Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • JetBlue stores plaintext passwords — and emails them too! Ugh.

    I recently had a bad experience flying (or trying to fly, I guess) JetBlue. When I called in to ask for a refund on my ticket, the customer service agent and her supervisor were very helpful and gave me a credit. This resulted in an automated email from JetBlue telling me that a TravelBank account […]

  • mounting large (> 2TB) hfsplus (mac) partitions on linux / ubuntu

    I recently wanted to read an external drive which I’d formatted under Mac OS with Linux. Unfortunately, it was > 2TB, which seems to not be supported under Linux. It appears as if many of the vulnerabilities which used to exist (use of 32-bit values instead of 64-bit ones) seems to have been fixed, but […]

  • Get control-left and control-right to move between words on Mac OS X

    The default key bindings on OS X really annoy me to no end.  The strange behaviour of home/end continue to confound me, but I finally figured out how to get Terminal, iTerm and iTerm2 to allow me to go between words using control-left and control-right. There are ways to do this by mucking around in […]

  • It turns out /etc/profile and basrc are insufficient for GUI apps. You have to add stuff to some plist for system-wide paths. Anyway I needed ndk-build in my path for Eclipse to auto-build my JNI/android code, so I created this file: chef:jni vijayp$ cat ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” […]

  • How to get Lenovo x201 to connect 802.11n (n) wireless networks on Ubuntu. High speeds!

    I recently upgraded my wireless router to 802.11n, as a first step in following in my friend Craig’s footsteps. He has an excellent guide to setting up a new wifi router with ipv6. I figured out what my wireless adapter was called by running vijayp@ike:~$ lspci | grep -i net 00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation […]

  • Setting primary monitor (with dual monitors) on Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick)

    I have my laptop connected to an external monitor, and I want the external monitor to be the primary display (i.e. with the menu bar displayed on it.) For some reason, there’s no GUI element to set this. I had to read a bunch of man pages, but when all else fails, trusty old xrandr […]

  • living life vicariously through my credit card

    Because of fraud (see below) I have to get a new credit card number. I’m really bad at remembering to pay bills, so I have set up auto credit card charging of almost all of them. That makes this transition a major pain in the ass. Ideally, I would be able to generate a unique […]

  • lowering mouse speed (and sensitivity) in ubuntu 10.04

    I bought a Evoluent VerticalMouse 3 a while back, and regardless of what settings I used, the mouse’s movement was just too fast on Ubuntu. I set the mouse sensitivity slider in gnome to the least sensitive, but even that wasn’t enough. After a bunch of playing around, I discovered that running this does the […]

  • Python quiz

    What will this code snippet print? #!/usr/bin/python class A(object): def __init__(self, a={}): if not a.has_key(‘1’): a[‘1’] = 1 else: a[‘1’] += 1 print a[‘1′] for i in range(3): _ = A() (Hint: it’s not not what you think.)

  • free Lonely Planet iPhone guides, today only.

    Sorry if the title of my post sounds like it belongs on a splog, but I’m pretty excited about this. Apparently, the Lonely Planet folks wanted to help out those who are stranded in Europe, so they’re giving away their iPhone guides free, until today. You can buy them on your phone. Here are the […]

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