a crank’s progress

I am updating the Darwin installation on my circa 1995 Mac PowerPC 9500, for no other reason than to see how complicated the process is. XPostFacto exists to make this possible, so perhaps documenting My Struggle with this will be of use to someone else.
The hardware isn’t supported in Darwin releases since the last [...]

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
The guy who donated bandwidth to ipodsdirtysecret.com (about two brothers who spraypainted complaints about lousy batteries on iPod posters) is pissed a plenty:
Gee, you don’t suppose they’re doing this for a little free publicity?

Wired News: Gizmo Puts Cards on the Table
Researchers in Dublin, Ireland, have developed a way to help people who are far away from their loved ones feel a little closer, using a pair of kitchen tables equipped with radio tag readers, projectors and computers running on Linux and Macintosh operating systems.
The kitchen table is the [...]

Localfeeds is now working for me. I got a note from the proprietor explaining where the problem was.
I fixed the problem you were having with Localfeeds– it was partially my fault and partially yours.
Even though I don’t advertise the fact, Localfeeds reads geo.position as well as GeoURL-style ICBM. Since your geo.position comes after the [...]

DarwinPorts Home
If you’ve ever been on a mailing list for CVS commits, you’ll appreciate this.
There are currently a few hundred completed and usable ports, with more being added on a regular basis. You can track recently added ports by subscribing to the cvs-darwinports-all mailing list, or by using our RSS feed of recent commits.
I’m [...]

www.spiv.com postcard rack
Send a postcard to a friend
I had no idea this stuff was in the Wayback Machine’s repository . . . .
I’m glad to see this: it was a fun time, back in 1996 (!?) when these kids (I use that word advisedly: they were all younger than me and tons smarter) [...]

If adserving companies didn’t run such slow webserving plants that they didn’t block pages from loading, I wouldn’t mind so much. But I do, and I can make this problem go away.
nidump hosts / > hosts
vi hosts
edit the file to have adservers synonymous with the loopback interface:
127.0.0.1 [...]

James Gosling: on the Java road…
Also in 1990 an arcade-style 2D game called OIDS was released on the Apple Macintosh. I developed a real addiction to it and spent many hours going back and forth between writing the java (then oak) compiler/VM and playing oids. There’s something deeply fascinating about gameplaying that unlocks mental logjams. [...]

iPod’s Dirty Secret - Neistat Brothers
I get a lot of search engine queries for “ipods dirty little secret.” I guess this is what they’re looking for, not Steve Jobs smacking his lips over how many iPods the iTunes Music Store for Windows is selling.

My name is Misty and I think I maybe got married last night. Could someone call me back and tell me if I could get an annulment? I’m at Circus Circus? | Metafilter
What’s really undermining the sanctity of marriage? Dahlia Lithwick has an interesting piece in Slate commenting on the real threats to marriage in [...]