Category Archives: Blog

This is why it’s worth learning about advertising

A lot of people are asking what Apple’s target market is, and how they’re going to sell this iPad. These people are all stupid. Apple has told us exactly how they’re going to sell it.

From Apple.com:

Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.

Bam! That’s their selling point! Somebody gets paid lots of money to write that sentence, and they earn it all, because that sentence will sell several billion of these things.

Geeks are getting pissed off because this isn’t a real computer/doesn’t run OS X/doesn’t have XYZ/is a glorified iPod touch. This is because geeks know nothing about advertising, which is another way of saying they don’t know how people work. Admen get paid to understand the entire planet and to synthesize it all into a sentence. So when you look at Apple’s advertising, you know that this isn’t just empty speech. Apple has figured out what the entire world wants and it is magic and revolution. That’s how they’re selling it. They figure the only people who won’t want an iPad are people who don’t like magic.

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All moved in (again)

A little while ago I decided to move my blog from my home linux server to a Rackspace cloud server so that my frequent meddling with my home server wouldn’t keep bringing my site down.

But today I decided that the easy-peasiest way for me to host this site would be to go full circle and move it back to wordpress.com with a custom domain.

For anyone who’s considering moving a self-hosted wordpress blog back to wordpress.com, the process is pretty simple.

Create a new blog on wordpress.com, then use the import/export functionality to dump all the stories out of your old blog and import them into the new one. It’ll even bring across the pictures you uploaded and store them in your new storage space.

Then once you’ve got it looking right, click “Upgrades” and select to map your domain. You’ll need to have access to the DNS settings of your domain so you can point the nameservers to wordpress.com, but it’s a relatively simple process and there’s a stack of howtos available.

Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with my Wiki.

Browsing irrationale from a mobile? Good news!

If you view irrationale on a iPhone, storm, droid or similar, then our new mobile skin should make things much more comfortable for you.

Enjoy!

Snow Leopard on Non-Apple Hardware

Building a hackintosh, an Apple computer which uses off-the-shelf hardware, can be a pretty daunting task. In the past I’ve struggled with confusing walk-throughs, been frustrated with shitty custom builds of OSX and generally thrown in the towel after about 4 hours of abject failure.

But all that changed when I found this article.

All you’ll need is something reasonably modern – in my case it was the following hardware:

  • Gigabyte X48-DS4 Motherboard
  • Intel Core 2 Duo 3.2GHz
  • 4Gb of DDR2-800 RAM
  • Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1Tb

I also didn’t have a large enough USB memory stick, so instead I used an 80Gb 2.5″ hard disk and an IDE to USB adaptor. If your motherboard is able to boot from a USB key, it should be able to boot from one of these too.

Following the guide is relatively easy, but there is one step which was missed (at least in my case), and that’s the installation of Chameleon on your hard disk once you’ve finished the install. Unless you want to keep your USB key permanently plugged in to your system, I’d suggest you go through the boot installer steps again once you’ve finished and use the ID of your main hard disk.

Enjoy!

Upgrading OpenSolaris to the latest Dev version

At the time of writing, the release buid version of OpenSolaris is 111b, and the latest dev build is 124.

To upgrade, open a terminal and run the following commands:

user@opensolaris:~$ pfexec su -
root@opensolaris:~# pkg set-publisher -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev opensolaris.org
root@opensolaris:~# pkg image-update

Expanding your OpenSolaris NAS

After yesterday’s guide on setting up a Solaris NAS, I figure the next logical questions would be:

  • How do I change out disks which have failed?
  • How do I change out smaller disks for larger ones?
  • Can I add more disks to my pool?

All three questions are quite easily answered, and can, for the most part, be done with a single tool.

Read More »

Home NAS with OpenSolaris

After a few requests, I’ve decided to put together a simple howto for building a home NAS with Opensolaris.

The main reasons to choose Opensolaris are simple:

  • Common PC hardware is all you need. No propriatary disk bay system.
  • Gigabit Ethernet. Well, providing your network card and switch support it.
  • Cheap, redundant disk arrays with ZFS, the Opensolaris RAID-like filesystem.
  • Quick and easy setup.

In a nutshell; it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s simple. So on the upside you won’t need to spend a great deal of cash to get yourself a nice NAS, but you might miss out on a feature or two. Read More »

Hmm. Time for a redesign?

Perhaps it’s just that I’m tired of the old look. Perhaps it’s that I’ve been influenced by some of the awesome typographic sites out there on the net. Perhaps I’ve watched the film “Helvetica” one too many times.

But I think it’s time I re-kerjiggered this joint. Any suggestions?

Recovering from WoW: Day 1

delete_wow

When I started playing World of Warcraft around four years ago, I would never have imagined that a video game could dominate my life. I thought I was just sitting down to play a game, but I was wrong. Very wrong.

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What to do

Well, it’s been a long time since my last post on irrationale, mainly due to the fact that I’ve been very busy, and have also managed to break the database which runs the site during a recent server migration.

We were running on a mac server, but have since moved to a Linux server, and somewhere along the lines all of the images got broken.

So I’m now faced with a question – what to do with irrationale.com

I could just let it die- after all, I have been running this blog (albeit half heartedly) for the last 4 years. I could also take the opportunity to reimagine the whole kit and kaboodle – at the moment there’s not really any clear direction or meaning behind it, and a radical rethink may make it fresh and fun again.

Stay tuned.