Saved for future reference, since I don’t do it very often…

1. From another admin account, open System Preferences, click Accounts.
2. Control-click the username, select Advanced Options.
3. Change the UID and optionally the GID.
4. From a root shell, chown -R the user's files.
5. If you changed the GID, run:
   dseditgroup -o edit -a $USER -t user $OLDGROUP
6. If you want to add more local groups to match your NFS server, run:
   dseditgroup -o create -r $DESC -i $GID $GROUP

Q: What do the following sentences have in common?

• Dinner is ready.
• This cloth will make me a coat.
• A pool forms.
• A son was born to them.
• Mushrooms grow well in damp places.
• Watermelons are produced here.
• Some business turned up and prevented me from going there.
• His income enables him to live a decent life.
• He is good for nothing.
• A tender understanding seems to have been formed between the two.

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Why is plaintext email converted to HTML on the server? I ask because it’s clear that you’ve never seen what happens when Entourage tries to display the daily log output from a moderately busy mail server. It takes several minutes to render the message, during which time the single-threaded client is completely unresponsive.

I don’t dare kill it, of course, due to the risk of database corruption; I just listen to the fans as they crank up to full speed, and find something else to do.

[side note to the Entourage team: why does resizing the window that’s displaying an HTML-formatted message trigger yet another multi-minute formatting lockup? Did someone hold a gun to your heads and demand that you use an HTML library that was written by four-year-olds?]

Pirates who attacked a ship off the coast of Somalia got more than they bargained for when it turned out to be a naval vessel - from an international force against piracy, Nato said.

The pirates apparently mistook the FGS Spessart for a commercial merchant ship when they targeted it in the Gulf of Aden, between Somalia and Yemen.

(via The Daily Express)

It’s not a new idea, but it would be nice if they sent a few more merchant-ish naval vessels into the area, to thin the herd.

Reina says, “You can call yourself an artist all you want, shutterbug; the bikini stays on.”

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We’re planning a bad-movie marathon for some upcoming weekend. I’ve already acquired DVDs of some of my more memorable college rentals (in particular, Video Vixens and The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak)), but our planning reminded me of two others that weren’t available last time I checked:

…and now they’re mine!

Also overpriced and underpowered, but isn’t that always the way for sexy young things?

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The oddly-named band Bump of Chicken has had a number of hits in Japan, with their songs being used in commercials, games, anime, and, of course, my reading class. Not all of it is to my taste, but I liked the latest one enough to pick up the album last time I was in Kinokuniya.

The designer was an asshole. The front, back, and spine are snow white, with lightly embossed text. Until you get it out of the shrink-wrap, it’s almost impossible to tell that there is text on the cover, much less figure out what it says.

But the fun doesn’t end there. A while back, I complained about the moron who decided to print the liner notes for Aya Matsuura’s latest album in 6-point gothic kanji, including one illegible song that had white text on a light-gray, color-halftoned background. The halftoning made sure that you couldn’t even scan it and blow it up to a reasonable size; the text just disappeared into the dots.

The person responsible for the liner notes in Present from you avoided the halftone trap by printing the lyrics on a nice, clean white background. In 6-point metallic silver ink. Unless you’re under carefully-diffused lighting, you can’t even get an entire line of text to show up clearly at the same time, and the eyestrain from reading 6-point reflective type is insane.

The only good news is that metallic silver is a spot ink, not a process color, so if my scanner can cope with the reflections, I can blow it up to a decent size and hack the contrast into something legible.