A large bright oddly shaped galaxy with a dark dust band across it

Astrophotography with Mac OS X - Reprise

So, N years later, how is that going? It was going pretty well, but then there was a pandemic with lock-downs and curfews, which rather restricted access to dark skies.The obvious fix was to obtain access to dark skies, by way of a holiday house in the Wimmera.

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A large bright oddly shaped galaxy with a dark dust band across it

a constant irritation

Posted by cafuego on Tuesday 8 January 2008. In categories &annoying  &noise  &melbourne city council  &justified homicide

For over two years now virtually every single one of my days has been disturbed by a bunch of scrap metal guys who run their business from a truck, which they park in the street outside my office window. This is a home office and it's a residential street.

The guys in question then proceed to scour the neighbourhood for scrap metal, old fridges, washing machines and all kinds of hard rubbish, which they take back to their truck and noisily dismantle (using an axe to de-gas a fridge for instance) in the nature strip outside my house over the course of a few hours. 

T minus 1892880

Posted by cafuego on Sunday 6 January 2008. In categories &open source  &conference  &linux.conf.au

A mere three weeks from now we'll be in the middle of set-up for LCA.

Earlier this week the conference bags arrived at our storage facility (2 pallets!) and we've now organised a date and time to stuff the bags with conference shwag.

The badges and booklet designs are being finalised, so we can get them printed next week and we'll be confirming the various social events this coming week.

The planet is now live and the delegate wiki only needs linking in to the main site navigation.

Slowly but surely, things are taking shape :-)

linux.conf.au ticketing update

Posted by cafuego on Thursday 27 December 2007. In categories &open source  &conference  &linux.conf.au

Nearly one week ago tickets for linux.conf.au sold out, leaving a lot of people with a tentative (unpaid) registration - unable to attend the conference, as we have a hard limit of 600 on our keynote venue.

These people with tentative registrations are now on a waiting list, and as spaces are becoming available when we process cancellations, we will offer newly freed spaces to the people on this waiting list. Mini-conf speakers get priority, then we'll go in order of original registration date.

you're about to miss out

Posted by cafuego on Friday 21 December 2007. In categories &open source  &conference  &mel8ourne  &linux.conf.au

Nearly there.

With just on 38 days to go before linux.conf.au opens, we have 13 12 11 9 8 7 6 tickets left to sell, and they're going fast.

If you've registered - but not yet paid - you're probably missing out as you read this! Your place is not guaranteed until you've paid.

So, if you did miss out and you still want to go, consider volunteering. As a volunteer you won't be able to go to many talks, but you'll certainly be part of the buzz.

mythtv - it works!

Posted by cafuego on Sunday 9 December 2007. In categories &open source  &linux  &mythtv  &dvico

After over a year of using myth on my laptop (which has tv out) to view video files on tv, I now have an honest-to-god working mythtv setup with dual tuners, remote control and everything.

For my birthday I obtained a DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4, after doing a spot of googling about Linux compatibility. This is a PCI card that, after plugging in, is detected as two USB tuners and an input device.

Hardware 

I had scrounged together a pile of hardware from various defunct machines in the house and been given a mobo by a friend (Thanks Steve!) The system is an Athlon64 2800+ with 512Mb ram, a fanless nvidia FX5200 with an RCA tvout connector and an 80Gb harddisk. (Though all recording is done to a 500GB LVM volume in another room via NFS over 100baseT)

a spot of php tweaking

Posted by cafuego on Wednesday 28 November 2007. In categories &open source  &conference  &osdc  &php

Well, as it turns out there is a ready-made fix to some of the horrid inser-input-filtering problems I - and probably any PHP coder - encounter.

This morning was the first time I saw Rasmus Lerdorf speak and, although his views on web security want me to give up coding in general and become a potato farmer more specifically, he did point out some tools to make it a lot harder for a macilious user to abuse any web app you write.