November 2008 Entries
The hard drive in my backup NAS died before the hard drive in my laptop...
So should I try fixing it, replacing it, or switching to DVD-RAM?
In response to the recent economic downturn, the convenience store down the street from me has increased their price for a two-liter bottle of soda from $1.99 to $2.29. I usually walk in with a $10 bill and buy their fridge's stock of five Mountain Dew bottles; sadly, I can no longer do that.
To the best of my knowledge, the price at the local supermarket is still $1.64. They're extremely rude there, to the point where I'd much rather pay the extra marginal 35 cents to not have to set foot inside. Sixty-five cents, on the other hand, might just...
In response to yesterday's post, I went to the supermarket today. While a two-liter bottle is still (for now, at least) $1.64, the price of a twelve-pack has gone up to $5.59. Cans are 355mL each, and 0.355L * 12 = 4.26 liters in a case. At that rate, I could have picked up nearly the same quantity with the convenience store price of $4.58, or six liters for $4.92 at the supermarket.
In other news, the senior class at school had a photo taken yesterday for the yearbook. In the few minutes before the photo was taken, I sketched a...
I finished up my radio recorder today. Its primary purpose in life is to record four hours of WFNX radio content to a CompactFlash card, and so far it seems to work pretty well.
It's built off spare parts and various things I got off eBay. The concept is such that the radio (duct taped to the side) is fed to the line-in on the computer, where it's exported in WAV format (36KHz/16-bit) to a 2GB CompactFlash card that can later be played on my laptop. The entire thing is then connected to a light timer, which turns it on...
In retrospect, buying a couple of CD-RWs and DVD-RWs instead of spindles of record-once media would have been a good idea. I'm in the process of getting rid of some twenty CDs worth of outdated Linux distros (Red Hat 6.2 or Mandrake 8.1, anyone?), expired time-demos (to which we can argue that Microsoft is not being environmentally conscious with Longhorn and Longhorn Server builds that expire), and free trials that I no longer have licenses to.
For the time being I'm going to keep them aside. I have a pile of burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs, dead rechargeable batteries, and the...
Podcast co-host Mark and I yesterday drove out to Rochester, New York to visit our old co-host Jeff at RIT, among other things. That said, we'll probably be recording a show later tonight, for old time's sake. Stay tuned for photos.