technical

hacks / technical — 15 Comments
6
Oct 09

Nice life hack with Mediacom

Most of my close friends can tell you that I do not like Mediacom.  In fact, I hate most telcos in general.  But Mediacom holds a special place on my shit list.  They are particularly evil.

  • They have this thing where for the first year you get fair priced service.  $90ish for digital cable + broadband.  The only problem is that after a year, it jumps up to like $120.
  • A few years ago, they put in the DNS resolution stuff that sends you to their paid search results when you look up an invalid domain.  When they did this, they introduced frequent artificial outages that lasted for at least 3 weeks.  It didn’t take but an hour or 2 for me to figure this out, and I pointed my DNS resolution to Open DNS.  After that, I no longer had issues.  But everyone else that I knew with Mediacom continued to suffer.
  • Their customer support is just this side of worthless.  At one point, years ago I paid a few extra dollars for a static IP address.  The install kit did not contain my IP, subnet, gateway, etc.  I called customer support to get this required data.  The 1st and 2nd tier support did not know what a static IP was.  In fact, the 1st tier insisted that I did not want this anyhow.  Finally after about 30 min, I was sent to someone that knew the first thing about networking and I had my data.  Several times when I used their services, the customer support insisted that they dot not support Linux or non-M$ systems.
  • Their interface for their Digital Cable is non-intuitive.  If you press the up button while watching a channel, it goes up one (channel 13 –> 14 for example).  But, when you are navigating the guide pressing the up button results in going down a channel (channel 14–> 13).  I’m a little anal about GUIs, so that my be insignificant to most of you.

But back to the hack…

I had a friend who just got a new apartment.  This person called Mediacom and they quoted her $90 for Digital Cable + Internet.  The friend agreed.  After a couple days, the person changed their mind and canceled right before the installer arrived.  My friend had discovered an open Wi-Fi network nearby.  The next day, this person got a phone call from Mediacom.  They called to offer her the same package, but this time for $50.  Rock on.  That’s pretty cheap.

By canceling, the friend was placed on a cancellation or save list.  This enabled the person for significant discounts.

Cheers,
Jonathan

time travel / video — No Comments
24
Aug 09

This movie will blow your mind.

The more times you watch Primer, the more blown your mind becomes..

Cheers,
Jonathan

mac / technical — 1 Comment
15
Jul 09

Linux-like keyboard mappings for the Mac

This tutorial will fix several non-standard key mappings on the Mac. The fixes are listed below.

  1. Home key behavior
  2. End key behavior
  3. Page Up behavior
  4. Page Down behavior
  5. Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, and Save Keyboard shortcuts

First you will need to create a file named ~/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

On my system the full path name to the file is /Users/jon/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

If you do not know how to create this file, run the following commands from the console. All commands are case-sensitive!

cd ~
cd Library
mkdir KeyBindings
cd KeyBindings
nano DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Once you have DefaultKeyBindings.dict open in nano, copy & paste the following in it.

{
    /* home */
    "\\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";
    "$\\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:";

    /* end */
    "\\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";
    "$\\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";

    /* page up/down */
    "\\UF72C"  = "pageUp:";
    "\\UF72D"  = "pageDown:";

    /* use the flippin control key */
    "^a"        = "selectAll:";          /* C-a          Select all */
    "^x"        = "cut:";                /* C-x          Cut */
    "^c"        = "copy:";               /* C-c          Copy */
    "^v"        = "paste:";              /* C-v          Paste */
    "^z"        = "undo:";               /* C-z          Undo */
    "^y"        = "redo:";               /* C-y          Redo */
    "^s"        = "save:";               /* C-s          Save */
}
Now, press Control+o to save, then Control+x to exit.

Log out and then log back in for your new settings to appear.

Cheers,
Jonathan

geek porn / technical — 1 Comment
8
Jun 09

ddate is fun

ddate is a unix utility. It is glorious. Just read the man page.

ddate prints the date in Discordian date format.

If called with no arguments, ddate will get the current system date, convert this to the Discordian date format and print this on the standard
output. Alternatively, a Gregorian date may be specified on the command line, in the form of a numerical day, month and year.

If a format string is specified, the Discordian date will be printed in a format specified by the string. This mechanism works similarly to the format
string mechanism of date(1), only almost completely differently. The fields are:

%A

Full name of the day of the week (i.e., Sweetmorn)

%a

Abbreviated name of the day of the week (i.e., SM)

%B

Full name of the season (i.e., Chaos)

%b

Abbreviated name of the season (i.e., Chs)

%d

Ordinal number of day in season (i.e., 23)

%e

Cardinal number of day in season (i.e., 23rd)

%H

Name of current Holyday, if any

%N

Magic code to prevent rest of format from being printed unless today is a Holyday.

%n

Newline

%t

Tab

%X

Number of days remaining until X-Day. (Not valid if the SubGenius options are not compiled in.)

%{

%}

Used to enclose the part of the string which is to be replaced with the words “St. Tib’s Day” if the current day is St. Tib’s Day.

%.

Try it and see.

Examples

% ddate
Sweetmorn, Bureaucracy 42, 3161 YOLD

% ddate +'Today is %{%A, the %e of %B%}, %Y. %N%nCelebrate %H'
Today is Sweetmorn, the 42nd of Bureaucracy, 3161.

% ddate +"It's %{%A, the %e of %B%}, %Y. %N%nCelebrate %H" 26 9 1995
It's Prickle-Prickle, the 50th of Bureaucracy, 3161.
Celebrate Bureflux

% ddate +"Today's %{%A, the %e of %B%}, %Y. %N%nCelebrate %H" 29 2 1996
Today's St. Tib's Day, 3162.

Bugs

ddate(1) will produce undefined behaviour if asked to produce the date for St. Tib’s day and its format string does not contain the St. Tib’s Day
delimiters %{ and %}.

Note

After ‘X-Day’ passed without incident, the Church of the SubGenius declared that it had got the year upside down – X-Day is actually in 8661 AD rather than
1998 AD. Thus, the True X-Day is Cfn 40, 9827.

Author

Original program by Druel the Chaotic aka Jeremy Johnson (mpython@gnu.ai.mit.edu)
Major rewrite by Lee H:. O:. Smith, KYTP, aka Andrew Bulhak (acb@dev.null.org)

Five tons of flax.

Distribution Policy

Public domain. All rites reversed.

See Also

date(1),
http://www.subgenius.com/
Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia, Or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her

geek porn / technical / video — No Comments
13
May 09

This video makes my soul smile

:)

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