Technocrank

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It Done Broke.

ExpressVPN and D-Link DIR-890L Compatibility

This may or may not be up your alley, but if you own a D-Link DIR-890L or L/R and you’re looking for a VPN service that can be connected to natively by this router (i.e. as an “always on” outbound tunnel), ExpressVPN doesn’t support it.  Their documentation is circumspect (it references the much older DIR-605L f/w 2.05UI) but they’re otherwise pretty transparent that it may not work.  I found it just didn’t connect as an L2TP client no matter how much I tried (even with much discussion with their engineering support).

 

Rails Installation

The current state of setting up a Ruby on Rails application reminds me of the early days of Linux.  There was a time when there were no admin GUIs and you had to compile your distribution from source and it was a race between Slackware and Debian.  Red Hat made serious inroads by giving you an option.

This is me, today, updating gems to try to resolve an error while executing the “rails new” command…ugh…and it still doesn’t work.

Rails gem update

 

Firefox Developer Tools – Colours in RGB

The recent addition of the “inspect element” feature in Firefox and the developer tools is generally welcome (by myself, anyway), but it seems to think that I want to know what colours an element are styled in using RGB values. I can’t find a way out.

An example

I thought I must be missing something, like a config option hidden somewhere. But the closest thing I’ve found to a confirmation or denial is this Mozilla spec page that explicitly states this feature as an option (“(optional) Computed styles automatically converts all of the colors to rgb(). The user may have specified the colors using some other system. In order to help them make sense of the color, display a color swatch next to the color label, in both the initial and expanded views. (F12)”).

Yeah… I could try posting to a forum somewhere or writing my own patch. But then I’d have to face the fact that I’d wasted my time and it will never get merged or even noticed.

This might be a personal failing, but I’ve never styled using rgb()…ever. I’m curious: does anyone?

Porsche Blackberry PPK

I’ve never been a huge fan of RIM’s industrial design, but I love the disdainful hipster comments on this Engadget article about the new Porsche-designed Blackberry P9981.

Blackberry O9981

Thing is, hipsters, this Blackberry wasn’t designed for you. The $2000 device was made for someone who carries one of these:

Walther PPK

Laugh if you will – just don’t do it with the owner in range.

Smokescreen Javascript Flash Player

I’m intrigued by this.  On my system, the Flash player plugin is 31MB of top-quality Adobe-compiled code.  How can it be that Smokescreen, a Javascript implementation of a Flash player that weighs in at 175.1kB (minified) can fully replicate the functionality of the Adobe player?  Either (a) it doesn’t (perhaps a work-in-progress, but still…), or (b) Adobe’s plugin is a steaming pile?