It snowed pretty much all night last night. I made the mistake of going out again for some last minute groceries, a jaunt down the block that wound up taking a solid hour, most of which was occupied by my trying to nagivate the TARDIS safely over frozen roads with no traction whatsover, and horrible visibility due to the huge snowflakes and Virginia drivers who think that high beams are perfectly acceptible to use in an environment filled with highly reflective particles. I got home and stayed home.
Last night Lyssa and I watched the first half of the second …
This is a shell script for OpenBSD that will automatically update the source tree for your systemware as well as the ports collection from a public CVS server. This file must be edited to configure the $CVSROOT variable as well as the branch of OpenBSD that you're following (for example, OPENBSD_3_8). It must be run as root, and I'm too busy right now to add a check to make sure that the user running it has root privileges. Use your brain: Put it in /root, mode 0700.
This utility was designed to convert information about someone or something into a form better suited for magickal operations. It's written in Perl and outputs an MD5 message digest suitable for use in sigils, mantras, chanting, or what have you. Documentation is built in and displayed with the command signature_generator-1.1.pl --help.
The utility requires the Perl module Digest::MD5, which is included with most any copy of Perl these days.
This is one of my first technomagickal experiments written in Perl, a utility that converts words written in English or Hebrew characters into numbers for use in gematria, a process used to discern concealed patterns and relationships between words, and thus their associated concepts.
I originally developed this utility with Perl v5.6, and it runs under v5.8 and later without trouble.
gematria-1.0.pl --help will print the online help.
gematria-1.0.pl --how_to_supply_hebrew_words will explain how to pass Hebrew characters to the utility.
Here's a shell script that makes it simple to burn DVDs on a *nix machine. Requires cdrtools v2.00.0 or greater and a reasonably up-to-date set of dvd+rw-tools. I use v5.19-1.4.9.7 on Leandra. Make it executable with the command chmod 0755 /path/to/burn_dvd and invoke it with burn_dvd /dev/dvd_burner /path/to/files-to-burn.or-iso-image. I've only tested it as root. If this script blows up in your face, it's not my fault or my problem. The script will output usage information if you don't supply any command-line arguments and is well-commented.
When I saw this page at Propping Up the Mythos, I knew immediately who I'd be making a Deep One embryo in a bottle for - Derek Pegritz, the Crawling Chaos Himself. Pegritz's encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft never ceases to amaze or impress me, and I know he'll get a kick out of it.
I started off by finding a jar of some kind that would be ideal for holding something roughly fist-sized, like an embryo of one of Lovecraft's creatures. I eventually found a suitable container at Wal-Mart, of all places, for just a few …
