Confessions of a cat

If you do any web development or page layout / editing then sooner or later you realize that this old latin text is being used all around. 

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

Although some web-development IDEs have a built in snippet editor that contains this handy text (e.g. Coda form Panic) and there are various websites (lipsum.com) devoted to generating tons of paragraphs of this text and its variations I found the following 2 short applications to be of most use to me on the Mac. › Continue reading

If you want to do that, you will soon find an app called ‘MacSFV’ but its PPC only and the latest update done to it is in 2003. So what to do now?

Fortunately the Mac has a BSD unix system as its underpinning with lots of good and usable command line tools. One of them is called ‘cksum’. Although it does not generate straight sfv files (which uses crc32 checksums for each file listed in them) but with a little trick you can use it. Here’s a simple example, using multi volume rar files:

cksum -o 3 *.part*.rar | perl -wane 'printf "%s %08x\n", $F[2], $F[0]‘ > checksums.sfv

It basically pipes the output from cksum to a small perl program that formats the output as in the sfv file standard (if there’s a standard like that :)). If you want to be sure that this is compatible with windows systems, use \r\n instead of \n in the printf fomratting call above.

Also thanks for Zsolt Muller for his article. Nice fella, since he uses drupal with its default theme for his blog

This little device you can see here is the Sharkoon SATA Quickport. It has a USB (USB 2) connector at the back, and you can put a bare 3,5″ desktop (2TB max storage capacity as of now per disk) or a bare 2,5″ notebook (500GB max capacity as of now) drive into its dock. 

If you have lots of downloaded shit (be it music, HD videos, pr0n, whatever) that you seldom need access to, but when needed you need it fast - it comes very handy. DVDs are cheap, but you need a pile of them to be able to store anything massive. Blu-ray comes a bit closer, but the price is a bit still steep, and again reading and writing these bastard discs takes considerable time. › Continue reading