it while others continued downloading.
I just [...]

Over the past week I purchased several iPhone applications through the App Store, including Super Monkey Ball, a Rotary Dialer, and a few others.  I also downloaded some free applications.
Today I connected the iPhone to the Mac Mini for the first time.  I had to update iTunes, but that was relatively painless, other than dealing [...]

I went to the Apple store at Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara CA yesterday afternoon to get an iPhone 3G. My mother paid for half of it as my graduation present.
Only after I got home did I discover that Apple overcharged me $16.50. The receipt shows the price of the phone as [...]

The birds nesting in the trees near my bedroom window wake me up earlier than I’d like in the morning, and at night they keep me awake, singing past 2 AM. I’ve taken to sleeping with earplugs, but then my alarm clock doesn’t wake me up. It occurred to me that there might be watches [...]

I just bought a cap and gown, so I guess I will go to commencement after all.
Herff Jones apparently must make them from some ridiculously cheap fabric, since they say not to wash or dry clean them.  I presume they must use better fabrics for the rental ones so that they can at least be [...]

Les brought to my attention that Google seems to think my blog hosts or links to malware, as shown here. I certainly don’t deliberately host any malware nor have any links to such, and a brief investigation doesn’t turn up any evidence that my site has been compromised, so I’m baffled as to what [...]

On the way to a friend’s house, I went to a drive-through and ordered a burger and a shake. I still had the several-day-old remainder of a beverage in the cupholder that I needed to dispose of, but there was a waste can just beyond the pickup window, so after I got my order [...]

I used LVM to increase the size of a logical volume containing an ext3 fileystem from 300GB to 500GB. After expanding the logical volume, it is necessary to expand the filesystem to use the added space. In theory, this can be done online (while the filesystem is mounted) by using the resize2fs command. [...]

I just got a refurbished Apple Mac mini, with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is mainly intended for use compiling my open source programs such as Nonpareil for Mac OS X. I am extremely surprised at the user experience of booting Mac OS X Leopard for the first time, [...]