Mokka mit Schlag » Tech

Yep, I did it again. I ordered yet another PC from Dell. I wasn’t exactly happy about ordering my latest box from convicted fraudsters; but nobody else I trusted came close on price, especially when the Memorial Day sale price kicked in. I actually wanted a less powerful system with no monitor, mouse, or keyboard and Windows XP; but that would have cost quite a bit more than what I did buy.

I most certainly did not buy the extended 3 year warranty with onsite service. I have no faith at all that Dell would actually fulfill any part of that promise. However, this isn’t a mission critical system (I mostly bought it for Age of Conanexperimenting with Java 7) and I’m capable of supporting myself for most tasks.
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For my insect photography, I’ve been reading a lot of books and web pages about closeup photography. They usually suggest three things:

• Diopters, a.k.a closeup lenses
• Macro lenses
• Extension tubes

I haven’t tried extension tubes yet, but I did buy myself a cheap set of macro and closeup lenses. However, I discovered that the directions were distinctly lacking. Furthermore, none of the books and web pages I consulted explained what these did or how to use them in words I could understand. So today I ran a few experiments to figure out just what they did and how to use them. Since flying insects in the park aren’t exactly a reproducible test case, I set up my tripod and took some pictures of a flower on my dining room table with different lenses. Here’s what I figured out:
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Personally I listen to hardly any Internet radio, or much radio at all for that matter except when I’m driving; and being a New Yorker that’s almost never. However people who do listen to the radio seem incensed over a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board to dramatically increase fees Internet radio station pay for broadcasting music. Some are even calling it a death sentence. I’m not so pessimistic, and here’s why.
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Joanna Rutkowska rips through Windows Vista “security”. I wonder what she’d do to Mac OS X or Linux?

I am seeking tools (especially GUI tools) that will perform regular expression, grep like search and replaces. Ideally the tool would be open source, multiplatform and would provide the functionality of BBEdit:

Requirements include:

• Transparent handling of line endings
• Able to recursively descend through various directories
• File filters to determine what to search
• Autodetection of character encodings

I could write this myself in Java, but not by my deadline. Any suggestions?

Game over. Sony has forfeited and Blu-Ray has lost.
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