candescence.org

I’ve been using colloquy on my Mac and iPhone for a while now but the simple fact is getting constantly disconnected because of calls, following links, or what-have-you really gets old (and annoys everyone else in the channel). When i saw that the new iPhone app supported push notifications i was excited but a little hesitant – after all i don’t exactly want to route the entirety of my IRC traffic through someone else’s server. Thankfully the guys have been working on a rather interesting approach to push notifications – you host the server yourself. With an upgrade to the colloquy client i run on my Mac at home i can how log in to one persistent connection while on the road. Pretty handy if you ask me.

Just a couple of projects that have caught my eye over the past few weeks with a common theme – super-sizing toys from our childhood. The first project is Jeri Ellsworth’s 52″ net-controlled Etch-A-Sketch. It was built from an HD TV and is controllable via an IRC bot.

More recently the NYC Resistor hackers have been working on an 8′ Lite Brite. It’s not net-enabled, but that’d take the fun out of it.

Any other super-sized toys i’ve missed? Wonder what’ll be next.

A while back i decided to setup a 3-drive ZFS pool in the MacPro. The only complaint so far is that OS X gets a little eager with putting the drives to sleep for my taste. In more recent versions of OS X the only option for putting the drives to sleep is a checkbox that, when on, will attempt to put the drives to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity.

In the early days of OS X the Energy Saver preferences looked a little different – users could set a time to wait before putting drives to sleep.

Thankfully after some digging i realized it could all be set through the pmset command. The man page has everything you need but for the lazy here’s the gist for disk sleep timing. pmset takes a flag to determine which power profile you’re changing: wall-charger (-a), battery (-b), UPS (-u) or all profiles (-a). Next simply pass it the disksleep argument and a number in minutes.

Set all power profiles to sleep the disks after 15 minutes instead of the typical 10:

sudo pmset -a disksleep 15


Setting the time to 0 will disable disk sleep altogether for that power profile.

One interesting thing to note is i originally stumbled onto this on a rather old article that suggested using the spindown argument instead of disksleep as the man page now suggests (as of 10.4). Using spindown does not cause pmset to complain though it appears to disable disk sleep altogether.

Stumbled across this depiction of the 20 Largest Bankruptcies in the history of the world. I love how cheerful the graphic is in comparison to the depressing truth it is displaying. All in all a great little bit of info viz.

It took me forever to figure out who all these Coho people were; at first i thought it was just some annoying bot and mostly ignored it. It wasn’t until i finally responded to one calling it a bot (to which i was accused of being a bot back) that i got curious enough to investigate. According to Wikipedia the bots are directed at public twitterers, the goal of the social experiment being to connect random people. They usually lead with some simple comment sent to both users ranging from the simple “Hi!” through other greetings and apparently, as i found out tonight, including demands of “internet sex”.

To the random internet stranger who, through coho, i apparently demanded the “internet sex” from, hats off to you my friend.