So I was trying to untar a large archive — a time consuming process — and had the problem that the laptop was going to sleep while I was doing it. I don’t seem to be able to completely turn off the hibernation settings on this machine, so below is my solution as to a DIY mouse jiggler. Unfortunately I discovered that even with this the process crashed (both in GNU tar and WinRAR), presumably because those programs were never designed/tested with ultra-large archives in mind… Which to be honest is a little surprising! Anyway, I can’t imagine anyone else needs it (although it includes source code, so maybe that’s more useful), but for posterity I posted my own untar utility for Windows.
First, since I’m sure people are wondering, I did not adopt those dogs. As much as part of me would really love to, they’ve got a nice adoptive home waiting for them in Brampton and I think they are probably better off in a place where they have a yard than in my apartment (to say nothing of the issue of what happens if we move onto a boat). Very sad to think about, no matter what the conclusion, as it’s one of those all too common situations with no perfect solution.
In more pleasant news, and one with perfect solutions, Nefarious and I have moved up from checkers to full-on chess. It took her only about half a coached game to pick it up well enough to be challenging… Her fast-moving little five-year-old brain makes me feel old and clumsy-minded, that’s for sure. It is quite embarrassing how badly I play. If you’re wondering, they did zombie makeup at her school today — she’s looking forward to the next Toronto zombie march already!
I went out to the Sterling today. The body has been put back on the pan, and it’s getting rewired right now (I posted a couple pictures on my Facebook gallery of the build if you’re interested). Since it’s in pieces, there’s been an opportunity to see exactly what the previous owners did — some strange glassing together of body panels for example that may be prone to cracking, but we’ll see. All in all it looks good. Anyway, while I was there a bunny hopped through the driveway. That’s a sign of good luck I think.
A while back Nefarious’s mother got rid of Nefarious’s little Chihuahuas “Timmy and Butters”, and it turns out that they’re up to give away on the Canadian Chihuahua Rescue and Transport website… It made me really sad to see that, and I wish I was in a position to adopt them myself (and I’m very strongly considering doing it anyway!), but I mention it because by all accounts they’re charming dogs (and the most recent caretaker has finally gone to the effort of housebreaking them… mostly) and if someone that I know adopts them in the Toronto area, I’m sure Nefarious would be absolutely thrilled to see them again.
Anyway, click the picture to visit the CCRT website.
It’s sad how many “vanity” dogs are up for adoption… It’s terrible that we treat living, emotional creatures as throw-away objects that we dispose of as soon as they become too much trouble — and all too often repeatedly. Really heartbreaking.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
I ordered some on-demand self-published books from lulu recently, both for my Sterling project and because I wanted to check out the quality… The quality of the hardbound books is pretty nice on the whole, so I’m quite seriously considering putting out an expanded and full-colour hardback version of the old ModCon book with lots of new interviews. If there’s an interest in it I could certainly have something very nice out long in advance of Christmas. I suppose I’d just have to make sure that it doesn’t violate their TOS due to the content — I imagine it would be a judgment call on their part because it’s really dependent on how you define the content.
Time to reinstall some desktop publishing software perhaps…
Edit/Update 1: Found this review of Lulu’s quality with some better pictures.
Edit/Update 2: Work has started!
