I’ve had innumerable conversations with my friends about why I’ve stuck with my Sony XBR960 CRTV television (ie tube-based television), a model that’s often called the last great tube-based tv, despite it being only 32″ in this age of 46 and 52″ televisions. I stumbled across an exhaustively researched post that explains why I’ve stuck with my CRT which is better than anything I could write
Monthly Archives: December 2008
The end of Abit
I used Abit motherboards for years – for quite a stretch they were the best enthusiast motherboards you could buy. The linux box running this website ran on an
RIAA finally gets a clue?
The RIAA finally appears to have figured out what pretty much everyone else has known for years – suing your customers is not good business practice, nor is it likely to convince the rest of your customer base to change their behavior. They’ve announced they’re going to stop suing individual file sharers and turn instead to partnerships with ISP‘s. Of course I’m happy to see this happening, but my message to the RIAA remains unchanged: FUCK YOU. I continue to hope you’ll be obsoleted out of business. No one loves a middleman, especially not a litigious heads up their ass middleman.
Low carb diet contributes to cognitive issues
Here’s a report on a the results of a study indicating that folks following a low carb diet perform poorly on memory-based tests. This is serious stuff to me as I definitely have short term memory issues. The good news is re-introducing the carbs solved the issue in the folks participating in the study. The bad news for me is, I can’t without inducing blood sugar/cholestoral/heart disease issues! Oh, the dilemma: die young but witty and on top of my game, or live long and a bit dimly. For now I’m sticking with the low carbs.
Related links
Technolust, December edition
Check out this unbelievably cool motion simulator rig for racing sims:
No price listed, and I’m sure it’s out of my range, but damn isn’t that cool? Now to convince Susan it’s an acceptable alternative to buying a sportscar for my pending mid-life crisis…
Friday Fun: Doom in Flash
- Image via Wikipedia
Been a while since I last posted a Friday Fun link, so here’s a doozy – play the original Doom from Id Software right in your browser with the flash plugin. This works surprisingly well and really brought back memories. Funny too, in that back in the day this was the most intense thing ever, and now of course it looks desperately crude. Still, it’s pretty fun to play and authentically recreates the experience, right down to the sluggishness you probably experienced back when this first came out, trying to get your 386 or 486 to push Doom along at a reasonable framerate. Check it out!
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Datapoint supporting the coming econopocalypse
I’m obsessed with the economy these days, to the point where I occasionally drive Susan a bit nuts at dinner chattering about it, but it’s pretty clear we’re entering into a significant recession and possibly worse. Evidence supporting the worse angle would be this article on engadget, , where they report that Black Friday sales declined… for the first time ever. There’s perhaps no greater indicator of the collapse of US consumer culture than this, folks. For the record, sales were down by 8%, which hardly seems terrible until you consider companies were already forecasting lower sales to begin with, to the point where companies like Circuit City already were facing bankruptcy. Another way to express it would be: if the black friday sales can’t get gluttunous US consumers to pull out their walletts, what can?
Praise for Tomato, free router firmware replacement
- Image via Wikipedia
Tomato is one of a number of replacement firmwares for routers. Last week I switched over to it from the stock firmware on my Linksys WRTG54. So far I love it, despite it being responsible for knocking my network offline and forcing me to re-configure everything from scratch. Truth be told at this point I’m pretty sure the network being offline was my fault (me? Read the docs? never!), and the process of rewriting every device’s config from scratch was a good exercise for me since I have a ton of devices and the configs were an accumulation of mistakes small and large.
The whole move to Tomato was caused by Thanksgiving, when one too many devices ended up on my network. This caused a cascade effect of ip addresses being bumped and multiple devices with one IP assigned to them. This knocked my consoles offline and caused my streaming music to stop working, pushing me to replace the firmware, but I had been planning to do it anyway for a couple of reasons. First, Comcast now has a 250GB monthly bandwidth cap and I want to track how much we’ve used of it at any point in time, and second because there are bugs in the factory firmware on my router which cause UPnP not to work for my gaming consoles.
The install process couldn’t have been simpler – just point the default firmware’s update function at the firmware from the site, do a nvram reset, and configure. It was even smart enough to pick up my old firmware’s configuration with its dozens of MAC addresses in the wireless access list, and though in the end I think that’s what caused the problems I initially had, I was still impressed that it worked.
UPnP now works on my consoles, the interface on Tomato is much nicer than the default Linksys one, there are a ton more features including ssh access, dynds/domain mapping, full routing functions, various logging/traffic reporting features, and more, and all for free – it’s a fantastic option if you have one of the supported routers. Definitely worth checking out.
For kicks, to give you a sense of scale, here’s a mostly complete list of networked objects in my house, each of which I had to poke yesterday as I resurrected everything:
Hardware:
- Yamaha receiver
- Pocorn Hour streaming media box
- Xbox 360
- Playstation 3
- Squeezebox Duet remote
- Squeezebox Duet content streamer
- Linux webserver
- Gaming PC
- 2 mac laptops
Software:
- Playon (PC)
- Apache (linux)
- MyIhome (PC)
- Squeezecenter (PC)
Problems with Nyko Frontman guitar and Rockband 2?
If you have a Nyko Frontman guitar and suddenly started having problems with it when you’re playing Rock Band 2 on your PS3, it’s not the guitar – a recent PS3 firmware update broke things, but there’s a workaround. Set the ‘footpedal’ usb controller dongle to Guitar Hero compatibility mode and your Frontman will work with Rock Band 2 again. Thanks to the folks over here for the pointer on how to fix this. Hopefully Sony patches this problem out of their firmware in a subsequent update.
Will you lose your credit card?
So next up from the economic crisis: no more credit for you, Joe Consumer. Check out this article over on Reuters‘ site. It’s a bit longer on speculation than fact, but this is not the only piece I’ve seen suggesting the banks are going to radically reduce the amount of available consumer credit, and I’ve already been contacted by one of my banks letting me know they’re jacking up my interest rate and fees. If you’re living your life off your credit card and you don’t have a stellar credit score, watch out.
Here’s an idle bit of speculation to ponder, too. How long do you suppose it will be before the insurance companies start dropping clients? All of this stuff is deeply intertwined, and offering insurance requires capital and access to it. Insurance is heavily regulated and there are more stringent requirements on capitlization than the banking industry was coping with, but where do you suppose those funds the insurance companies are required to hold are actually sitting? And how much do you suppose they’re actually worth versus how much they think they’re worth? I have no facts to back this up, just idly wondering how far this unravelling will go.
More melamine news
So now it’s turning up in infant formula, (90% of the major brands) and the FDA‘s response is to change it’s categorization of acceptable exposure to melamine, without any research to back it up. We’re the ones who are sneering at Chinese food safety issues? This epitomizes the Bush White House’s approach to governance folks, and man does it ever piss me off. It pays to be extra careful about dairy products – as I predicted a couple of months ago, this stuff is going to be showing up in lots of unexpected places.