No Wasted Moves

For much of the time since I got my iPhone last July, I’ve found the touch screen to be quite intermittant. Sometimes it works brilliantly, often I might as well have a phone wth no buttons.

I don’t know what kind of dark magic Apple have used to make the iPhone work, but it only responds to fingers (or at least, nothing else I’ve tried tapping it with – pens, pencils, erasers – works).

It later occured to me that my hands are often quite dry. No skin crackingly dry, but they could probably do with moisturising more often than I do.  So I began a quick experiment.

Every time my screen becomes non responsive, I go moisten my hands under a tap. In a pinch, I lick my finger (yeh gross, whatever. This is *science*.)

Seems to do the trick pretty much every time.

Guess it’s off to buy some moisturiser then – for the sake of my hands and my iPhone!

Following OpenSolaris rendering itself completely non-booting, I’ve moved back to running Solaris 10 u6 (10/08) on my Ultra20. I’m really not sure what caused the crash, but I couldn’t recover from in the amount of time I wanted to spend (not much) and really I should be focussed on Solaris 10 anyway.

So, how to setup the new box – knowing the end goal is to have a solid development workstation I can use for Ruby, Rails and Solaris development as well as general testing and hacking around… These are my notes. While the end result does work, it took a fair bit of effort getting there. It was a learning experience and ultimately I’m glad of it.

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A few years ago I bought a Nissin 30iZ flash.

The manual was next to useless in terms of explaining how it worked as far as adjusting the power output went. My lack of knowledge at the time lead me to pretty much give up on it except for when I wanted lots of light.

Tonight I had another look at it, chucked in some rechargeable batteries (thanks Aldi, $10!) and tested it out. Turns out it’s not as sucky as I first though.

This thing has three slidey switches. The top two, DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. They are purely cosmetic, adjusting only the ‘display’ on the back.

The bottom switch is the good one. It has four positions, marked O, M, [green] A, [red] A. Useful huh? No, not really. But here’s the thing. This switch is the power adjuster. Here’s what it should be labeled:
Far left, O: OFF
2nd from left, M: Full power – 1/1
2nd from right, [green] A: Half power – 1/2
Far right, [red] A: Quarter power – 1/4

A quick relabeling with the Sharpie, and I’m in business. I have my 2nd battery powered, adjustable power strobe all ready to go.

Awesome!

Went out to get some photos before Floriade finished on the weekend.

While the flowers looked like they’d taken a bit of a beating over the last few weeks, it was a gorgeous day to be out and about.

All in all I was pretty happy with the results.

Floriade 2008 on flickr.

Some guys would build a deck or maybe play with their trainsets as a weekend project. I decided to see if I could kick some live back into this site. I’ve got lots of ideas stewing, and finally have reached a point where I think I can add value through the site on a regular basis.

Here’s hoping!