Right speaker of my QC15 gave out one morning. Frustrated by it, I almost forked out $400 for a new pair. Following symptoms started showing all of a sudden:

• After turning the headphones on, I’d hear a loud white noise from the right speaker.
• Following a few seconds of playing a song, the song would start to cut out intermittently and eventually stop.
• Tilting my head to sides would improve the situation a bit.
• After completely cutting out, blowing into the right speaker (having removed the cushions and the fabric cover), would bring it back to life for a short period of time.

read the rest …

I want to learn Go. I’ve read a lot about it, its docs and code. I’ve seen it in action. But I still haven’t written a single line of Go. Recently, in presence of some good white noise, I did a bit of introspection and realized why I haven’t done so yet. I discovered that I do the following before deciding to embark on learning a new skill:

1. Have a project in mind that requires the new skill
2. Start ASAP after the initial thought
3. Use the most basic or immediately available tools if it helps with 2

Quick notes on the above before I give you some examples. You need to have a project you care about otherwise you will lose interest due to the lack of purpose. You won’t go far and instead will stick to basics. You need to start ASAP because your interest may wear off if delayed. You can argue that if one is truly interested, this is not an issue. I agree but just as when sometimes an idea is better than its reality counterpart, reality can sometimes be better than the idea. And for those of us who are only lightly taken by an idea, getting down and dirty with it has the potential to get us full on excited. But if we let it slip, we forever remember how it wasn’t such a big deal anyway.

read the rest …

I’m afraid I’m interrupting you
something on your lips I spotted
Let me hold that for you —
you drink vodka from a wine bottle?!

It’s beautiful outside, and so are you
What … What I meant to say was
that beauty is everywhere tonight

Surely you fancy a drink from the bar
It’s a good break from the Russian mafia
that you’ve been drinking all night

Jesse by the way, that’s my name
You can tell by the hair, all Jesses have the same
I would bet a dance on that squeaky floor
that your name is Summer, Summer the stunner

read the rest …

Here is another ghostscript trick to split a PDF into separate pages and convert them to high quality PNG files:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sDEVICE=png16m -r300x300 \
   -sOutputFile=output_"%d".png -dTextAlphaBits=4 \
   -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 ../input.pdf

You can change the output dpi by modifying -r300x300 to dpi of your choosing.

I remember using WRT54G router when it first came more than a decade ago and back then, my first attempt to upgrade the firmware resulted in bricking it. It wasn’t until I went searching for how to make it OK again that I discovered an entire community of hackers making this $100 device do incredible and magical shit.

Fast forward to few days ago and while going through my stuff, I came across this Samsung HDD which had a very familiar looking chip on it—an SDRAM! Aha! I remembered I had seen that chip elsewhere, on my very own WRT54GL. I quickly googled the part numbers and found them to be pin compatible. So I rolled up my sleeves and got busy desoldering the chip off the HDD and soldering it onto the router. I fucked up more or less and ended up bending the chip and knocking one of the pads off (albeit an NC one) on my router. I finished the job nonetheless. Already hopeless, I powered it up and saw nothing but flashing power LED and all on ethernet LEDs. Couldn’t be worse.

read the rest …

You may be gone, but the ideas that you shone light on
will forever shine, turning the quiet of every night
into a loud sound, a ringing in my ears
that blocks the silence I had taken comfort in for so long

Hey bossy pants
Let’s dance

Five rolling aces
Loads of glitter and roses

Five I love yous
Run of the mill blues

Falling chimneys by the dozen
Fire, fire, fire closer

Shopping at the mall with a cruiser
Bye bye to all of you losers

Sunday, my day, Coca Cola, hooray
Night time, bed time, a song, with rhymes

Here’s an example of a phone call I receive every now and then:

At this point, I’m wondering if the company has a picture of a donkey on my file, seeing that I’m being treated like an idiot. Only an idiot would just give out personal details without being 100% sure who the entity on the other end is. And guess what, the only way to be sure that it’s your bank you’re talking to, is to call them yourself. Period.

read the rest …

At one point or another, you may have used Microsoft Outlook to send and receive emails and if you have ever saved an archive file, you know that it is not so easily convertible to other formats. In this post, I’m going to show you a painless and quick way to move all your emails from a PST file to an IMAP server preserving everything, including the date and time the emails were originally sent.

read the rest …

I’m working on a little project to multiboot anything and everything unix in the universe on a single media. This is one of the several utilities that I have written to help with that. It’s a python version of the original decompressor for compressed loopback device (cloop). To extract/decompress the cloop image, you can do:

python cloop-decompress ~/tmp/KNOPPIX ~/tmp/KNOPPIX.raw

Now you can loop mount the raw image as you normally would:

mount -o loop ~/tmp/KNOPPIX.raw /mnt