That blooms into the demon flower.

[reddragdiva]

• You know, I'm thinking diffrentcolours has a point. (courtesy arkady; not work or brainsafe.)

I am appalled that I missed mentioning last Friday's date with Arkady at the Oakdale Arms Beer Festival. By crikey I approve. Also met timeplease and asked how the hell he went from academic geek to publican. It's amazing what beer fandom can achieve. Cheers to hairyears for the considerable *pint*age. Or half-*pint*age — it's a beer festival, after all.

Today I got MediaWiki running at home. And we got Samba working on our FreeBSD boxes. I can now play music on tinny laptop speakers anywhere in the house!

redcountess has been going hog wild on the new Mac. First upgrade purchase will definitely be a new hard drive. A USB 2 card is likely. We don't yet have a shrine to Steve Jobs in the corner, though the stack of Mac stuff is likely to count soon.

One thing we would like geekly advice on is KVM switches. Or VM switches, using the Mac keyboard (USB) on the Mac and the Microsoft Natural keyboard (PS/2) on the PC. Not switching the keyboard, even an old KVM would do if the video quality is good. (As I understand, it's almost entirely down to the video cables, not the switchbox itself.) If anyone has a spare, our zero-budget condition would most welcome it.

Comments

[arkady.livejournal.com]

You've been missing all the fun today. ditto_cops has crashed the Frienditto server, it appears! I've been very busy today.... ;-)

[littlemsmortis.livejournal.com]

very disturbing link ....

[reddragdiva]

Yes. Discovering it was an attempt by the ljdrama.org trolls to get people's locked posts was ... special.

They are of course also susceptible to DMCA notices. From anywhere in the world, actually. To them and their upstream provider.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

The hardware KVMs start to wear out after a year or so, giving you a picture dyed toilet-blue and/or smudging. (I went through 2 or 3 of those when I had a Mac and a PC sharing a monitor.) Given the flakiness issue, I wouldn't be surprised if they were unsuitable for anything over 1024x768 or so. The solid-state ones which cost an order of magnitude more are probably better.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Heh. Their server was also vulnerable to hacking. The site's returning 403s now.

Or maybe their ISP yanked it thanks to all the copyvios people were suddenly aware of.

Either way, the site's down, so I don't consider the 16+ hours spent cataloguing compromised LJ posts to have been wasted. I actually enjoyed it, in some grim fashion....

[mangosteen]

Yes. Discovering it was an attempt by the ljdrama.org trolls to get people's locked posts was ... special.

Regrettably, there's nothing illegal about being a ghoul.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

The little two-machine solid-state devices (such as the Belkin device I bought for the office) can be had for 10 to 20 quid, and aren't bad. Mine's good to at least the 1280x1024@85Hz I run my CRT at -- I think it's specced up to 1600x1200@75Hz but don't quote me on that.

[edwards.livejournal.com]

New Mac? What did you get in the end?

[juliann.livejournal.com]

Actually, depending on their hosting, they may not be liable to DMCA challenges (but that means they are fully on the hook for court challenges) and their upstram provider may not have any liability at all.

It all depends on how it's set up. But it it's some guy's PC on his DSL line, the DMCA has no effect and people will have to go to court over it. And this is all ASSUMING that the server is in the US at all.

[reddragdiva]

It's hosted in LA by level3. The site owner is in Nevada.

Even if it were on DSL, you could still hit the upstream provider with a DMCA notice. I know this one from the Scientology wars. It was RTC vs Netcom (1995, just before the DMCA) that established the need for that provision or something like it.

[reddragdiva]

Rilly? We were looking at a 20-quid Belkin USB KVM but it got some bad consumer reviews. What model is yours?

[reddragdiva]

No, old Mac ;-) A blue G3 from naughtypixie and juliann. The birthday money remains unspent and will go towards an iBook G4 or similar when I am employed once more.

[juliann.livejournal.com]

No, the DMCA (which came into force late 1998) removes upstream provider liability. However ISPs are still liable for their customer's content -- but they do not have to opt into the DMCA. Most do, as it's the easiest and least expensive way to handle it, but they don't HAVE to.

[redcountess]

Further to David's comment, it's a B&W G3/400 running OS X 10.3.8 - I've already installed X on it, as well as Adium and Macirssi :-) Oh, and I have a 60 day trial .mac account, redcountess@

I'm sure I posted in my journal about being given the G3.

[redcountess]

Oh, and the processor is a rev 2 :-)

[reddragdiva]

Oh yes, that's correct.

Still, I would be amazed if Level3 didn't opt into it.

[juliann.livejournal.com]

If they do opt in they will have their official agent posted somewhere on their website -- it's part of the rules for opting in. So it should be easy enough to find out :)

[edwards.livejournal.com]

I could quite easily have missed it, I've been quite distracted lately. That's a good spec of Mac; my media server (which runs all the time, runs OS X and OSXVNC) is a 266MHz beige G3, and it's quite functional.

.Mac rules. Especially when you have more than one Mac - iSync keeping your address books synchronised has to be one of the most useful features ever.

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

Most cheap KVM switches only do PS/2, so the cheap way to get the K in KVM is to use a USB to PS/2 converter box. But beware that some of them don't work properly with Macs... I know that shouldn't happen, but it's my experience that at least some of the ones that only claim to support Windows really do mean it... :-(

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Mine is the F1DK102 (http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=202717&pcount=&Product_Id=137412&Section.Section_Path=%2FRoot%2FPeripheralSharing%2FOmniview%2E%2E%2ESwitches%2FDesktopSeries%2FCASeries%2F)
I think -- it looks like the right one, pretty sure it is but can double-check if needed. Thinking about it, I do have some minor quibbles with it -- it doesn't seem to like being disconnected from one running machine and plugged into another, which might not be a problem for you. I typically use it just as a video switch, since the majority of the boxes I plug the second cable into don't use PS/2 keyboards or mice.

[reddragdiva]

Ah, heh. PS/2 isn't Mac-suitable ;-) Unless a PS/2-USB converter will actually work on a Mac.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Don't know about the convertor (my guess is a resounding 'possibly' -- the little boxes of tricks might work, but the little plastic blocks that just rewire the plug might not), but for my Sun machines that don't grok PS/2 I use the KVM switch just as a V switch. This means the PS/2 keyboard attached to the workstation is the only one that works for switching displays, but then you'd need two mice as well :-/

Ah, another possible downside is that the cheap units draw their power from the PS/2 ports it's connected to; mine works fine if only one machine is powered up, but I'm not sure how well it would behave otherwise. Oh well, that's a shame; I'd certainly recommend a solid-state device over the mechanical ones otherwise.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Discovering it was an attempt by the ljdrama.org trolls to get people's locked posts was ... special.

Er, this is so, or is that just an educated guess?

[reddragdiva]

jameth is directly involved. ljdrama.org was taken out at the precise same moment as frienditto.com.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Supposedly, he was a victim of frienditto because "someone" deleted his journal. Probably another smokescreen.

[reddragdiva]

You realise, of course, I've been getting minute by minute updates from arkady ...

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I figured you might, heh. What a friggin' car crash, and it's all because ALL YOU OF EARTH ARE STUPID!