Pretty much everyone who reads this blog would like this site. I know a few off the top of my head…who knows, some of you might be getting this stuff for your birthday!
Edit:
My mother pointed out how much she likes the USB Christmas tree. I personally think the USB Aquarium is pretty fun.
The current /. poll asks Last book you read? I had to pick “Other non-fiction” as it was a cook book. I’m not mad that cooking was not an option, I a little bumbed that nobody in the comments has talked about cooking books. I guess not too many people read cook books from cover to cover, skipping a recipe here and there.
Discoveries tonight as I sit over-tired but not willing to go to sleep, partially from perusing the 2004 Weblog Awards:
Ni-ni.
I succeeded in getting the (better) ivtv framebuffer driver working, but my previous impressions of the mpeg were wrong. Still looking choppy, and to top it all off I wasn’t getting any frequencies to work. Harrumph. This has taken way, way too long. I should stop using such old stuff, depending on my further research to progressively move things slowly forward to more stable and reliable versions.
I found a cool writeup by Jarod Wilson of how to set up MythTV on a system running Fedora. I’ve already got Fedora Core 2 on CD on the shelf in the office, so I think I’ll bail on the KnoppMyth idea for now and give those instructions a run with a fresh install. I’d even been considering doing Win98 + the software bundled with the card to qualify the card as functioning correctly, but then as I was passing the Wasters in the Fourth Great Circle of Hell I pulled myself out and came up with an alternative that I can live with.
Next update will be the initial results of doing everything under Fedora, based initially on Jarod’s notes. Fingers crossed.
Only by reading thru some messages in the forum on SourceForge did I discover that the 0.1.9 version released January 13 2004 isn’t the actual stopping point in development. Over at ivtv.no-ip.com are the real ongoing copies, including 0.2.0-rc3 from December 12th and an alpha-level (I presume) version 0.3.0. WOW. Its install.txt file even concurred with something I’ve read elsewhere: ivtv shouldn’t need any special parameters for its module anymore. It should figure out my system’s PAL nature, among other things.
I put the new 0.2.0-rc3 stuff in place, and a test of
cat /dev/video0 > /tmp/my.mpg
resulted in about 6 seconds of snow when I watched it on another machine. No sound yet either. However, it had consistent snow, no frame loss that I could see. Oh, hope of hopes. I’ll add a channel, give it a try, and report back. Later today I’ll try to write up the details of exactly what I’ve done and how I put the new version in place on top of the KnoppMyth I’m running. But I wanted to at least share this positive news, and the detail that isn’t yet appearing on the SourceForge project page or even on the ivtv parent page. A real shame when you figure there have to be plenty of other people suffering the way I am—including one person who wrote me just this morning.
Today our son Patrick and I went out to do a bunch of errands. Drop clothes off at the laundromat (our washing machine is broken), drop off lots of recycling, and do a follow up supermarket run for the pieces we need for this week’s recipes.
Just after leaving the recycling center, a cool new place that just opened, from behind me P said, “Dad” with a bit of desperation in his voice. As I looked in the rear-view mirror he coughed a couple of times, then suddenly started barfing. I’m driving at 30 miles an hour on a fairly thin road (Ireland isn’t known for its huge thoroughfares) and suddenly he’s freaking out and exploding, launching his breakfast over his legs. That’s only happened a few times in his little life in very different settings, but each one is pretty concrete in my memory.
Anyway, I entered this funky crisis mode that freaks me out a little when I look at it in retrospect. Normally in any day-to-day thing actions involve some level of forethought. You think for even half a second about what you’re going to do with lots of random actions. But not when a kid is in trouble. Jesus. As soon as he started to be sick, I saw that a bus was just pulling out of a spot where the road widens a bit, and pulled right over. An old guy with a cane looked at our car with some worry as it flew over to the side of the road, came to a screeching halt as I put on the hazard lights, and I jumped out of the car. There was traffic coming from both directions, and as a collective group they all got pissed off at me at the same time. My car was still covering half of the left lane turning it into an alternating one-way route, but I didn’t really care. For all I knew Patrick was going to choke to death. The only fair description of the emotions was fuck the world. Nothing else was important.
I ran to the other side and threw open the door. I got Patrick out of his seat and stood him next to the car. Off came his jacket and pants, now unwearable. I grabbed cloths and some moist towelettes out of the glove box to clean him up and try to get his seat back into a usable condition for the return home. I had to let him hug my shoulder when he started sobbing in response to the shock of what just happened. His boots and the bottom of his shirt were awful, but eventually his clothes and his seat were finally clean. He was lifted back into his seat, tucking my jacket around his now-bear legs as I strapped him in. I left messages at home and on Elana’s mobile phone to let her know that we weren’t going food shopping and would return home.
On the way back he said from behind, “I’m sorry I choked Dad. I cried after. I’m sorry I was sick Dad.” Heartbreaking. I offered some consolation, emphasizing how important it was that he was feeling better and anything that happened didn’t matter a bit.
I got a brief call on the way from Elana where I could tell her that he was okay and coming home. By the time we got home (half an hour later: cardboard isn’t recycled here without individual effort but we’ll talk about that another time), I think I figured out what had happened. He had a big breakfast, followed by a few bits of chocolate (for pooping in the toilet entirely on his own, a big step), then a 30-minute drive in a warm car to the recycling center next to some plastic bins with wine bottles, beer cans, and juice bottles still with the smallest hints of unpleasant smells. All the ingredients to a good old hit of car sickness. (I’ll try my best to not read too much into the fact that both Elana and Patrick are now on record as having gotten motion sickness from being passengers in a car I was driving…I like to believe I’m a decent driver, even if I’ve got a funky car accident in my past.)
After he was home for about half an hour, we gave him a little apple juice which stayed down, then a light lunch of chicken sandwiches made using the rest of what we had for dinner the night before. (Definitely something for The Accidental Cook.) The lunch went well, with Patrick back in his usual (amazing) good spirits. The rest of the day progressed without any further drama.
I realized at lunch how the human brain seems to enter a completely alternate state when your child is in trouble. I didn’t actively think about the right thing to do. I just acted. Similar in sensation to sheer panic but with apparently coherent thought, my emotions and impulses focused on making Patrick feel better, now. Find out what was wrong, and make it right. No choice in the matter.
It’s kind of frightening how this mode of thought completely overpowers you. I couldn’t have done anything else if I wanted to. Only when he was back in his seat, calm, and ready to continue home did I really feel my brain thinking clearly again. I’m looking forward to further long periods of clear thought, thank you very much.
When VCRs hit the world, they gave you the ability to save your copy of MacGyver or Whiz Kids or Airwolf seemingly forever. You could take a break from cleaning your living room to watch that dusty tape with the General Hospital episode where Luke and Laura were married. TV executives didn’t seem too bothered by the idea.
With the aggressive eroding of privacy in all facets of our lives, the pull for power by some seems unstoppable. There are reports that at least one Time Warner exec wants to introduce a new rule: Transitional Fair Use. You may have recorded last night’s episode of Gilmore Girls on your MythTV box, but watch out: if this plan actually takes form, they’d effectively put a timer on the show. You’d have less than a week to watch what you recorded—when the next episode airs, you lose the right to watch the previous week’s recording. They wouldn’t make your box burst into flame or raid your home with a S.W.A.T. team, but they could still claim that you broke the rules.
You pirate, you.
There are folks who are noticing the effort and conversations abound. Hopefully this “possibility” won’t turn into a law buried in a bill about proper care of public grasslands or a quiet regulation from the FCC.
If we’re not careful the needs of the money may be fed by the needs of the few. Or the one.
余艾蕾 and I put together what we like to call Zoe Type, a glut/GL program that I was seeking for my Junior Hacker, Zoë. Well, something like it. I put the source up.
Phone companies often offer customers the (barely documented) ability to identify the number you’re using. By calling an ANAC (Automatic Number Announcement Circuit), you can have the system tell you the phone number that is the origin of your call. I was reading stuff in the Blacklisted! 411 online forum and saw a post about one such ANAC that you can use all over the US: +1-800-444-4444. That number also appears with many others in The Tech FAQ‘s own explanation of ANACs.
If you use the “default” monopoly phone provider in Ireland, you have to pay a lot for calls to America. But there are alternatives, including one company called TeleStunt that charges the normal national call rate in Ireland for international calls to the US. (All calls in Ireland are charged by the minute—we don’t have any “local calls” like the US does.)
Through Telestunt I called the 800 number above, and was told by MCI that I was calling from “719 555 1212”; look it up, and you find that it’s directory assistance in Colorado. For kicks, I dialed the 800 number directly, and was told that I was calling from 212 918 0000; the prefix of 212-918-xxxx is in New York City. Call it, and you get a busy signal. A Google search of the number just finds a PDF with a weird phone bill.
Wonder why Telestunt shows me in Colorado, and via our regular phone company we’re in New York City?
Does that imply that a harassing or threatening call from here to the US wouldn’t be (easily) traceable?
A recent InformationWeek article titled “Don’t Take The Name ‘Laptop’ Literally” is best described by reading the tag for the story:
Years after laptops became a required tool of business, we learn the heat they generate can make men infertile if they put them on their laps.
Now if companies like Transmeta start to market their low-power low-heat processor chips using this sort of information, they’ll definitely be able to tap an untouched (heh…) market.
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