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What a neat idea! “Stain is a set of a teacups designed to improve through use….The interior surface of the cup is treated so as to stain more in predetermined places. The more the cups are used, the more the pattern is revealed. Over time they will build up an individual pattern dependent on the users personal way of drinking tea.”
Hey, probably not a good idea do this on your Mac OS X machine:
sudo mv Security.framework Security-1046.framework
Good lord, every process uses PAM, which links to Security, so basically you won’t be able to launch or use any programs, even command line. In particular you can’t use “sudo mv” to fix what you broke because sudo, of course, uses Security.framework for authentication. It’s pretty hilarious, kind of like messing with ld.so or libc.so on a Linux system.
To fix it, reboot, hold down command-S to boot into single user mode, follow the directions to make the filesystem read/write, and then use “mv” to fix it.
I’ve been dorking around more with /System days, just like I did with Linux lo those many years ago (well, it was /lib on Linux). I need to start watching TV or something.
I’m not sure why I don’t read the Wooster Collective blog every day. Every post is a work of art! Some of my recent favs: huge pieces, small pieces, post-it note jesus, paper sculpture, and this beautiful story:
Yesterday, Nico woke up in his flat in Split Croatia. On his closet door was a map created by his girlfriend, Andrea. The map showed different places for Nico to look as his took his usual route from his apartment to the academy where he studies.
What Nico found was an elaborate love poem done on the streets of Split by Andrea. She had put up stencils, paint, aerosol, collage wheat pastes etc. with last piece reading…. “i love you”.
Link to pictures of Andrea’s project.
Link to Fly me to the Moon on the wiki.
hee, i LOVE the one way sign :-)
According to SFGate, the weather forcast for tomorrow is MATH. Flurries of multiplication followed by torrential calculus!
But wait, it gets worse! On Monday the clouds will start thinking for themselves!! This is bad… you can’t hide from clouds! You have to go outside eventually.. Be very careful.. DO NOT ANGER THE SENTIENT CLOUDS!
I recently read Banker to the Poor after it showed up in our sidebar. I found it so facinating that I stayed up late and finished it in one sitting.. It’s the autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, a professor of Economics who, in 1976, started making small loans to provide capital to the poor in Bangladesh. He started the Grameen Bank, which has now loaned more than US $5 billion to those who can’t get traditional bank loans. The Grameen Bank provides no-capital loans to the poorest of the poor. They have an almost perfect repayment rate, and 97% of their borrowers are women. The bank is structured so that 90% of the bank is owned by its borrowers. Grameen Bank aims for poverty elimination by making credit a human right. Prof Yunus’ dedication to fighing poverty is inspiring. He won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
In addition to the Grameen Bank, there are now many Grameen enterprises, including Grameen Energy and Grameen Telecom, which are also focused on helping the poor of rural Bangladesh. In 1997, the Grameen Foundation was formed to help support Microfinance institutions around the world. Today, peliom pointed me to Mifos, an open source account management system developed by the Foundation. They have a SourceForge project, and they are also hiring a program manager and an intern. If you are Java type interested in finance, you should check them out!
I became interested in microfinance after reading May’s post about Kiva. Kiva is looking for volunteers to help with web development. It would be great if Kiva provided traditional bank accounts similar to ING Direct or other online-only banks, where the account funds were used for funding microfinance loans. I’m sure a lot of people would use such a bank, even if the account earned no interest.
the ceo of kiva is going to be giving a talk in the city this tuesday!
Yunus gave this speech at the Nobel Peace Prize awards ceremony today. Lot’s of interesting ideas, and very inspiring!
“Even profit maximizing companies can be designed as social businesses by giving full or majority ownership to the poor.”
“I firmly believe that we can create a poverty-free world if we collectively believe in it. In a poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums. “
but apparently they’re ear phones. One of the guys in the office just got these and they’re made from custom molds of his ears by a company called Ultimate Ears. He swears by them and says they’re awesome. Awesomeness, however, does not cheap – at $850 a pair, they’re not something you can easily replace at Best Buy should your puppy accidentally decide they might be tasty.
since they’re molded to his ears, I can’t try them out, so I can’t attest to their awesomeness…but i think they look kind of neat.
Link to “Geekiest Wedding Present Evar” (via nephology)
Victoly!!!!
As someone who is frequently accused of having her head in the clouds, it makes me happy just to know that something like “The Cloud Appreciation Society” even exists. Could they have existed before the internet?? I dunno, but I certainly wouldn’t have found them. Anyways, they’ve got what looks to be a fabulous book out called The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds
Everybody loves stars, but clouds always get a bad rap, so here’s their manifesto
Here’s to cloudy days!!
You know how I’m always talking about how HTML Canvas is going to enable all kinds of new and interesting web apps? Well, someone implemented MSPaint in Javascript using Canvas! You KNOW someone out there is working on a Canvas version MacPaint… or how about a Canvas version of System 7???
i was playing with this yesterday too! it works on both my tabletPC and the mac. hooray for javascript :-)
No…this isn’t an item from the SkyMaul catalog…it’s actually something you can buy right now, today. And I think it’s brilliant!
HOLY TOAST BREAD STAMP
In the beginning…there was bread…. Make that boring bread an inspiration by embossing it before you toast! Our easy-to-use HOLY TOAST stamper always makes a good impression.
Press the stamper into an ordinary slice of bread, toast it, and behold a miracle!
This is one of those totally basic operations that is right in your face with Firefox (“download file, or open with application ‘blah’ “), but with Safari it’s a battle with MIME types, “Universal” Type Identifiers, and file extensions. For the quick fix, copy com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist into ~/Library/Preferences in your home directory and add to the list of file extensions that you want automatically opened after download (aka “Safe Files”).
I thought it would be straightforward to write a CGI script that emits CSV and have that automatically be opened in Excel. Good lord, what a pain. First of all, Safari has no easy way to associate a MIME type with an application. But can associate an application with a given file extension by doing a “Get Info” on the file in Finder … look for “Open with:”.
So I had to find and download a helpful app called RCDefaultApp. It installs as a System Preference and allows you to change all the crazy Launch Services business (associations MIME types, UTIs, file extensions, etc).
The official MIME types for CSV are text/csv and text/comma-separated-values. Unfortunately Safar breaks this. As far as I can tell, Safari just automatically displays “text/*” inline in the browser. So I used RCDefaultApp to defined “application/csv” (yeah, I guess I should have made that “application/x-csv”), and associated that with Excel.
Here is the perl code I used to test this whole mess:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w $result = "foo,bar,baz\n"; print "Content-type: application/csv\n\n$result";
And here is the plist file just to give an idea of what it looks like:
LSRiskCategorySafe LSRiskCategoryExtensions csv
Figuring out how to tell Safari that CSV was a “Safe File” was harder to track down. It’s totally undocumented, but a couple of hardy Mac OS X nerds have uncovered the fact that com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist holds the key to the magic. It allows you to override the download assessments that are hard coded into Launch Services. A post over at MacEnterprise.org provides some great documentation on exactly how to set this up.
The asute reader will notice that my com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist file has a definition for the “csv” file extension rather than a MIME type. That’s because to get things to work at all, I had to actually make my CGI script have a filename that ends in “.csv”, which is totally crazy. Otherwise Safari downloads the file alright, but it saves it with a file extension of “.pl” or “.cgi”, and then cleverly reminds us that we might be downloading a PERL executable. In fact it is simply CSV text with a “.pl” extension. So it looks like the key steps here were:
Gosh, Mac’s are so easy to use, I can just hardly believe it :-) Sorry folks, I think this is a case where the “PC guy” wins, hands down.
Link to Modifying Safari Safe Files List
Link to RCDefaultApp for editing MIME type associations
wow, just found this little gem on the web a coupla weeks ago.
nice formatted, colored XML in hierarchy.
and you can opt to see the XML “raw” or different options and even customize it.
If you like old video games, you might get a kick out of this description of Metroid level design. I spent hundreds of hours playing Metroid in the eighties, and now I spend countless hours reading about it. But since it’s time that I should probably be working, I like to think that it’s time well spent! (via)
Rick Prelinger is showing rare early video footage of San Francisco on Wednesday!
Film is much more than entertainment—it’s rich and often vivid evidence that backs up imperfect memories and infuses institutional histories with traces of everyday life. Drawing from the Bert Gould collection of silent and early sound films, the Vista collection of exuberant early-1960s city views, diverse home movies and industrial films, this program will include rarely-seen views of San Francisco, contextualizing them in time and space. We hope for audience participation, especially to help identify mystery scenes!
The exhibit is showing at CounterPULSE on Wednesday at 8pm. Let’s go!
Update: here is the upcoming listing.
cool! unfortunately wednesday night is butter night (bike loop around the city…yep even in the dark). but if you guys end up going, I’ll try to meet up with you afterwards :-)
Lauren are discussing. 
Lauren 1:26 pm on December 11, 2006 Permalink |
Cool teacups. But I’m really writing because I couldn’t help but notice the “Great Books”, Philosophy and Latin titles in your Amazon Feed (Stuff We Love).
All this jumped out at me because I’m currently taking Latin at Berkeley Extension and am reading my way through the Great Books following the St. John’s College list (I’ve made it to Aristotle).
I gathered from other stuff on this blog that you’re in SF. I live in Bernal and one of my classmates lives in the Mission/Noe. (She’s also taking Philosophy at Cal.)
If you are interested in connecting with a couple of laid back, like-minded people, send me an email. (I couldn’t find an email address on this blog, so I figured I’d just post a comment here in hopes that you’ll be able to access my email address from the comment form.)
It’s just so rare to run across someone who’s interested in this stuff, especially here in SF . . .
Vale!
Lauren
rajbot 2:54 pm on December 11, 2006 Permalink |
When (if?) we get our first check from the Amazon referral fees we should buy drinks for all the TR readers at Wild Side West!
may 9:28 pm on December 11, 2006 Permalink |
I just sent an email to Lauren, but to all the other TR readers who might happen upon this…the links in our sidebar are actually chosen by Amazon based on things it thinks *you’ll* like and not necessarily stuff we like (though chances are high that we’d like it too :-) There’s more info on Amazon’s Omakase thingy over here. Anyways, hope that clears up the confusion! :-) (also kudos to Lauren for making it through all the classics! I wish i were determined enough to do that!)