A student working for us this summer had his xbox die on him while he was home in CA visiting his folks. He opened it up to try and discover what the problem was and found this:

Under the power supply. Too damned funny! His guess is the little bugger crawled in because of the warmth and then electrocuted himself against the power supply. After he scraped it out and took a metal brush to the board the xbox returned to normal. Too funny, he’s lucky it still worked though.

The folks at lockergnome have pulled together an incredibly useful collection of categorized rss links for a ton of the categories of stuff amazon sells. Want to keep an eye on the paperback bestsellers list, or know when a particular computer game is in stock? Just subscribe to the appropriate RSS feed. Kudos to lockergnome for building such a useful index of these things.

I’m mildly obsessed with bargain hunting. I probably spend a half hour to an hour a day digging through various online forums and websites looking for deals on tech equipment. Today I found a new site, techbargains.com that has a great selection of deals and links to stuff. It’s better organized than most of these kinds of sites too. Worth a look if you’re digging after deals all the time like I am.

One positive thing that’s come out of this recent health business - not eating for almost 3 days led me to lose another 5-6 pounds. I got on the scale this morning and was 158. I cannot remember how long it has been since I weighed that much, I think I was around that weight or just over it when I graduated from high school almost 20 years ago. That completely blows my mind. Now to keep it off

The latest in my seemingly endless series of health issues seems to be basically done. Here’s what happened. I woke up Monday morning feeling pretty nauseous but forced myself to eat a normal breakfast. By the time I got to work I was starting to have a bit of a stomach ache but nothing serious. I had to give a brief presentation at our staff meeting and went to get coffee before the meeting. As I started the presentation my stomach was starting to really hurt. After about halfway through I stopped sipping the coffee because I thought maybe it was causing the problem. I soldiered through the presentation but basically couldn’t wait for it to end, by the end of the meeting my stomach was absolutely killing me. I left work shortly after this.
(more…)

Out of the blue last night Lisa called me. I haven’t spoken to her since the night we said our goodbyes in (February? January?). Nothing too remarkable about the call really - she had heard I was looking to buy a house and she’s losing her apartment in October and wondering if I would pass the lease on my house on to her if I move out. I will if I actually manage to find a house by October. What’s funny though is this morning I woke up at like 5:30 from a nightmare. In the dream, I woke up to the sound of clanking plumbing noises and ran downstairs to find lisa on a stepladder removing plumbing from the cieling in the bathroom. Scattered around the living room, kitchen and bathroom were most of the houses plumbing in a wet dirty jumbled pile. Lisa was flustered - she climbed down off the ladder sort of apologizing….right as I woke up.

What the hell that meant I have no idea. Too frigging wierd aye?

So…I’m not a praying kind of guy. But my sister’s beloved dog is critically ill. Kirsten is very attached to her and so it follows that she’s pretty upset about it. If you can spare a moment of your day to offer up a positive thought or two for the poor poot, please do.

They’re not sure what’s wrong with the dog. It’s some kind of bacterial infection, possibly (probably?) attacking her heart. Apparantly the dog has a 50/50 shot at making it at this point. She’s only about 7 so hopefully her constitution is still strong enough to help her pull through. I have to admit that I didn’t like the poot when she was a puppy, but she’s mellowed as she’s aged and I like her well enough now. Keep your fingers crossed, if we’re lucky she’ll be giving me cat turd kisses this weekend
(don’t ask)

Check this out. Are you sick of the same endless drivel on your radio? Have you heard the same Aerosmith tune 3 times on 2 different stations during your morning commute? Do you wish you could wander in to the ClearChannel world headquarters and pummel the fuckwit executives responsible for the mess that is commercial radio? This project may appeal to you. There’s a slight ‘loophole’ in FCC regulations about radio broadcasts that allows anyone, without a license, to broadcast FM Radio from their homes, provided it is at .01 watts/200 foot radius restricted. What good is that you ask? Well, if you apply the same mesh network principles that activists are using to provide free internet access over 802.11 networks in urban areas, you can build a radio mesh network from these .01 watt microtransmitters, thus bringing fresh radio to the huddled masses who crave something beyond 24×7 Brittany. And it’s very cheap to do, $40 or so and even less if you’re handy with a soldering iron.

Is this a practical idea? Ha! Still, I love it. Anything that tweaks Clearchannel is ok in my book. Of course if this project achieves anything near minor success you will see the FCC fall all over itself to amend the laws that govern personal transmitters.

It’s Friday so it’s time for a fun and completely useless link. Today we’ve got cool fonts that look like people for your computer. Ever wanted to punctuate a sentence with a superhero throwing a punch for an exclamation point? Now you can

As most of you probably know, the layout of the QWERTYUIOP keyboards 99% of the eastern world uses were designed with the keylayout they have because of a need to keep the original manual typewriters from jamming and not from a usability standpoint. Those of us who are not accomplished touch-typists would probably agree that the layout is not the best. There have been attempts to modernize the design of keyboard, with approaches like the Dvorak layout and novel approaches like the vertical layout and the chording keypad. I’ve investigated most of these at one time or another (ok, aside from the vertical one) and am still interested in a better way to get text into the computer. I found a new one today, the frogpad. The basic premise is similar to the dvorak keyboard - make the layout based on your finger’s proximity to the most frequently used letters in us english, but it also combines aspects of the chording keyboards in that some characters require the press of more than one key.

I’m interested enough in this one to want to try it. The one downside with all of these though is price - since no one buys these solutions in significant numbers, they cost $$$, most of them cost more than $150 and some are as high as $250. Now I’ll confess, I once dropped $150 on an Apple Extended (the old, excellent model) but I don’t want to drop so much cash on a Frogpad without being able to try it first, so I’m stuck with keyboard envy and the hope I run across one of these on someone’s desk. Anyone else using a novel keyboard?

Nobody, and I mean nobody, seems able to remember my domain name. I don’t see what the problem is, but I’m so immersed in net culture I guess it just comes easier to me. So….I need to get a domain name. What do you folks think of:

obbie-chops.com [from infamous story when I was but a lad]
the-dave-cave.com [from when I had the coolest rec-room on the east coast, in a basement. Ok, I'm exagerating maybe a little. But it was cool!]

Those are my two leading candidates. Do you have a clever suggestion of your own? You can look it up to see if it’s available here:

swhois.com

Silicon solar cells have been making steady performance gains for the roughly 20 years I’ve been paying attention. I first got interested during the oil crisis in the 70’s and have paid at least passing attention to them ever since. To this day the issue that keeps them from achieving mainstream usage is that they are more expensive than the power they generate in all but the sunniest of climes, and even there it’s more like a break-even at best proposition.

It’s looking hopeful that things are about to take a really positrive turn. Scientists recently made some advances in material sciences that should lead to solar cells at least twice as effective at converting sunlight into electricity. The remaining key issue is how much will they cost to manufacture - if they can maintain current cost levels or even reduce them, this is extremely positive news. Who knows, we might all have a solar cell roof in 10 years of this all pans out.

Keep your fingers crossed.

You know, if it wasn’t for the boxing on Saturday nights I think I would have cancelled my HBO by now. I catch the first run movies before they show up on Saturday nights, and since the last new episode of Larry David ran I haven’t been watching their Sunday night lineup. I don’t care for Six Feet Under and everything else has been re-runs. But last Saturday the new season of The Wire began and I was solidly reminded of why I like HBO so much. The Wire’s new season has started out just as good as the first season - on location shooting, excellent acting from a large cast, and absolutely first rate writing. This is tv for adults, none of this brain dead lowest common denominator pap they spew out on the regular broadcast networks. The first season must be out on DVD by now; if you never caught it it’s well worth checking out. It’s a self contained season as well - there’s a story arc that completes by the end of the season.

Anyway if you do have HBO, no excuses, check out The Wire, if you like intelligent drama you’ll almost definitely enjoy it.

I grew up playing the classic old ‘twitch’ arcade games like asteroids, galaxians and star castle. Some of them I still play to this day using the m.a.m.e emulator. Sadly this genre of games is mostly out of favor. The big publishing houses that own the rights to them have pumped out ‘inspired by’ modern versions of some of the classics over the years, but mostly these versions have been ‘inspired by’ a desire to make a quick buck and have had mediocre to poor gameplay. Leave it to the shareware scene to produce something truly excellent. If you ever played Robotron and liked it, there’s a very good chance you’ll really like Crimsonland. Great graphics, simple control scheme, pulse pounding action, and it’s over in 5-10 minutes per game. It doesn’t get much better than this in the twitch gaming scene. Blast through survival mode and see how long you can last, or check out quest mode and get an introduction to most every weapon and power up in the game.

PC only though, sorry folks.

So I’m reading more Jack Vance now, another in the Cugel’s saga portion of the Dying Earth books, and I’m still really enjoying it. I had been intending to type up a little exerpt from the books so folks could get a sense of it for themselves. Fortunately someone over on rpg.net has done it for me. To wit:

Faucelme returned, shaking his head in puzzlement. He seated himself in his chair and resumed his reading. Cugel came up behind him, looped the rope around his chest, again and again, and it seemed as if the rope would never exhaust the coil. Faucelme was presently trussed up in a cocoon of rope.

At last Cugel revealed himself. Faucelme looked him up and down, in curiosity rather than rancor, then asked: “May I inquire the reason for this visit?”

“It is simple stark fear,” said Cugel. “I dare not pass the night out of doors, so I have come to your house for shelter.”

“And the ropes?” Faucelme looked down at the web of strands which bound him into the chair.

“I would not care to offend you with the explanation,” said Cugel.

“Would the explanation offend me more than the ropes?”

Cugel frowned and tapped his chin. “Your question is more profound than it might seem, and verges into the ancient analyses of the Ideal versus the Real.”

Faucelme sighed. “Tonight I have no zest for philosophy. You may answer my question in terms which proximate the Real.”

“In all candour, I have forgotten the question,” said Cugel.

Funny stuff. The entire series is written this way - if the above segment appeals to you I highly recommend the books, see my earlier post for a link and whatnot.

So I noticed that Megamek was updated today. It’s a cool open source project to allow the playing of the game battletech online. Battletech is a turn-based strategy ‘boardgame’ that’s been around for ages and which has seen numerous computer games released based on its gameplay. I love projects like this, and this one is particularly well done. The problem? My friends are all lamers when it comes to online gaming, my success rate playing with friends online comes close to zero. So, who’s going to step up and let me kick their arse in Megamek? It plays on all platforms so you have no excuse

Today’s link is to a new abandonware games archive. Home of the Underdogs has been around forever, unfortunately to cover their bandwidth costs they’ve had to embed all kinds of advertising crap in their site. This new one has none of that going on, plus their server is tons faster. Have a hankering to replay some of the old games you used to love? Check it out. I’m grabbing x-com gold.

Several of you have asked me about this so…here’s the deal. Ever discover some super cool file on the net, the next greatest thing, a demo of a game, preview of a movie, excerpt of some funny ad everyone is talking about, and you can’t get it because everyone and their uncle is all trying to download it from some overwhelmed server at the same time as you are? Or even worse, find yourself in the 4 hour waiting list at fileplanet waiting for your turn to grab the file, which invariably you miss because you walk away from the computer shortly before your turn in the que comes up?

Enter BitTorrent. Problem solved. BitTorrent is at its best serving up files ‘au courant;’ whatever it is everyone is trying to get at the moment, the hottest demos, movie clips etc etc, BitTorrent most likely has and there’s no need to wait in line, and there’s no speed limits beyond what your own connection can handle. How does it do that? It makes all of us responsible for sharing the file with each other. Every person who is downloading the file is simultaneously sharing the parts of the file they’ve already gotten with others who are also trying to get the file. The more popular something is, the faster you can get your hands on it. It works great!

To get it going, grab the software from the site linked above and install it. Next time you see a link to a torrent file, click on it and it will invoke the BitTorrent app, which will ask you where you want to store the file. Tell it, and the download will start. Within a few minutes it will ramp up to saturate your download link, assuming it’s a popular file you’re after.

You can also go grab a copy of TorrentSpy - if you grab that, you can drag saved torrent files onto it and it will tell you tons of info about the file, most importantly how many people are currently grabbing it. Comes in handy if you’re not sure whether to bother grabbing something or not.

So where do you find torrents? I’ll post more about this in the coming weeks. Basically anything popular ends up getting turned into a torrent, but there’s not a single source of info on where to grab them. All kinds of cool stuff shows up too, like the previous night’s tv shows, concerts, radio broadcasts, all kinds of great stuff. For now, just watch for the links in the discussions that surround any particular file, like inside slashdot discussions or on usenet.

One last thing - the success of BitTorrent depends on a great degree to the willinness of all of us to leave the window open after the file downloads - let it run for a while, give back to the community which just gave to you. Don’t be a dick! Do you like waiting for a file on fileplanet for 3 hours? If not, dont be an ass, keep the window open so others have a chance to get the file, and so places like fileplanet are no longer the central source we all have to rely on to get our mods, patches, demos and so on.