Last weekend I moved mac.fiveforks.com off our home iMac (vintage 2004) in the living room to a G3 (vintage 1999.) I got the G3 several months ago for free and, it has been running in test mode without a hitch in my basement. Its name is Wart, Merlin’s nickname for the young King Arthur.

Last night I moved Wart downtown to a server closet, so while the older 400 mhz G3 is three times slower than our 1.25 ghz iMac, it has 4 times the speed access to the internet. This is kind of like the tradeoff someone working downtown makes when moving from a bigger house in the suburbs to a smaller house in the city to cut commute times.

This week I was handed a bigger house. A G4 (vintage 2002) which I will swap out with the G3 when I can find the time.

Eventually I’d like to go to an XServe.

Note to self:

The manual address with automatic DHCP mode did not work. George coached me through hand plugging these:

IP 4.21.254.11

Router 4.1.254.1

Netmask 255.255.255.0

DNS 4.21.254.3 4.21.254.4

Network (not needed) 4.21.254.0

Gandalf (who is from a different book) is sitting next to Wart on .10.

I’ve always wanted MovableType to have a better editor that worked for Windows or Mac machines. This one will soon work with Safari.

FCKeditor – The text editor for Internet

Securing Mac OS X – 1

Securing Mac OS X – 3

Securing Mac OS X – 4

Yoda’s event log kept filling up after disabling remote access. Here’s why and what to do…

Event IDs 1008 and 2001 Repeatedly Logged When You Use Performance Monitoring

You have to let the flash program load, so wait until you see colorful letters. Warning: Immature people will try to make bad words. (Same thing happened on flooj.com.)

It is funny to watch some of the dynamics in place. I immediately assumed the role of curse-word spoiler. When there are 30 to 40 people on, words rarely can get spelled, so you end up with other spontaneous, group interactions around shapes, colors, positions and patterns.

I did this for about a half hour at home last night. Someone started an alphabet string, and I got the string to be bend in the circle. The whole group jumped in and an overlapping, sequential circle of letters was quicky formed, using all letters. This was the only completed group task that occured.

You’ll find 5 different “fridge sites” at the link above. One only allows 15 users which is less chaotic. We built the alphabet heart pictured here. When it worked (two complete alphabets met to form the heart) someone spelled “YAY LOL.”

Owner, group, world is the sequence I have a hard time remembering.

A quick and dirty chmod Tutorial…… : evolt.org, Backend

Google is scanning a number of university libraries and indexing the text. These are actually scanned photos of book pages. Some of the books are starting to pop up. To test it out, type “book” in google and some words you are looking for. For example, to find Hamlet, I typed: book the slings and arrows.

QuickTopic.com lets you set up a discussion area on the web. Instead of a bunch of people replying to one another with ever growing e-mail threads, you could set up a QuickTopic and get everyone to comment. I could see using QuickTopic to support a group project in school, business, or church. We use comments this way on blogs, but you don’t always want to use your blog for group discussions.

Instructions on setting up an FTP only account (so that the mac5 bloggers can add/delete/change their pictures, templates, and non-blog web pages.
Mac OS X FTP Server Administration

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Years ago I repeatedly developed carpel tunnel swelling in my right hand. I switched the mouse to my left hand and that solved the problem. I think keyboarding plus mouse-clicking plus using my right hand for writing all built up too much strain. Switching to my left hand for mousing distributed the work, and I have not had a problem since.

At night, I use my laptop keyboard, so I have to become right-handed again. This means twice each day, changing my mouse settings from for the left and right buttons.

A little hotkey utility called SwapMouseButtons solves this problem. This would be good for anyone who switches mouse hands or for a house with right and left-handers who like to move the mouse from one side to another.

It even has an option to make your pointers mirror so they tilt left or right, reminding you which way the mouse is set.