http://www.heavygravity.com Mon, 26 May 2008 14:10:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Some hours ago, the Phoenix lander touched down on Mars, and just in the last few hours sent back some pictures. One of them has an interesting feature in it: Click the image below this to see the entire picture and the strange white 'blip' in context. Whats interesting ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2008/05/26/phoenix-touches-down-sends-back-first-images/ Oh, the gods were angry at me last week. Very angry. They not only put me through the hell of completely destroying my computer (or so I thought), they also influenced me to exhibit my geek stubbornness and not replace anything, but instead break out the soldering iron ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/12/10/the-zalman-reserator-or-how-i-horribly-broke-my-pc/ I was recently looking for an easy way to encrypt individual files and directories (recursively), and I ran across the linux command mcrypt. This nifty little utility does just what I want, but doesn't do anything fancy – it just does encryption on a single file or standard input. With ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/11/15/encrypt-files-and-directories-easily/ There are lots of things out there on the net related to getting your mail out of Outlook and into Thunderbird, but not really anything that deals with the reverse. I've been using Thunderbird for a while, and as much as I like it, I really want to give ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/11/14/how-to-import-thunderbird-mail-into-outlook/ I recently had an infrequently used hard drive fail to mount, and upon inspection I found that it was no longer recognizable and an error was being produced at the console: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc1, missing codepage or other error In some cases useful info is found ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/10/25/fsck-fun/ I've been working on a side project called "SongBoxx" over the last few weeks. It's a meta search engine that searches several of the cheapest music sites out there simultaneously and produces results that are easily sortable in your browser, so you can quickly find that track or album ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/09/06/all-in-one-music-meta-search-engine/ AllOfMP3 has been under attack for the last 6 months, and it's showing: there are practically no payment methods left to use. So what are decent alternatives to AllOfMP3? Are there any, even? I did a little research and came up with what I think are the top alternatives. ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/05/28/allofmp3-alternatives-what-are-the-other-music-sites-and-how-good-are-they/ Not living in the US, I sometimes hear about hot news items there that permeate the airwaves that never seem to make it far outside the US. It's hard to imagine, I guess, that most of the world doesn't know who Anna Nicole Smith was (I didn't either), who ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/04/05/news-filtering-the-enf/ Why did we invade Iraq? Was it because, as the White House claimed, Saddam Hussein was an immediate and serious threat to America. Or did Bush mislead the public, the Congress and the UN by consistently overstating this threat? Bush claims he was forced to to invade Iraq as a last ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/04/04/top-iraq-lies-told-by-the-bush-administration/ I've read a lot online about how users of AllOfMP3.com are unhappy (and even upset) about not being able to buy credits anymore to purchase music from the USA. Apparently, political pressure from the media industry in the US forced the big name credit card companies to withdraw their ... http://www.heavygravity.com/2007/03/15/how-to-buy-credits-at-allofmp3com-from-the-usa/