August 2008 Entries
I seem to have gone through my main mobile phone battery and my two spares without charging any of them. Each battery lasts about nine days, which means I haven't bothered to throw my phone on the charger in nearly a month.
I still haven't managed to find any new job offerings, though I managed to make up for a week's pay (based on my pre-August paycheck) by selling my old TV tuner and two PCs on Craigslist, though that possibility clearly won't last long.
Though Comcast appears to have stopped throttling on their former on-network/off-network basis, it seems like they still haven't given up completely on packet shaping. Take the following screenshots: here I begin downloading a video (legally, mind you).
The download bursts at roughly 4Mbps for about two seconds, then hovers around the 700kbps mark for the rest of the 19mb download.
If I go to download the next video in the series, I get another spike followed by normalization.
What clearly seems to be going on here is that Comcast has found a protocol- and IP-agnostic way to throttle data: by optimizing their pipe...
Well, I got laid off today, along with everybody else at the place I (used to) work.
Anybody looking for a part-time desktop support technician or Web designer?
I personally prefer the 24-hour clock to the more common 12-hour clock. On most OSes and even some obscure devices such as my wristwatch, it's possible to selectively output a 24-hour time. It turns out there was a way to do this with my clock radio too.
My clock is a Lloyd's J274 circa 1978. The clock portion is based on a Sanyo LM8361 chip, which has a select pin for a 24-hour mode. The clock physically has no switch to enable this, but it turns out that by soldering a wire from pin 38 to ground, it's easily enabled, making...
I'm beginning to realize that HD is like The Matrix. You don't really know high the resolution is until you see it for yourself.
Recently I found myself in the market for a new capture card, as my previous one had developed a rather bizarre habit of resetting every ten minutes. While tapping the input button on the front of it wasn't that big of a deal, restarting VLC after the sudden gap in the feed crashed it turned out to be an ordeal of hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del, ending the process, restarting it, and opening the card as a feed could take...