Apple TV and iTunes Match
My 3rd generation Apple TV (with iOS 5) has some problems streaming media. First noticed it with NetFlix; the stream would pause for about 30 seconds every couple of minutes. iTunes Match had a...
View ArticleiCloud and Outlook: Installation Order Matters!
Nice work, nVidia. Today marks the third time in three years I’ve had to send my Mac back to Apple to replace one of your faulty GPUs. What the hell happened? I spent the morning setting up an old...
View ArticleHash strings to integers in PHP with the DJB hashing algorithm
I recently found myself needing a PHP implementation of the DJB hashing algorithm, but ran into a problem—in 64-bit PHP5, integers don’t overflow. Instead, they magically turn into floating point...
View ArticleCygwin and the Case of the Unreadable Blues
Cygwin includes some nice built-in aliases for colorizing terminal output, but the default blue hue is so dark as to be unreadable on the black background. It’s easy to fix, though; just add the...
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[Nearly] Silence your Butterfly Labs Little Single Bitcoin Miner
Last week my Butterfly Lab Little Single (SC) Bitcoin miner finally arrived. The good: it works as advertised and mines Bitcoins at about 30 GH/sec. Setup was a breeze on Windows 8; plug in the miner,...
View ArticleUbuntu and Radeon video cards
The last few releases of Ubuntu have given me a lot of trouble on a desktop with a pair of Radeon 7970 video cards. The Live CD would start up, but leave me with a blank black screen and a mouse...
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Up your boxed mac & cheese game
Macaroni and cheese remains my ultimate comfort food, but I generally don’t have the time to do it right. This variation is a decent compromise between the convenience of boxed mac & cheese and the...
View ArticleQuickTuring: a fast Java implementation of the Turing stream cipher
I recently needed to use Qualcomm’s Turing stream cipher for a Java project. Some Googling found a Java port of Qualcomm’s C++ reference implementation, which behaves almost exactly as expected: its...
View ArticleSay “Hola” to mDNS-SD in Java
Service discovery in Java is not as simple as it should be. Apple’s reference implementation, Bonjour, is ironically very difficult to setup on Mac OS X (for JavaFX at least). Alternative pure-Java...
View ArticleStatic linking on Mac OS X
Sometimes you want to distribute a program without requiring users to install a long chain of dependencies. Typically we can do this by building a statically linked binary; for example, by passing the...
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