I got a gift card for iTunes from my parents. Normally, I wouldn’t buy iTunes credit, opting rather for Amazon MP3 for my online purchases, but since this was essentially free money, and Apple has removed the Digital Rights Management from their online store, I figured I would go for it.
What I didn’t anticipate is that iTunes would work worse than it did years ago.
I will let my message to Apple Support speak for itself. Read the rest of this entry »
Each summer thus far, I have wandered all summer long and never made any progress on any leads I’ve had, programming-wise or otherwise. I hope to change that this summer.
So I’m making a list.
The penlight, in its nonfunctional state on the palmrest of my laptop.
My penlight stopped working.
It’s perfectly fine with me; it was a freebie I snatched up from the Michigan Tech Advanced Technologies Development Complex during orientation week. But still…it worked, and then it didn’t. And I wanted to know why.
So I cut it apart.
Turns out that these puppies house an entire triple-A battery inside them! The outside housing of the battery is connected to the negative side of the
The penlight, cut open and splayed out on the table.
battery, so it comes all the way around to the positive side. It has a spring that pushes the battery away from the light bulb; when I press the switch, it mashes the spring and pushes the battery to the light bulb. Except the bulb was burned out. Oops.
I was digging around in my long-abandoned Windows partition, and I found some old backups of some old stuff. One particular program I used to be so proud of is my Sudoku Solver. It is a C++ program that I wrote as a final project my sophomore year of high school; I opened the files and made the necessary modifications to make it compile (stripped a couple of mistakes out of the header file; removed a system() call that only works under Windows) and stuck the GPL on it. It isn’t particularly clean, or a great solution, and it has next to no comments, but here’s the source of Sudoku Solver. You can compile it under Linux by issuing the command “g++ board_handler.cpp main.cpp”. As for Windows, I used Bloodshed Dev-C++ for the longest time; I believe it has a Windows version of g++ behind the scenes, so it should behave the same. I included a simple unsolved file for it to read; pointing it at sudoku.sdk saved a lot of time in debug…
Is it bad to be barely an adult and already have nostalgic moments?
K3b is a good CD burning app for Ubuntu. But it won’t burn MP3 files right out of the box. A bit of Googling and trial and error reveals the fix for this. Read the rest of this entry »