After the war, Wilfrid Sellars and his wife Mary, who was now successfully writing short stories, resolved to write for up to ten hours every day to get Wilfrid over his writing block. Eventually in 1947 there appeared the first of what was thereafter to be a steady outpouring of deep and challenging articles for the remainder of his highly successful academic career.
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Writer’s Block
I saw Heiner Goebbel’s odd Stifters Dinge this weekend (made odder with the persistent head cold I’ve had), and though I think it’s senseless to try to give a concrete analysis of it, one part jumped out at me, an interview with Claude Levi-Strauss where he says that there is nowhere left unexplored in the world, no remaining frontiers. I don’t think he’s right, but humanity is definitely at a place where we finally think of the whole planet as our home rather than any one part of it.
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Blumenberg on Running Away
Many people have an old computer, but wish to make a change to make it silent. There are two options available. The first requires one to get his/her hands dirty and also some twine. The second involves underclocking. http://aprivatebeach.com/blog/2009/11/underclocking-a-amd-phenom-ii-x4-or-intel-core-i7 First, buy a large fan. The size of the fan depends on what you want the fan
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Converting an old computer to a silent computer cheaply Dec 2009
Looking online about brokerage fees that various shipping companies charge, I decided to call them about it. I asked them all the same question. Brokerage fees are charged on ground service, but if I choose air, or other service, will I still be charged a brokerage fee? This is the answer I got from them. Fedex
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Avoid Fedex, DHL, UPS or other shipping companies brokerage fees Dec 2009
I was trying to install my wireless Internet USB stick in my Windows 7 computer. Basically, all that a user needs to do is plug the device in. That is what I did. Unfortunately, I get the “An error occurred during the installation of this device” message, and “Access Denied”. Trying to reinstall does not work
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Solution to An error occured during the installation of this device” message, and “Access Denied”
I just placed an order for an Odyssey cell phone. Being in Canada, I am very cautious about this no name cell phone since there are currently only 2 main carriers that use a SIM card. When I receive this phone, I will document my experiences with it. http://www.chinavasion.com/product_info.php/pName/odyssey-wifi-quadband-dualsim-cellphone-w-3-inch-touchscreen/
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Purchasing a cell phone from Chinavasion Dec 2009
Reductionistic Framework Alert! Since “conservatism” has had such bizarre associations in the United States for a long time now, I thought I’d give brief accounts of the three breeds that I most often think of in connection with the classical sense of conservative (that is, the sense that still has something to do with the meaning of the word). Classic Conservatives Elitist Conservative : Firm believer in the natural superiority of a small elite. Worries about the danger of the unwashed masses having too much power, surely leading to chaos and mob rule
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Three Versions of Conservatism
I did some printing, and found that my documents were being printed past the top of the page. When I look at the document on screen, it shows that it fits on one page. Therefore, I tried pushing the document down, but only ended up with the document being printed on 2 pages. This is
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Printing is too far to the left, right, top or bottom? There is an easy fix
It is not at all natural to want to listen to classical music. Learning to appreciate it is like Pascal’s wager: you pretend to be religious, and suddenly you have faith. You pretend to love Beethoven–or Stravinsky–because you think that will make you appear educated and cultured and intelligent, because that kind of thing music is prestigious in professional circles, and suddenly you really love it, you have become a fanatic, you go to concerts and buy records and experience true ecstasy when you hear a good performance (or even when you hear a mediocre one if you have little judgment.) Berlioz detested the music of Bach: he did not want ot enjoy it.
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The Elitist’s Credo
There’s that wonderful illness that incapacitates you from all responsibilities and just leaves you to lay in bed thinking about the most interesting things with just enough strength to pick up the books at your bedside which are conveniently piled there for you. (At an extreme, Robert Wyatt described recovering from the fall that left him paraplegic as an experience like this. I’m not so stoic, but it did produce Rock Bottom, so I can’t argue with the man.) Then there is the sickness that removes from you all your capacities one by one: movement, balance, sensation, thought, comfort, digestion, respiration.
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The Sickest I’ve Been in Years
Dinesen was Danish, moved to Africa for a spell, and, under a pseudonym, wrote fiction in English that evokes German Romanticism more than any English precedent. Dinesen admitted the willfully anachronistic quality of her writing, and yet it is still surprising just how greatly her work involves characters who are pretending to an ideal, and how they strive after a Romantic ideal analogously to how Dinesen pursues the Romantic and gothic qualities in writing. The two greatest stories in Seven Gothic Tales are the two longest: The Deluge at Norderney and The Dreamers
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Isak Dinesen: The Dreamers
A year ago I received an OLPC XO (the “$100 laptop”) through their Give One Get One program. I played with it for a few days and found it essentially useless due to unstable and slow software (and lack of WPA support), so it quickly began gathering dust on a shelf (it has since improved). Last week I was thinking about how cool it would be if Amazon’s Kindle supported O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online service, and I decided to dust off the XO to see if it could be used as an ebook reader for Safari Books
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Using OLPC XO as an ebook reader for O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online
The Problem —————- Most Mac OS X power users know about the [“open”]( http://tuvix.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/open.1.html ) command line tool which opens the files specified as arguments in their default (or a specified) OS X application. Additionally, many OS X text editors, such as TextMate (“mate”) and SubEthaEdit (“see”), come with command line tools which can be used to open files
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ropen: Remote "open" command for opening remote files locally on OS X
In the course of working on projects like server-side Objective-J , jack , and now narwhal , I’ve often had to write shell scripts that needed to know their location in the filesystem. Rather than hardcoding it, I prefer to infer it automatically at runtime. Unfortunately this isn’t as easy as you would expect.
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Determining the absolute absolute path of a shell script
When I searched for ways to load a JNI library from a jar there were numerous hints of how to do it, but no code that I could find. So here’s my solution: import java.net.URL; import java.util.zip.ZipFile; import java.io.File; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.InputStream; public abstract class UnixDomainSocket { static { try { // get the class object for this class, and get the location of it final Class c = UnixDomainSocket.class; final URL location = c. getProtectionDomain ()
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Embedding and loading a JNI library from a jar
Networks are supposed to foster communication, but sometimes you don’t want users communicating TOO much. Here’s a classic tip about how to stop NetWare users from messaging each other directly across a network. Doing so in Windows presents a challenge. ————————————————————- Instant messaging is as common a form of business communication today as e-mail for many organizations
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Classic Tip: Prevent your users from talking to each other
Ant has tasks for CVS and Subversion, but none that I could find for Git. I threw together these simple Ant macros to get started: The first one, “git” just runs git with whatever command you provide to it (clone, pull, etc) along with any arguments you pass to it
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Ant Tasks for Git
I recently heard about an RSS reader (can’t remember which) that had a feature to mark all messages older than a certain threshold as “read”. I thought this was an incredibly useful feature, since I often forget to check my feeds for days at a time, and end up with hundreds of unread items that I don’t have time to read
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"Mark Old As Read" for NetNewsWire
I recently heard about an RSS reader (can’t remember which) that had a feature to mark all messages older than a certain threshold as “read”. I thought this was an incredibly useful feature, since I often forget to check my feeds for days at a time, and end up with hundreds of unread items that I don’t have time to read. Luckily my current RSS reader, NetNewsWire , has AppleScript built in, so I whipped up this script that prompts for the number of days you want to keep as unread, and marks the rest as read
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“Mark Old As Read” for NetNewsWire
BugMeNot is a great little service for bypassing the registration process for websites that really shouldn’t require it (ahem, nytimes.com). The bookmarklet brings up BugMeNot for the current website you’re viewing, and gives you login/password pairs which you can then copy and paste. But wouldn’t it be better if it automagically filled in the username and password for you?
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A Better BugMeNot Bookmarklet