Well, the cable run upstairs from the basement was a success. However, the Linksys is fighting with the Airport for DHCP supremacy in an all-too-familar smackdown. Yesterday I was able to hang the Airport off the Linksys and still have the Airport hand out DHCP assignments and manage the client cloud effectively; today, I'm getting no love from the bitmonsters. Still, I now have RJ-45 Ethernet run from the DSL entry point to the very center of the house both upstairs and down, a good place to be if you envision a mixed wired/wireless network with a server closet.
All of this after some heavy bushwhacking that yielded a nice haystack size pile of slaughtered and dismembered tree parts.
Linksys BESFR41 docs, Ars Technica writeup. I'm patching thin into my home LAN as an upstairs hub and need to figure out if I want to let it run DHCP or keep it on the Airports. I also need to see what havoc the default config might enforce on stuff like Appletalk and so forth.
Oh today's a busy day - drilling cable runs, pruning trees, cleaning house.
The same day I squashed my cell-phone, it should be noted, Viv accidentally attached her iPod to a magnetic-latch closure on her cell-phone case. The iPod was described to me as "stuck to the case." Hearing this, I had no great hope that the tiny hard drive was functional, and indeed, after much waving of chicken feet and casting of entrails, I pronounced the device dead. Happily, it was well under warranty and so we took it to the Apple Store in U Village and they immediately replaced it.
Further adding to the week of technical misery, my car's right turn light finally popped out of the crunched fender it has been doggedly clinging to for the past few years, and it's currently taped in place. We haven't been able to find the time this weekend to get it to a shop but it's clearly necessary now.
R. W. Apple holds forth, with some bloviation, on Northwestern oysters in The Oyster Is His World [NYT]. I'll slurp to that!
So, speaking generally, the skinny on my smashed Treo is: I'm SOL. Apparently the Treo 700p is due out in mid-May (that's the 700 with PalmOS on it instead of Windows Mobile), but Palm hasn't made a formal announcement on this yet. That means that even used Treo 650s are running around $300 on eBay. Forum postings indicate that having a hissy fit on the phone with your provider might sometimes result in a replacement discounted phone.
I'm leaning in the direction of locating a vanilla candy-bar phone that I can use until the 700p is out and then assessing.
The screen is utterly cracked and I can't get the phone to wake up, as the key guard feature requires a button press. However, incoming calls do activate the phone and while the display is about 50% obscured by a black fog-like area the touchscreen works perfectly well.
I did locate a Treo repairman, but the base rate to fix a dual screen and keyboard failure, including parts and labor, is over $200. My guess is that after the 700w comes out $200 will be the average resale price on eBay for the 650.
Word to the wise: do not step on your Treo 650 until such time as the Treo 700p has been released.
dammit.
In ameliatory fashion, all four flowering fruit trees on our proppity have burst forth. The lord of them, a tall cherry in the back yard, has a distinct and lovely fragrance.
The spots on my right hand where I foolishly, and twice, attempted to grasp the handle of a dutch oven containing our ham are mighty discomforted.
Tonight we braved the wilds of westernmost West Seattle for a tasty sunset meal at La Rustica, a place I've often wished to try.
We enjoyed a delicious appetizer of broiled oysters with spinach, cheese, and pixie dust. Viv had some chicken deal, and I had a wild boar chop, wrapped in bacon. It was very good.
Viv variously enjoyed and was blinded by the setting sun over the waves. I personally ejoyed looking at my wife as she was brilliantly illuminated by the sunset.
On the drive home, Viv noted the neon in motion of a traveling carnival in the south parking lot of Northgate Mall. It's cold tonight and they did not appear to be doing big box office.
Viv and I are just now heading to the halfway mark of the third hour of a 60-to-90 minute visit with an in-home sales rep for a window replacement company. He's estimating in the range of 20k to 30k for the project, which would cover nearly all of the windows on the upper floor of the house. That wouldn't include some skylights and set of doors.
UPDATE: time check, 10 pm, still here.
Broadcast Date: Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Eventual URL: www.pbs.org/pov/tintinandi/
Woo-hoo! Gimme dat Hergé!
Q, an open source emulator that supports Windows and Linux on Macs. Looking forward to doing some speed comparisons.
Now when the hell will I see those 200gb travelstars on eBay?
(Via this informative roundup of virtualization options in the age of the intelMac. Are you lissnen mobstahs?)
Alas, they had no monkfish liver.
I am excited to learn that my backup mail service, fastmail.fm, has upgraded their TOS for Enhanced users - I can now assign 200 aliases and 50 virtual domains there, and they have also implemented a 1GB WebDAV volume at that service level with includes some level of hosting. This may very well mean I can basically stop selfhosting for email, which would be a Good Thing. The aliases also mean that I can transfer all the friend and role addresses over there and I might even be able to do proper groups.
This time, I'm testing the mobile videoblogging service available via blip.tv. It seems like file upload speed to my mail provider from the Treo might be part of the problems I have seen with these attempts.
Crud - the Flickr crosspost just plain failed, and the post to mike.whybark.com appears to have succeeded, but the post format only provides a link instead of a thumbnail linked to the movie asset.
Not only that - but it looks as if the file upload for the video asset is also no good. It took over four tries to upload the attachment, and the handset kept trying to go to sleep while uploading. The final, apparently successful upload took about 10 minutes, much more time than it should have based solely on file size, about a megabyte.
cityofsound: Why Lost is genuinely new media [via thingsmagazine.net]
Far out. The author notes that there is a book for sale on Amazon seen on the show as a manuscript being read by Hurley, and cites the author bio from the online bookseller's listing:
"About the Author: Bad Twin is the highly-anticipated new novel by acclaimed mystery writer Gary Troup. Bad Twin was delivered to Hyperion just days before Troup boarded Oceanic Flight 815, which was lost in flight from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles in September 2004. He remains missing and is presumed dead."
Lostpedia, a wikipedia for the show.
I had a dream last night in which I stumbled into a little known hipster subculture centered on the construction and flight of archaic aircraft while dressed in pseudo-authentic period costume.
Among other things, I saw a linen-winged open-frame triplane in flight and met a young man in a vibrantly reimagined riff on the baby-blue service uniform of a Great War French airman. The high-collared tunic had rainbow piping and embroidered logos and symbols on the back, at the elbows, and at the shoulders and breast. This decoration combined the manner of astronaut flight suits, NASCAR track outfits, and the heraldry of motorcycle club colors.
In essence, the garment, as I dreamt it, was an argument that the Great War practice of personalizing pilots' planes with distinctive unit devices and color schemes is the common ancestor of these more modern coats of manty colors.
FREE*PASS: All the copyright rubbish you can take for $99 a year, or $1.99 per flick. Despite my distinct perception that this is cinematic shovelware, I have not taken the time to see if all the UK Hitchcock they have is actually from archive.org or if it's sublicensed from commercial distribution. I will note that they have a ton of black-and-white horror (lotsa Karloff) and some really crazy stuff. such as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. But really, $1.99? That seems like it beats BitTorrent considered simply in terms of time for a lot of this stuff.
Another thought - the stuff they have available is distinctly reminiscent of the late-night local-horror-host material that was once prevalent in this great nation, and has succumbed to the wash of money that erodes local flavor with such vigor. I wonder, are there distribution restrictions on the content? Could I create a video podcast around, say, Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth, peppering the film with shots of me in an ill-fitting bald-head wig, cape, and round-lensed black glasses, telling stupid jokes and pretending to drink from beakers of dry ice?
I got rolling with Vimeo yesterday and today, and apparently was able to email a movie to my Vimeo account; but for some reason the clip isn't rendering there successfully. Googling for a direct Vimeo-to-MT pipe such as Flickr makes available has been fruitless, to date.
That reminds me, i keep meaning to make sure Jim sees the cover of the Newsweek dated April 3.
After all, Coke simply doesn't have enough caffeine, as we all know.
This appears to be a Coke-branded coffee beverage. Viv pointed out that the swoosh over the "a" must mean that it's pronounced "Blake."
In other news, it looks like Vimeo permits post-by-email for video clips. A bit more snooping to locate a reflector for MT and maybe we're good to go.
I did find this script this morning, but I think it's abandonware. I like the direct-to-your-host model for this, since I bridle at paying Flickr, and eventually Vimeo, and my back-up email service, $25 bucks each a year to get this stuff running.
Hopefully, this will implement the new posting template, although yesterday's post had some sort of line break bug that this implementation may not redress.
I suppose the next thing is to find the equivalent of post-by-mail with Flickr for audio and movies off this device, eh?
ES over at ...pickhits... comments obliquely on the weekend's outbreak of Midwestern tornadoes, which apparently also struck his farm.
