Hah! Some notes on Mac Minis in the living room

Long term readers might remember when I first moved Horton (my Mac Mini) to the living room and specifically where I wrote:
The more subtle problem was this: when I turned off the display device connected to Horton, the machine went to sleep. You can wake it up if you hit a Bluetooth mouse or keyboard to wake it, but that’s not very useful for the remote situation. Turns out there is freeware called InsomniaX that fixes the problem like a charm. Run it and the Mini stays awake even with the TV off.
This turns out not to be true. This morning I upgraded Horton to Snow Leopard and I was doing a lot of screwing around with updating the web server, making sure SSL was working, blah, blah, it was even boring when I was doing it, blah. Got up to the point where everything was running but the sleep-stopper InsomniaX. I had also been working with my laptop and suffering through the "Man I really need to pair the Harmony to it stops controlling my laptop as well" sort of drills - I'd push a button on the remote and both computers would respond, that sort of thing. This was aggravated by the "Activity" macro for Horton has always started playing music automatically. I've meant to fix it, but never gotten around to hauling out the software and working on it. So I figured while I was messing around I'd look at that as well. ANYWAY, InsomniaX is supposed to be Snow Leopard compatible but it froze every time I ran it. And while I was trying various things I switched away from the TV display of Horton and noticed that my laptop threw up a screen of a remote emitting little cartoon Zs and then it went to sleep. Whaaa? Has the Harmony remote been putting Horton to sleep all this time? Turns out that yes it has. You don't need InsomniaX, you just need to program the Harmony to leave the mini on all the time. (Also, the Harmony software now knows the mini remote codes, so that complaint I wrote before about needing to teach the commands is no longer valid - although it was at the time.) So yeah. Good to know.
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Kindle Freeze Tip

Yesterday I was reading my Kindle while I ate lunch because that's how I roll. I'll pause for you to wrap your consciousness around the edginess of my lifestyle. Anyways after I finished I pushed the buttons to put it to sleep (you press Alt and the Font Size buttons simultaneously) and put it back in the little folio case. As I did so I noticed it was being slow to update the screen but I didn't worry about it. I just figured it was downloading something or talking to the mothership or plotting my demise or whatever Kindles do when you're not looking. Until lunchtime today when I pulled the Kindle out to find it still had the same page displayed. Now this is bad because even if I hadn't put it to sleep it should do so automatically after a timeout. Sure enough it was frozen up. I could still see a page and the battery indicator was about 90% full but no buttons did anything and the little silver "zipper" on the right wasn't present. No worries, I popped the battery cover off, scrounged up a paperclip and then pushed the little reset button. No response. Uh oh. I finally gave up and read a real book while I ate lunch and then I called Kindle support. Turns out that if your Kindle freezes it can burn a lot of power and you can get in a place where the battery is dead, but the screen still shows a full battery indicator (since the screen doesn't require power to maintain, only to update). When that happens it won't reset until you plug it in. As soon as it has AC power it reboots normally. So give that a try before you call the customer support people.
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Welcome to the social. For life

So guess who spammed me Friday with useless information about their service that I'll never use? Did you guess Zune? If you did you win!
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Gosh I'm so excited to experience the "whole new world of Zune", especially if I can experience one where I can unsubscribe from their goddamn spam! Actually this time around I may have. There's no unsubscribe link here but when I clicked the "Privacy" link there was a link to "Communication Preferences". Clicking that got me a page where I had to agree to new "Terms of Service" (What. The. Fuck. I can't unsubscribe without agreeing to "Terms of Service" on a service I don't even use, for hardware I don't own?) and then finally I got to a page where I could unclick something about sending me a Zune newsletter. Maybe now it will finally stop. We'll have to wait and see, won't we? In the meantime I'm still reporting it as spam, because it is. I don't want Zune email, I didn't ask for Zune email, and Microsoft has no legitimate reason to send me Zune email.
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Hulk Fucking Smash!

A few weeks ago I thought to myself, "Hey self you'd better upgrade your WordPress install pretty soon - it's way old." And myself said right back, "Sure, put it on the list, but it won't be easy. The last time you upgraded the sidebar got all screwed up. It will take a least a few hours." Them both of myselves went off to PAX and managed to be out of town as the Wordpress exploit hit over the holiday weekend. (grrr.) Sure enough the site got teh haxx0r3d while I was away. I believe it is fixed now, but a side effect of that fix is that all of the users got nuked away. Your comments were retained, but you'll need to create a new user account in order to post comments again. And since it's a new account I'll get a new moderation request and your comment will be queued until I approve it. Isn't this fun? I think I got everything back into the sidebar but that turned out to be a little tricky, and I didn't have a great template to work from. Let me know if I missed anything. (There are some new bits I turned on while I was in there, but I'm more concerned if anything has disappeared.) On the upside with a more modern install I can start looking at changing the theme. I want to A ) make the display wider, and B ) have a left sidebar so I can balance the page a little better. UPDATE: Oh yeah, this will finally kill off the "Tim's Snarking Post - with Comments" feed that I've been threatening to kill for ages. Since it never worked right really anyway. If you have that feed in your RSS you'll want to update to the new feeds in the sidebar.
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