Voder-Vocoder

#!/bin/sh

## make-envelope.sh
##
## Written 2009 Hal Canary.
## Dedicated to the public domain.
##
## Put the envelope in the printer
## with the front facing you, and
## the opening flap to the right.
##
## Argument is file containing
## "to" address.

FROM="${HOME}/.return-address.txt"

## No 6-3/4 Envelope
# WIDTH=6.5	# inches
# HEIGHT=3.625	# inches

## No. 10 Envelope
# WIDTH=9.5	# inches
# HEIGHT=4.5	# inches

## Stationary Envelope
WIDTH=5.5	# inches
HEIGHT=4	# inches

MARGINLEFT=$(echo "(11-${WIDTH}+.25)*72" \
	|bc -l|awk -F. '{ print $1 }')
MARGINRIGHT=$(echo ".25*72"\
	|bc -l|awk -F. '{ print $1 }')
MARGINTOPBOTTOM=$( echo "(((8.5-${HEIGHT})/2)+.25)*72"\
	|bc -l|awk -F. '{ print $1 }')

echo "	MARGINLEFT = $MARGINLEFT points"
echo "	MARGINRIGHT = $MARGINRIGHT points"
echo "	MARGINTOPBOTTOM = $MARGINTOPBOTTOM points"

TO="$1"
PDF=`mktemp`
mv "${PDF}" "${PDF}.pdf"
PDF="${PDF}.pdf"
{ cat "${FROM}";
  echo "\n\n" ;
  sed 's/^/\t\t/g' <"${TO}"; } \
  | paps --landscape \
    --bottom-margin=$MARGINTOPBOTTOM \
    --top-margin=$MARGINTOPBOTTOM \
    --left-margin=$MARGINLEFT  \
    --right-margin=$MARGINRIGHT   \
  | ps2pdf - - > "${PDF}"
echo "lpr ${PDF}"

Shauna and I have been landscaping the garden one bit at a time this year. The patio went in a month ago and the landscaping around it is progressing. On the left there, I’m trying to produce wildflowers.

I’ve gotten addicted to watching Netflix’s streaming video on S.’s computer. It sounds like getting their service working on Linux is a total nonstarter. This makes me sad.

I’ve had a 100GB partition reserved for windows on this desktop since I built it last year, but I haven’t used it yet. When I finally found my XP install disk, I thought I’d give it a shot, but I was disappointed to discover that the install program could not correctly read fdisk’s partiton table on the SATA drive, and the install program would have write over random parts of other partitions.

So I decided to try a more modern Windows. I don’t own a copy of Vista, and do not want to steal it, so I downloaded the release candidate for Windows Seven. Now I’m wrapping up a backup of the majority of my file-systems, in preparation to try it out.

* * *

UPDATE: Well, I got it working. Everything works except the Samsung ML-1210 printer.

R. was looking for an easy way to share files among the computers in his house, most of which ran some version of Linux. SSH offers one solution to this question. Pro: it is available on all the Linux computers, is integrated with Gnome, allows shell as well as file access, and is secure over a wireless network. Cons: Poor support in Windows.

To set up:

1) Install the OpenSSH Dæmon. In Ubuntu, for example, "sudo apt-get install -y openssh-server" will install it.

2) Get the local address of each machine with:

/sbin/ifconfig | grep 'inet addr' | awk '{print $1 " " $2}'

3) Give each machine a unique and memorable hostname. Hostnames can be changed permanently by changing the contents of the file /etc/hostname (on debian-style systems) and until the next boot with "sudo hostname NEWNAME".

4) Edit the file /etc/hosts on each computer to list all of the local IP addresses for each computer on the network. (Under Windows, it's "%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts" and under MacOSX it's "/private/etc/hosts".

5) In Gnome, open the file browser Nautilus ("nautilus" from the command line)→menu bar→File→Connect to server. In the dialog, select "Service type" to be SSH, give the hostname, and username only if it's different on the two computers.

Alternatively, one can enter "nautilus sftp://USERNAME@HOSTNAME/DIRECTORY" on the command line.

In recent versions of Nautilus/Gnome, you can bookmark locations like this. Then they will be availible from the Gnome Menu→Places→Bookmarks.

I’ve resumed the practice of keeping a food journal. It’s helpful to look down on today’s page and see that I’ve already eaten all the food I wanted to eat today and don’t need to keep snaking.

My desktop does a fsck too foten for my tastes. Let’s find out why

hal@sloop:~$ sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sda1 | grep 'heck\|nt count'
dumpe2fs 1.40.8 (13-Mar-2008)
Mount count: 9
Maximum mount count: 35
Last checked: Tue Mar 3 17:38:44 2009
Check interval: 15552000 (6 months)
Next check after: Sun Aug 30 18:38:44 2009

I want it to check every three months or 150 boots. That’s easy to do.

sudo tune2fs -i 3m /dev/sda1
sudo tune2fs -c 150 /dev/sda1

What have I read over the past year or so? Here’s a partial list:

• Eric Flint (et alia)’s 1632 series.
• Roger Zelazny’s Amber series (reread for the first time since college. They hold up well; I’m going to read more of him.)
• Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford series.
• David Weber and John Ringo’s Empire of Man series
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and three Earthsea books.
• Michael Williamson’s Better to Beg Forgiveness
• Jack McDevitt’s Seeker
• Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series
• David Weber’s Honor Harrington series
• Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father
• Norman F. Cantor’s Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World

What am I reading right now?

• Anathem by Neil Stephenson, for the second time. (9780061474095)
• John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman (9780060754013)
• Food Matters : A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes by Mark Bittman (9781416575641)
• Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges (9780811216999)

A few years ago, Chapman asked me “How many computers DO you have in your house?” Good question. There is (1) Sloop, the new one that I built last fall (Athlon 64 3500+) inside the old chassis from Lensman, which is now a inoperable mobo+cpu waiting to be recycled. Then there is (2) Olpc, the new netbook, which I sadly don’t use often enough because I rarely leave the house. (3) Dalek is the computer I built in 2001 that still serves as my backup desktop. (4) Mazer is a P3-800 laptop I keep around because Olpc doesn’t have a VGA-out socket for presentations. I’ve loaned Mazer to the housmate until he de-viruses his own computer (windoze user, go figure—and Steve’s a computer professional!). (5) Nimrod is an ancient Pentium laptop that I forgot I had until this year’s housecleaning. It still works, and I intend to get rid of it at some point. Then there’s my old laptop, Hiro2, which has been broken since before I fully paid for it; but we aren’t counting nonfunctional computers.

So yes, I own 5 functional computers. This weekend I found out that Dalek, even though it has a motherboard and processor from 2001 and has a Radeon 9200 GPU from 2004 and is running Linux will run World of Warcraft. Not well, mind you, but usable. Now Shauna and I can play together in my house. We’re such dorks.

I’ve got Dalek set up on my dining room table with a giant 9-year-old CRT monitor and an ethernet cable running across the floor into my room. It’s okay because it’s been so long since I’ve had more than two people eat at my dining room table anyway. The other possibility is to squeeze both computers onto my desk. But that would be crowded. We’d bump elbows.

According to maps.google.com, my longitude is -81.803888 degrees. This puts my house 5.45359253 hours befind Greenwich, England. Call it 5 hours, 27 minutes, and almost 13 seconds. This morning I woke up at 6 AM, Eastern Daylight time, UTC-4; so I got up at 10 AM UTC. This means I got up this morning at 4:32:47 local mean solar time.

Spent the past week or two cleaning my room. The most recent spirt of activity was caused by a search for a CD-ROM I last saw floating around six months ago. It may be lost forever, becasue I never found it. I ended up carting a large box off to goodwill and filling four big trash bags.

Then last night I went through the clothes hanging on my closet. I removed over half of them becasue they were too big; I folded them up and boxed them. Even though they represent almost eighty pounds lost in the past two-and-a-half years, it’s still a lot of money spent on clothes wasted. I think from now on I’m going to try to make do with a lot less clothing and try to purge the closet more often.