Matt’s added onboard jabber/iChat support to MeFi! Crap! I will no longer accomplish a single personal goal.
Balls!
Tom Harpel has posted a plea for assistance in the lifting of my wife’s bowling ball. We’ll be glad to help, as long as it involves a tasty dinner at Cactus. Viv is sick, though, and would like to wait until she is not.
For review
The Last iPod Video Guide You’ll Ever Need, at Plastic Bugs, via BrainLog.
UPDATE: Geez, that’s a pretty intimidating page for a non-technical user. Apple (or someone) could make a killing by releasing a conversion app that really truly doesn’t require a whit of oversight. Let’s see, how would it work?
My theoretical user would presumably understand using an iPod as a music playback device. Therefore the video usage procedure should be entirely analogous. My user inserts a video source such as a DVD or locates a video source such as a downloaded rip of the Daily Show. Then, the user drags the source to “Library” in iTunes, and the material is added. iTunes should broker any conversion, if neccessary, and the conversion settings should be tweakable in the iTunes preferences panes.
I would guess that a conversion dialog might be presented at the time the user drags the content over, asking if the conversion should take place as fast as possible or run more slowly, in the background, since ripping video is so timeconsuming on this generation of hardware.
Additionally, if the video source is a DVD, if possible, the raw DVD video should be copied in entirety to the local drive, allowing the user to eject the disc more rapidly than if the conversion process were to be based directly on the data stored on the optical disc.
Etherised
The airport is now properly configured, and I can get back to the usual business of monkeyfacing over appearing and diappearing network printers and the like. What a relief!
Aeroport
Finally got the router configured to support my fixed IP block, huzzah! But for some reason, the Airport only allows clients to gain full-qualified IP services if the client has one of the five fixed IPs – locally assigned DHCP clients, from the Airport’s own DCHP server, appear to gain the appropriate 10.foo.bar.baz number, but can’t see any webbiness or even ping the router – the DHCP LAN is walled off from the fixed IP LAN.
I think this may be due to the fixed IPs requiring a subnet mask of 255.255.255.248 while the DHCP is handing out a mask of 255.255.255.0. I don’t know if it’s possible to configure the Airport’s SNM for DHCP. Hm. Time to hit the boards.
Screw
Resources for locating antique door-knob set screws:
Robinson’s Antiques. House of Antique Hardware. Smallparts.com.
i vid
Yesterday I gave my parents a real-time video tour of the house and grounds via the magic of ‘high-speed’ internet and wifi. I must be a seriously negative creep because instead of marveling that we could do such a thing, I most have thunk on how aggravating and infuriating it is to deal with thousand-dollar technology that works as well as the two-dollar technology of 1968, at least as I recall it. Except the whole realtime video thing. And the two-dollar thing.
This of course fills me with well-warranted self-loathing, especially when I reflect on the fact that the easiest thing to cobble up on moving in to the new place was a Silvertone Victrola cabinet containing one (1) five-year-old iBook with an Airport card and one (1) set of high-quality powered spruce-cone computer speakers. I have been using this nightmare hybrid to stream in roughly equal proportion music from my 20-odd gb stash, near-real-time radio from local NPR gabfest KUOW, the same from old-home-place dusty classics champeen WFIU, and assorted other public radio streams including local cooler-than-thou woo-woo yipniks KEXP and also-old-home-place and shaggy enough to get me to relax faves WFHB.
Still, it’s the classical radio in front of the fire to which I’ve turned the most. Technology sucks.
Batting the bits
After getting off the phone with Qwest, it seems that my ISP was under no technical obligation to run a separate ADSL line to the house, although Qwest notes that the locale is speed-restriced for DSL to 256k, which is a pain and has made clear to me that I was running well over that speed back at the apartment.
Here’s the interesting bit; I think I could cancel my Qwest DSL entirely and just go with the new ISP and save $15 a month, especially if Qwest notes the speed restrictions are hard-wired. The outstanding question in my mind is, “Are there technical advantages to a non-separate DSL line as opposed to the new POTS line they dropped with ADSL on it? Can I get more bandwidth by lighting fewer wires?”
It seems unlikely, actually.
The next question, of course, is “Can I multiplex the lines, especially without paying for the circuit that may or may not be attached to the Qwest line?”
Of course, I should really be doing stuff like unpacking boxes instead of wrestling with ephemera such as bitstreams.
Cherry
One cord of 2-year seasoned cherry, inbound for afternoon delivery. Now I must prepare a crib!
Ricks and Cords
Getting closer to figuring out the firewood thing, and I hope to have a cord slated for delivery on Friday.
I noticed that after burning the fire very hot for a short period of time, the masonry in the back of the hearth turned white for a while. I’m curious about this, but Googling yields singularly crappy results. Surely the fire is not heating the bricks to the point of glowing.
Overall, I remain in the gloomiest frame of mind, despite reconnecting with my firebug preadolescence. All I can do is wait it out, really; I hate life changes and I also hate the holidays, and I’m reliably unhappy at this time of year. Finding myself entering into a rerun of my adolescent living circumstances, with fewer financial options, would naturally tend to accentuate this frame of mind, I think.
But what the hell! I only stayed that angry for ten or eleven years, right?