Jump to content

Nowak

Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    4,464

  • Joined

 Content Type 

Blog Entries posted by Nowak

  1. Nowak
    So I got a PowerBook G4. Yay! Only problem is, Mac OS X 10.5.8 is just borderline useful in 2016, especially on a PowerPC machine with 512MB RAM. That, and I grew frustrated with the way how Mac OS X is designed. So, I decided to install Linux on it. Here's how things went down:
     
    Downloaded Ubuntu MATE 15.10 PowerPC ISO Wrote it to an 8GB flash drive using LiLi Tried booting to it, it wouldn't boot Tried using the Mini ISO instead Mini ISO was missing a lot of things When I finally got it working, it was missing a lot of kernel modules (among other things) and was incredibly slow, almost slower than Mac OS X was; it was also extremely prone to breaking Finally figure out what I was doing wrong, used dd to write the ISO to the flash drive instead of LiLi and it booted Installed Ubuntu graphically, after working around a bug I encountered early on in my adventure that causes Ubuntu to crash if I don't type "radeon.agpmode=-1" into the yaboot prompt when booting or yaboot.conf file Using nano in a tty, I added "radeon.agpmode=-1" to yaboot.conf, updated the boot partition and rebooted to keep it from crashing Couldn't get wireless working, still used Ethernet for internetting Got sound working by editing the config files and alsamixer in a terminal Still couldn't get wireless working, put in an 802.11g PC Card into the PCMCIA slot instead  
    And now I have a more useful PowerBook G4. Runs much better than OS X did, too, and it'll run even better when I upgrade it to 2GB RAM. Maybe an SSD too... but getting to this point took so friggin' long and I'm glad it's over.
     

  2. Nowak

    Sakura's Farewell

    By Nowak,

    Unlike some other posts I've posted on this blog, this one is rather serious.
     
    In May of 2001, we were looking for a new cat after another was unfortunately killed by a car on a busy street down the street from our house. On the 12th, we adopted a mostly-dark cat covered in varying shades of brown and gray, with one orange spot on her forehead. We named her Sakura, Japanese for "cherry blossom". Oh, what a fitting name that was. Ever since she was a kitten, she was always on her best behavior; when she knew she did something wrong, she owed up to it, she never got in the way and when she knew she had to come indoors, she came indoors. She truly was a cherry blossom.
     
    For the longest time, whenever we took her to the vet's, they commented on how healthy she was, even as she grew older. She was our first cat to live past 10 years old. Although, that being said, her health wasn't always perfect. After a bad fall in 2008, she developed arthritis in her hind legs. She could still walk and jump as normal, but she had a noticeable limp to her walk. She also suffered from asthma in 2011, but that wasn't enough to stop her from being a cat too. Everything, arthritis aside, seemed perfect, and her projected lifespan was 16 - 18 years.
     
    But... last year, she started losing weight. We thought it was natural, because when humans get old they start losing weight. Then, it hit us that it wasn't. She was always sleeping, and she wasn't eating or drinking as she should; she didn't even want to be near her food. Concerned, we took her to the vet's. They weighed her, and found that she weighed only 5lbs instead of a healthier 9 - 10lbs. They also did some bloodwork on her, and we would receive the lab results the next day. We were hoping for the best, but at the same time, we feared the worst.
     
    And indeed, the worst happened. She had kidney disease, which can be fatal for cats, especially as they age, and can never be recovered from. Further lab work on urine samples revealed she also had a urinary tract infection. Everything was going wrong at once. We were devastated.
     
    The doctors recommended hospitalizing her for a few days so they could get some fluid into her, to try to get her kidney disease under control. We did that. When her treatment was over, she seemed more like the cat she always was. She would climb up onto our laps and sit there, purring gently. Everything seemed right in the world again... well, except that the kidney disease was still there, but under control. She even regained a pound. But... on Friday, her health began deteriorating again. She spent all day sleeping in the upstairs bathroom, which was rather unusual for her. On Saturday, it became even worse; she lost her sense of balance, and while she still attempted to get up, she kept falling over after a few steps. We dedicated ourselves to spending as much time with her as we possibly could, and keeping her as comfortable as possible. Her face looked like she had accepted her fate, but yet... there was a certain sadness in her expression. Like she was sad she'd never be able to have us scratch her behind her ears or gently stroke her back again.
     
    At 11:30AM eastern time today, after one final reiki treatment from my mom (she liked reiki), she peacefully passed away. Since I was still asleep at the time, and my dad playing golf, she was surrounded by my mom and my sister. Our other cat, Kiba (born 2007), doesn't seem to be aware of her death yet, but I'm sure he'll notice after a few days. Since the ground is still frozen, we can't bury her, as we have done with our other deceased cats. Instead, we'll be taking her remains to the vet one last time tomorrow to be cremated.
     

     
    They say that pets are part of the family too. Every bit of that is true. It was an amazing 14 years, Sakura. Rest well.
    Circa March (adopted May 12) 2001 - February 21, 2016
  3. Nowak
    Excuse the mess, I store things in here too. Anyway, I decided I wanted a server for... something, but then I decided why should I pay for something like a Raspberry Pi when I can just set up one of those computers my dad gave me as a server? So I installed Ubuntu on one and arranged it like this. Now a day later, I think I've finalized how I'll have my "server room" laid out.
     
    Right now I'm running a Minecraft server on it, but I also have bind9 installed in case I decide to do other things with the server.
     
    For those of you wondering, the machine is a Dell Studio Slim 540S with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300, an ATI Radeon 4350 512MB, 4GB DDR2 RAM and 640GB storage. Seems to run Ubuntu beautifully so far.
  4. Nowak
    http://pcpartpicker.com/p/b6BsTW
     
    i choes intel celeron becuz i had celron in my old pce an it wuz fien an i clerly dont ned beter an 4-way corsofire titan xs 4 maxmum poawr
     
    howver i herd abut somefing cald "bottlenecking" but dasb ulsht, botlneking is a lei, celron isz perkft
     
    wil dis pec b fijne?????
     
    yes, this is a joke. yes, I put effort into making those typos.
  5. Nowak
    Do you think your smartphone is private? Because if you do please stop thinking that.
     
    "But Daring, I can just remove Google apps! That'll make my phone private!"

     
    That'll just keep Google from spying on you, if you own an Android device. In reality, your smartphone (and even dumb phones, to a certain extent) contains records of your text messages, photos, GPS location over the past 24 hours, contacts (including names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses), call history and maybe a few documents here and there. It's not really private, if at all, Google or not. Meanwhile, a feature phone contains text message records, contacts and call history, and maybe some photos if it has a camera and enough storage to accommodate photos. So yeah, be careful of what you do and say on your phone, because it can get you in trouble later and prosecutors will have all the evidence they need in one place (provided they can get a search warrant for it.)
  6. Nowak
    Today after dinner, my dad called me over, saying he was having trouble with getting to his email on his tablet, an HP Touchpad. Evidently, Google has ended support for WebOS (I don't blame 'em, WebOS is a dead platform), so he could not access his email on the device. After a little while, I came up with a possible solution - flash Android 5.1.1 on it. With his full approval, I started working on flashing Android onto his aging tablet.
     
    Finding a ROM wasn't that hard. People have been keeping the ancient tablet alive by porting various versions of Android to it. I actually downloaded the first ROM I found and followed a guide on Lilliputing on how to flash Android onto a Touchpad using a utility called TPToolkit. Now this is where things got hard.
     
    It wouldn't accept the recovery and gapps zip files I had on the device. Why? I don't know. So I had to search for a gapps and recovery zip that TPToolkit liked. Eventually I found both files and Android successfully flashed onto the device. Only thing is, once I booted it into Android, it was missing the Google apps. After a bit of fucking around to try getting the gapps on the device, I gave up and tried flashing just the gapps, then found out TPToolkit didn't like the filesize of the zip file I was using. So I had to get a smaller one, which I did. That file successfully installed.
     
    Then came setting up his email account, Google Play (so he can get any apps he needs), Facebook and LinkedIn. It was relatively painless until I tried downloading Facebook, which kept returning an error. After failing to resolve the error I tried removing and re-adding his email account, then installing a Facebook apk. It worked, and every other app I've tried downloading from Google Play downloaded without a problem. Dunno why not Facebook, though, but oh well. And that was basically all I needed to do to set it up for him. Anything else he needs, he can (probably) find it in Google Play.
     
    I'll have to give him a tour of Android tomorrow, but now his tablet is running on a not-dead platform. You're welcome, dad.
  7. Nowak

    I've had enough.

    By Nowak,

    So I tried streaming Pokémon XD today. Instead, I got probably two legitimate viewers, both of whom were my friends, and then the rest were posting shit like a true story that 100% happened and dank maymays.
     
    I'm sorry, but I'm not doing something for zero feedback. That just isn't worth it for me. If you want to say dank maymays like "ILL NOSKOP UR MOM IN BED SKRUB XDDDDDDDDDDDDD", go to Call of Duty. Not my stream. I have a zero tolerance for bullshit, especially after this week, which was particularly rough on my mood.
     
    For those of you who don't know yet, I've been battling with depression. For a long time now, actually. I thought I was almost done with it, but nope, on Tuesday I had a depressive episode and had to step out of class for a bit. That's pretty bad, having depressive episodes in the middle of class. I don't know what exactly triggered my depression, but it's getting pretty bad again. I think I'm gonna take a break next quarter to allow myself to clear my head. I can't be having depressive episodes in the middle of class, I just can't...
     
    Last night was particularly hard on me. One of my best friends took out his anger on me without even realizing how much it was hurting me or how stupid he was being until later. We've made amends and are friends again, but that was the second time I broke into tears that day. As I said, this is bad.
     
    This is also what made me stop making videos on YouTube. I've tried for 9 years to be at least remotely successful on YouTube, and out of every video I've made, only one broke the 10k views mark. It no longer exists, and I didn't even put any effort into it, but that was the only time I got feedback on YouTube for my videos. Every other video I've made has failed to break 100 views, let alone get a single comment. After the Google+ "update", I disabled comments because people kept spamming their shitty Destiny montages on my videos, even though I was pretty critical of that game. That surely means I want to watch it, right? Ha... haheh... hah... no.
     
    My point is, I'm not doing something for zero feedback. That just isn't worth it to me. I'm sure there will be a light at the end of the tunnel and I will finally break the cycle, become somewhat successful online and live a good, happy life, but until then I've yet to find my way.
  8. Nowak
    1. Take your mechanical keyboard
    2. Remove the R keycap with your keycap puller
    3. Take your other mechanical keyboard
    4. Remove the H keycap from that one
    5. Place the H keycap in place of the R keycap
    6. Optional step, but remap the R key to H in your keyboard's config software (if it allows that)
    Conghats, youh now typing like a Masshole! \m/
  9. Nowak
    I used to be a pretty big fan of the Opera browser. It never got much market share, but it was feature-rich, had a highly customizable interface, session management, and was developed in the direction the community wanted rather than what Opera Software ASA wanted, and the dev team at Opera was very willing to listen to this feedback. It was awesome.
    Then Opera 15 came out. It was missing a lot of features that made Opera Opera. No tab stacking, no private tabs, no built-in email or IRC client, no session management, no customizable interface and it was developed in the direction Opera Software ASA, who got a new development team mostly based in Poland, wanted. It didn't even have bookmarks at first, which is just silly. I've been waiting since then for Opera to restore features to their browser, but it's been years. Instead they've been adding useless things like... bookmark sharing. And Discover, some news aggregation thing on the New Tab/Speed Dial page. Really, the only thing that made it Opera was the inclusion of a speed dial function - it was Opera in name only, otherwise. The shutdown of My Opera in 2014 only solidified this, as what made Opera unique was not just its features, but also the community. Removing that was just the final nail in the coffin.
    So now Jon S. von Tetzchner, the old CEO and co-founder of Opera, has returned to the browser world. He has unveiled a new browser also based on Chrome, but called Vivaldi. It aims to pick up where Opera 12.x left off, and be a true successor to the browser. I've been typing this in Vivaldi, actually. It's only a technical preview right now, has no private browsing, proper extension support or the customizable interface and is really glitchy, but I already feel at home in this browser. I'll be keeping my eye on it, and when it becomes feature-rich enough and bugs get fixed I'll replace Chrome with Vivaldi. I haven't been this excited about a new browser in years.
    Opera is dead, long live Vivaldi.
×