Photo
Photo
On Mondays and Wednesdays, I've been having an interesting problem: two almost-adjacent two-hour classes that require me to run back to my dorm after the first class is over, so that I can recharge my laptop. Annoying? You bet.
I researched an extra battery but found out that one would run me $180, and I wouldn't be able to use my docking station with it. So I came up with this:
"This" being a 180-watt-hour battery pack constructed from two UPS batteries and a car adapter. Now I can run around for eleven hours without having to plug in - although my...
Those guys actually went around to pick people up, too.
And so begins my final full day in Boston for a long while. It's a feeling that I knew was coming since last year, but finally set in. I'll be making my last rounds around the city in the morning, and plan on finishing up the packing in the afternoon, leaving Saturday morning for the 6.5-hour, 400mi / 650km trip to college. Hopefully it won't take me all that long to get situated there so that I can come back and detail the move-out and move-in.
Anyway, the past few weeks have been rather eventful:
My rooming situation has been up in...
I was going to save this post for a time when I had a photo to prove to Antony that I am, in fact, not rich, but it's taking me too long to produce that photo.
The news as of last week is that I am now the owner of a '99 BMW 528i, which a number of my friends have dubbed the "Donmobile".
For more photos, check out this post on the SD701 Forums.
(To Antony: I am poor, the 528i was the base model BMW 5series in 1999.)
(To Dave: I don't have any plans to run over your mailbox.)
A: What can't vinyl tape fix?
The button board had been acting flaky for awhile, and often to set the clock I'd just open it up and short the accumulator pin to adjust the time. It turned out that the material between the buttons and the board itself had dried out over the years, thus squishing instead of depressing as expected. I tore it out and used some tape in its place.
(to Antony: this is the same one I modified earlier. Why buy a new clock if I can just fix up what I have?)
I've already had a few requests for a copy of the crowbar image I was using while my blog was down, so here it is:
It feels nice to have some time to spare and catch up on things. I've been quite busy recently, with family, life, work, and school, and the sheer volume of what's been going on had put me off from taking the time to write a blog entry about anything. For those that have kept up with me via e-mail, AIM/iChat, Skype, and the like, bear with me for just a moment.
Things start in mid-April, where I had been working on a series of videos for the senior comedy event at school. This was, more or less, the only time when...
By now, some of you have probably seen the photos of how dirty my Model M keyboard got before I cleaned it. That keyboard hadn’t been cleaned at least since I acquired it in 1996, and I can’t be sure that its previous owner had cleaned it since its date of manufacture in 1989. Of course, the keyboard really never left my desk, so it wasn’t that bad of a dirt magnet.
Enter my laptop. Going on three years old this July, it’s been everywhere from hospitals to restaurants to train stations – it quite literally provokes a, “Do you know...
I found some particularly well-placed graffiti on the way home today – well enough that I walked back later on to take a photo of it.
I’ll bet that it will be quite some time before Uncle Sam resolves the politics of removing the graffiti.
Is it me, or does this post-install process seem a bit excessive? I took these at the first launch of IE8, so the other five or six steps in the installer itself aren’t included in these ten… I don’t even remember Netscape 6 having this many pestering install dialogs. I'm still wondering what to make of this review just yet. There's definitely been progress made, but in true Microsoft fashion, it seems to just be mostly improvements to technologies already available elsewhere. The unofficial Googlebar extension (the same one I was using way back when with Netscape 7.1, mind...
A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I got together and came up with a variant of poker that we called, "Geek Poker." Geek Poker is like regular poker, except it's played with PCMCIA, CardBus, and ExpressCard cards instead of a standard paper deck. The deck is created by pooling all the geeks' cards, and several categories are chosen appropriately. If there's a category with only one card, then it's permissible to make that category a wildcard (for instance, our wildcard was a TV tuner). Here's an example hand:
The cards are:
Megahertz 14.4k V.32bis fax...
Rather than simply throw out my non-landfill-friendly trash, I keep my so-called "e-waste" in a box underneath my bed. Needless to say, it's starting to fill up, and opening the box can sometimes make my eyes begin to water. This box is home to dead hard drives, useless write-once CDs, damaged floppies, blown electrolytic capacitors, burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs, and some dead (and even leaking and sulfated!) batteries. So therefore, this box contains varying amounts of lithium, sulfuric acid, zinc, manganese, mercury, cadmium, and various other heavy metals. Does anyone actually dispose of these by any particularly "safe"...
This is how I communicate with the rest of my family. To Antony: the container and the toaster in the background are both from the 1970s.
Mountain Dew has gone through a few logo changes since I first started drinking it, but this new one's downright weird. "Mtn" Dew? I can only assume that the new generation of Mountain Dew drinkers has an attention span of three letters.
As with the old Mountain Dew logo changes, it doesn't look like the drink itself has changed (anybody remember the "Same Dew, New View" ads?), as the ingredients on the back of both seem to suggest.
Then there's the issue of the new logo background. I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to represent, perhaps shards of glass or,...
I woke up this morning with "WEAR SHOES" scribbled on my hand. At the foot of my bed is a pair of shoes, no pun intended. After the disorientation of the first five seconds of wakefulness dissipates, I remember that I stepped on a light bulb yesterday, and that there are probably still small glass fragments on the floor.
I also notice that it's dark - darker than usual, at least for 8:45 in the morning. But of course, we can blame that on me too, for leaving this in front of the window:
Using the canned air I got for...
I'll post when I get back.
What do you get when you cross a snowstorm, Web server, webcam, and an ironing board?
At the time of this writing, the storm hasn't started yet. The photos this thing is taking are available over here, updating every five minutes, or at least while it doesn't get too dark for the camera to see anything but it's not updating anymore since it's dark out.
Earlier on I blogged about the two discolored lines down my laptop's screen. Unfortunately I now have five of them, and it looks like a sixth one might be developing. I'm stumped as to where they're coming from; if I bend the screen just right, they'll disappear, so maybe it's a broken trace or a loose cable. Either way, some of you have known me long enough to remember the ultimate fate of my old HP laptop's screen, which was much worse:
A few people have asked why I don't send it back for repair. Yes, the three-year warranty came standard,...
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...
Yesterday, Antony showed me a Mii version of me, created using the Mii Channel on his Nintendo Wii.
I can't say I've ever seen myself in Mii form, so I'd say this is pretty cool. Thanks!
How would you like to stare at these colored lines all day?
I don't know exactly where they're originating. I used a pair of binoculars to zoom in on the affected pixels to figure out exactly what's going on screen-side. It turns out that the yellow bar is generated by the red and green subpixels for that column being stuck in the on position. The blue bar, as you may have guessed, is caused by the blue subpixels being stuck. Blue in the first bar and red and green in the second work as expected, so if I display pure white,...
Antony got a second Bluetooth laser mouse today and is calling himself poor, so I'd like to show him an actual poor geek's collection of mice:
From left to right: 2x Mitsumi PS/2 scroll mouse, Microsoft Serial-MousePort Mouse 2.0, Gateway (Microsoft) Trekker 2.0A Wheel Mouse, Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0A, Logitech Serial-MouseMan, and Logitech MouseMan. I can't find the controller card for the InPort bus mouse, so I can't tell if it works or not.
I would like to point out that none of these mice are cordless, optical, or even USB-compliant. The newest one of the lot (the Trekker) is from 1998,...
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 certainly have been posting more than usual, haven't I?
Sometime last year, my school ditched their old circa-1978 Tandberg Educational Language Lab and replaced it with a newer Sanako lab. The new lab uses PCs instead of cassette tapes and, perhaps most important to this post, new headsets. While they were in the process of getting rid of the old lab, a couple of people and I asked if we could take some of the old headsets. Unfortunately, these old headsets used a 6P6C connector instead of 3.5" stereo connectors, so we couldn't just plug them into a computer and...
Having uncomfortably finished three term papers earlier this month, I decided to buy a PS/2 to USB signal converter so that I could use my IBM Model M keyboard with my notebook.
(Yes, I colored in my Model M's cable such that it's PC97-compliant. =D)
This turned out to be somewhat difficult, for two reasons. First, the Model M is based around en entire Motorola 6805 CPU rather than the standard-issue Intel 8048 microcontroller. Rumor has it that the keyboard was designed as such to facilitate a hardware terminal emulator, though I've never been able to confirm this. As a result, the...
Earlier today, Antony informed me that I hadn't yet shown the world my cheapskate version of a high-gain 2.4GHz antenna for 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth. So here's the antenna in all its duct taped, rabbit ear pole glory:
So it may not be the most attractive antenna up there, but I can get roughly +5dBi off this when it's fully extended and properly positioned (it's directional, unfortunately). I pulled one of the poles off an unused pair of television rabbit ears, lashed it up to the side of my monitor with duct tape, and then connected it to the antenna pad on...
After trying and failing to buy a replacement camera off eBay for well over a week, I turned to Craigslist in search of a faster means of achieving the same thing. Quite conveniently, I found someone living not far from me with an Olympus C-3000Z for sale - two memory cards, a carrying case, neck strap, infrared remote, and video cables included - for a meager $50. For comparison, the camera retailed for $799 back in 2000. After one e-mail and one phone call, I dropped buy just hours after seeing the ad and picked up the camera, no middlemen...
UPDATE 2/13/08 - There were seven discs, it turns out, instead of ten. Most of them were kids' games with an ESRB "Early Childhood" rating, which seems to shed some light on what actually happened...
I've had to repair replace a good few CD drive mishaps in the past: a floppy stuck in a CD drive, two CDs stuck in a CD drive, and even piece of salami stuck in a CD drive. But nothing, and I repeat, nothing, has come close to this:
Don't let the look of it deceive you: there aren't just seven discs crammed in there. Quite...
Not quite what you were expecting? AT&T's dropping their AMPS service, so I needed to buy a new phone that runs on a digital network. The Motorola v60i came in AMPS (right), GSM (left), and CDMA, so I picked the GSM version up off eBay.
AT&T is the sole analog provider left in the area. Now that I have the option of switching providers, I'm moving to T-Mobile: their prepaid airtime rates are over three times cheaper than AT&T's.
I had an unusually good day today.
School's ripping out its old "Tandberg Educational Language Lab" from the '70s to make way for a new computerized system. As such, anybody that wants the equipment (headsets, audio cassette decks, and a control unit) is free to take it with permission from the Modern Language department. Today I picked up a headset; it uses an RJ-11 head instead of a stereo or mini-stereo head, so provided the two use the same signal I should be able to create an adapter with ease. If not, another trip to Radio Shack. Tomorrow I'm going to...