Of Hacks and Possessions…
dancing lessons, spirituality Comments (0)
First: I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having some issues with the loading time for this page. This is due to the ad server (ads.evasivelabs.net- Baywords has ads, not my doing) being slow as a sloth in molasses. An easy solution is to convince your computer to check itself for the ads instead of checking ads.evasivelabs.net. It doesn’t find them, and the rest of the web page loads much more speedily. Here’s how to do it on a Mac or Linux box:
- Open Terminal. For Macs, this is in /Application/Utilities.
- Type “sudo nano /etc/hosts” without the quotes. This command tells your computer to open the text file /etc/hosts in a text editor (nano) as the super user (sudo- “super user do”).
- Enter your password when it’s asked for. You won’t see dots or anything. Just type it and hit enter. If you typed it correctly, you should see a file that looks something like this (the last two lines excluded):
- Add the line “127.0.0.1 ads.evasivelabs.net” (without quotes) to your hosts file. Hit “Ctrl-x”, then “y”, then “Enter”. You should now be looking at the original Terminal screen. Restart your web browser, and voila, this site will load much faster.
On another note, I have given away a lot of my possessions this semester as I work toward a more mobile life. My eventual goal is to be able to follow any “dancing lessons from God” that come my way. Today the victims were my iPod (in anticipation of my purchase of an iPhone in June) and my fridge (which I don’t want to deal with finding a place for this summer. I’m now contemplating selling the desktop I buillt for Winter Term as soon as I can get it working again.
Okay, so if you know me, at this point you’re probably going, “WTF? Why is Jonas talking about selling a computer? Especially one he keeps telling me is so awesome?” A fair question. Basically, I was in a very different place when I built it than I am now- although to be fair, the same could be said of now and last month. If I can get $750 or so for it, I can buy a Macbook this summer and give my Powerbook to my parents. Net result: a laptop in every lap as far as my family is concerned, one less net possession for me, and my main computer will combine the best aspects of my two current ones- black and running a speedy Core 2 Duo processor from the desktop, and being a Mac from the Powerbook. Between an iPhone and a spec’d out Macbook (and maybe, just maybe a Linux-modded Nintendo DS), I will have my computing needs more than covered.
Still haven’t decided for sure about that, but if I did sell it before going home, storage would suddenly become a lot simpler.
jwisser @ May 11, 2008