Penguicon may be a few months away, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored. Better to be ready early than rush at the last minute.

I'd like to avoid repeat recipients if possible, so that it isn't "Oh, ACME only delivers to that group." That's at an individual level. It certainly makes sense for the Guests of Honor to get something, but "So & so gets something every year" is what I am concerned about.

( Advise ACME )

NOTE: Friends replies are NOT screened and will be visible.

Current Mood: curious

Current Mood: disappointed

I've just read an article going around where Thomas Edison's great-grandson claims Thomas would have loved the law forcing a change in lighting by eliminating the current style of 100 Watt incandescent bulb. He says that this is due to Thomas having been for progress and improvement.

Not so fast. While I like CFL and really like LED (or hope to when it gets even better) I realize these are my choices. They are not everyone's choices. Some have issues with CFL and/or LED. They both do, currently, have some problems. So do incandescents. It's a matter of choosing which problems one wishes to deal with.

Now, when the incandescent bulb was invented, it had some significant problems. Short life. No standards for fixtures. No infrastructure - Edison had to design and build a power grid and all the fiddly pieces of it. And while he got some parts wrong (DC, anyone?) the end result is with us. But even he didn't use the new lights. That's right, Edison's own lab was lit by gas well after the light bulb had been invented.

Take a look around and you'll see plenty of electric lighting, whether incandescent, fluorescent, LED, or some else still - clearly, the electric light won over gas (and kerosene, and candles, and...) for illumination. And I do not know of any law that keeps me from turning off all the electric lights in my house and lighting it by some other means.[1] So if the law didn't cause change, what did? Superiority. That is, superiority as seen by the customer. No flames. No gas to build up if a flame is blown out. No oil to spill and make a mess or fire. No fiddling around with matches. No trimming candle wicks. Just flip a switch.

To get rid of incandescent lighting no law is needed. What is needed is a light source seen as superior by the person who is to use it. Anything else is interference and bound to end in failure one way or another. It is not beyond the realm of possibility for people with the right engineering talent to even produce their own bulbs - one doesn't even need a vacuum pump, but just inert gas and some glass-blowing skill. Smuggling bulbs could also happen. As could theft and re-sale. Hello black market. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol, doesn't work with drugs, doesn't work with firearms, and somehow it will magically work with light bulbs? Tell me another one.

I do not believe that the incandescent bulb will completely disappear, at least not for some time. What would be used in an oven, for example? While I think the mercury fear-mongering over CFL is just that, fear-mongering, I don't want any mercury containing device in my oven. Also the oven would be too hot for the electronics for CFL and LED power supplies, as well as the LEDs themselves. I do, however, expect something (right now, I'd guess LED, but something better might come along) to eventually replace most incandescent lighting.

That will happen when a few things happen, and not all have happened yet:

* LED light output can be truly equal to common incandescent ratings - up to at least 100W.

* LED light can be had at color temperatures (and ranges!) people are used to.

* LED bulb supplies run cooler - so can be used in enclosed fixtures.

* LED pricing drops, similar to how CFL pricing has.

All these need to happen. If a person can't tell the difference between an LED and incandescent bulb, can use the LED in the current fixtures, and doesn't see the price as being far greater than any power savings, THEN the LED wins, and deservedly so. A law mandating a change indicates a failure to make a product so much better than people switch to it willingly.

Maybe one day incandescent bulbs will be seen as quaint relics, much like cylinder phonograph records. That day is not here yet. Want everyone to switch? Don't pass a law; build a better bulb.

I started trying LED lighting in 2009 with disappointing results. In 2010, things were better though the "40 Watt equivalent" was not really a true equivalent, but dimmer. Since then the price has been dropping some, the choice of color temperatures improving, and the brightness increasing. Today I bought two LED bulbs of different make. Both claim to be 60 W equivalent and put out 800 lumens. That might be a bit under a true 60 W incandescent (wikipedia has chart claiming 850 lm for 60 W) but not by much. They are bright enough.

One is still heavy and has a color temperature still in the soft/warm white range of 3000 Kelvin. The other is a more cool white at 4000 Kelvins (roughly, reading the fine print it says 3880 K) which I prefer.

I will be using the light bulb in a desk lamp and the heavier one, for now, in the office to replace the not really 40 W equivalent that went out. I plan to eventually change out all the office fixture with the new, brighter, whiter bulbs like the desk lamp will have.

The downside, such as it is, is that the new LED bulbs use almost as power as equivalently bright CFLs. But they are instant-on, which is a bonus.

The "burnt out" LED that is being replaced is frustrating. It didn't last even half a year (though all the others are still going, so far), but it's not completely dead. If I push this way or that, it will light or flicker a bit. This screams "cold solder joint" to me. It would be simple to fix - if I could get at the solder joints. The bulb is not made to be be repaired, so there's no nice obvious way to get it open. I haven't studied it in great detail to see if there's a way that isn't so nice, but won't ruin the bulb in some other way.

Still, it's been more (Moore?) than 18 months since I started looking at LED lighting and I'm finally seeing things about like I want: Roughly 60 W equivalence, a good white (not 2700 Kelvin yellow - eww), and getting lighter in weight. If the efficiency of the drivers can be increased (thus decreasing heat issues) so that they can be used in enclosed fixtures things would be about ideal. Granted, the price is still higher than CFL, but that is also coming down.

I can't see re-lamping the house entirely in LED yet, and perhaps not even at the slow attrition rate of replacing the CFLs as they fail. But as things seem to be going, in a few years I might well end swapping out a few more.

Notice I haven't said a thing about mercury? I consider that to be something that ought to be all but a non-issue. There's mercury in regular fluorescent tubes, in many thermostats, in older thermometers and some other instruments and devices. Those are probably much more significant and yet generally seem to be ignored. While mercury isn't harmless, it's not worth nearly as much worry as some "OMG CFL EVILBAD!" articles try make of it.

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Music: Brains! - Voltaire

* Make your own Penn State/State Pen joke. *

As those who know me know, I am not a sports fan and tend to think of anyone involved with such as more likely of being guilty of something than the averages of probability would indicate. Note that I am not defending what happened. I am explaining how I think the failure mode worked.

Joe Paterno was, from what I can tell, the guy that all the stuff about "good sportsmanship" was about. He didn't jump to the NFL when offered the chance. He didn't use illegal or even questionable recruiting gimmicks. He followed up on the academics of his players. Oh, and he also managed to build teams that tended to win without having used various shady practices. Sounds like a great guy, right? Overall he likely he is. But he made a couple errors, very critical errors, and they really reduce to one.

One error was that when he found out about the abuse (as I understand it, he did not witness it himself, but was told of it) he went to campus authorities rather than the real police. The other was that he didn't follow up on that, as he did with his players, and make sure that those authorities were really doing their jobs and acting on that information rather than ignoring or suppressing it. Those are really one error: He trusted University authorities to act as adults and do their jobs. For all I know, there might have been a mild followup that was met with, "We're still looking into it, don't worry about it." or such. It would not surprise me if something on the order happened - but that is mere speculation on my part.

But money and prestige were involved, and that's when adults are most likely to play childish (not childlike) games and ignore or suppress things they do not wish to deal with. The price is that now there is a Big Scandal of things going on for some time, involving multiple people, rather than a much smaller scandal that Got Fixed. People keep forgetting or missing a lesson of Watergate (besides "Don't do illegal things"...) which is that a coverup makes things worse[1]. But the big lesson that should be taken away from all this? Do not trust an organization to properly investigate itself. To get results, you must go outside the organization that needs investigation. Sadly, I do not expect this to change and in a while another scandal that could have been averted or corrected sooner will blow up.

Current Mood: pessimistic
Current Music: HIghly Illogical - Leonard Nimoy

In August I was bringing older computers back into operation and wound up needing a newer monitor and picked up a "newer" monitor in the form of a rather old 15 inch LCD that did 1024x768. That got pressed into service as my main monitor for a while as in early September my 19 inch LCD (1280x1024) quit. Before I got to attempting repairs, I wound up upgrading to a nice 23 inch LCD with LED backlight (1920x1080).

Last week I finally got around to re-reading a thread on the Bad Caps forum regarding problematic Samxon capacitors in the Samsung SyncMaster 930B and then ordered some new (and hopefully much better) capacitors.

The new capacitors arrived yesterday. They were installed this morning. The old monitor works again. It took longer than I hoped, but it wasn't anything actually difficult, just a bunch of fiddly stuff. I'm really glad I took several pictures of the monitor as I took it apart those weeks ago. They took a lot of guesswork out of re-assembly.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: 15 Days Under the Hood - Jack Tempchin

I have accounts on both LiveJournal and InsaneJournal and am beginning to even ponder Dreamwidth despite some limitations. Posting on more than one account (same name - they are, in essense, mirrors of each other) gets increasingly annoying as the number of mirrors goes up. Naturally, I would like to automate this and have "write once, post everywhere" but I have yet to see a client that will do that. I know some sites let you (auto-re-)post to ONE other site, but I don't want to be limited.

The ideal client lets me use all the features of LiveJournal (I have a Permanent account) and InsaneJournal (another Permanent) account) so that I set the title, the text, the groups (if any), the icon, the tags, mood, etc. And both IJ and LJ get posted to and the results look identical save for LJ and IJ branding. For Dreamwidth (if I go there at all) I'd want a nice way for it to fall back to the limited icon set I'd have there, since as I understand it I simply cannot get a Permanent account there and thus Be Done with things - that's why I have those - my personal convenience.) It should also allow me to edit once and fix any goofs without having to do it two or more times. Having a selection that lets me choose to only apply a change in some places would be nice, but not essential. Oh yeah, and it must run on Linux - without WINE - and not be a plug-in to some program I seldom use, so no Firefox plug-in nonsense. While I have a Google+ account, I really only use that to read - I don't care to post there until I can use my preferred identify without Google's kiddies throwing a tantrum and potentially wrecking my phone.[1] Also, the G+ API, like the G+ marketing department, is still in its infancy so I do not expect any current clients to properly support G+, nor do I really need one to.

So far, I have yet to see such a thing, but I could easily be overlooking something. Anything I ought to be looking at?

Current Mood: curious

Well, maybe. I know I'm "not exactly normal." Thank goodness. Or a rather non-default childhood, as I've been recently reminded. Still, it's a bit of a jolt to have some of it recognized thus (via Twitter):

*giggle* Well, @DJBronxelf, I suspect a great deal of so called "strangeness" can be explained with "It's just @vakkotaur."

Current Mood: amused

In September I had decided that I would not drink alcohol in October. I wanted to be sure that I wasn't slowly running into genetics from one of my great-grandfathers. I stopped not on 1 October, nor even on 30 September but a couple days before - no last minute cheats, carryover, etc. It started well enough, though I caught myself thinking "I could use a drink" a time or two, more often it was a food pairing thing. A salad might suggest a little sherry, pizza brought beer to mind - that sort of thing.

I didn't make it. But drinking my uncle's wine to toast my father, well, that was not the time or place to go teetotaler, even if it was temporary. That happened twice. On the 5th and 6th or the 6th and 7th. It doesn't matter. After that, the dry spell resumed. From various reasons, it was a really good month to have decided not to drink anything. Let's just say that October could be summed up as a month of Mondays. The "I could use a drink" line of reasoning might have been invoked more often than would have been healthy.

It's now November, but I didn't really make it through October (I chose a month with 31 days, too. I saw someone once pick February for something like this and sure it's just a couple days, but it still felt like a cheat to me.) So despite having some time off, I won't be having a beer or a glass of wine or whatever with supper tonight. I can wait. The 9th would certainly be the 31-day mark from the last drink, but I'll be waiting until the 11th. And one will be plenty, I expect.

Current Mood: calm

I had been letting Firestorm run even when I wasn't around or awake as a virtual presence made some sense even then. The situation changed several weeks ago and I stopped keeping a near-constant presence via Firestorm. One morning recently I got home and found belgian's CPU fan alarm was buzzing. The system had not failed. It was just that Winter is approaching.

I had the side of the case off for something or other and hadn't put it back into place yet. It was a very cool morning, and Firestorm wasn't running. Firestorm seems to keep one core (or one core's worth of CPU...) fairly busy. Thus the CPU got cool enough that the motherboard controlled fan wasn't needed (there is a second, uncontrolled fan, set to slow). The motherboard BIOS, however, doesn't have a very smart alarm. It makes noise if the fan isn't running - no matter if the reason it isn't running is that the system itself switched it off as unneeded.

So I put the cover back in place (after giving the idled fan a quick manual spin to hear the alarm shut off for the bit it was spinning) and fired up Firestorm to burn some cycles and warm things up. As if I hadn't already known it, this all showed that the CPU cooler really does the job.

Current Mood: impressed

Way back in the mists of time... er, alright, it was probably September 30 jmaynard & I went to Manktao to check out Five Guys and I figured I'd at least look at LCD monitors and perhaps see what I liked best and then order from NewEgg. We looked at two or three places and, to my surprise, the best deal was actually at Best Buy. I had been pondering a big 27-inch monitor but the resolution wasn't any better at that size so it'd just be bigger pixels. The 23-inch monitors seemed reasonably priced and comparing a few, the AOC looked the best.

I hesitated and so we went and had lunch and I thought about it some. Checking NewEgg the prices were about the same with the shipping and there was the matter of having it right away. So we went back & I (eventually... oy, it took forever to get a clerk's attention) bought it. So now I'm not using the old 1024x768 LCD but a nice new 1920x1080 LED backlit 23-inch on belgian. I still haven't truly seen about repairing the 19-inch LCD. If I can repair it I then need to decide if I want to use that for percheron or maybe even use it as a second monitor on belgian.

Current Mood: calm

While dealing with things in Wisconsin earlier this month, Xubuntu 10.04 annoyed me for the last time. I wound up having to boot into Windows to get some things done since 10.04 just plain quit doing a thing or two I needed. That was, of course, the last straw. There was simply NO more reason to keep 10.04 around.

So a couple weeks ago I downloaded Xubuntu 11.10 and tried it as a LiveCD on andalusian. I still had to install the 32-bit compatibility libraries, but they worked - and the laptop's wireless hardware was recognized, which I consider a Big Win over needing to recompile the wireless driver at each kernel update as I did with 10.04. Another win was that once the wireless was set up, after the actual install to hard drive, the settings were retained. Maybe this was the case before, but not having hardware recognized by default meant I didn't encounter it. I left things sit for a while (been rather busy with various other things of late...) and only recently ran some updates. Another win: Upon rebooting I did not need to manually restart the local wireless connection as I did before.

I'd heard there were some issues with 11.10, but so far I've not run into them. I am considering updating belgian to 11.10 as well. While it is an improvement, I still hope to run PCLinuxOS. The 64 bit version of that is still in testing (not even beta yet, let alone Release Candidate...) though if 11.10 had given me trouble I was considering going to 32-bit PCLOS with the PAE kernel - a hack to let 32-bit software use 64-bit memory space after a fashion. Why PCLOS? Because after using PCLOS for a few years, *buntu, even with the improvements, still feels 'almost' to me.

Current Mood: good

Wednesday the fifth I was looking forward to a couple nights off away from any work and pretty much relaxing. Maybe I'd fiddle one computer or another and I'd probably bake a cake. Then the phone rang.

"I think your father is having a heart attack." is the memorable line. Backing a up bit... the night before, all seemed normal. My folks had gone out and they'd split a rib eye and had a pleasant time. The morning started normally as well, with Pa having a nice breakfast. He went into the living room and sat down to watch some TV and, as I have come understand, a bit later while my mother was on the phone with someone he sat up a bit and said "I don't feel so good." He went out and sat on the porch, then moved to the steps (there are but two) and started to lean over. The phone call was ended quickly and, "Should I call 911?" "Yes." She called, and got him onto the ground so if anything had to be done, he was already in position for whatever it might be.

Not too much later he stopped breathing. She did CPR. (Has or had the certification and did work some time at the local hospital.) He started breathing again. About then a police officer showed up and was about to chest compressions but was stopped, "No, he's breathing." "Yes, he is." And where was the ambulance? A radio call revealed it was about a mile away. Ambulance arrived, not sure if anything was done on the ground, but he was picked up and put into the ambulance and something more was done... doors closed.

That is when I got the phone call. Nothing either of us could do and I was told not to start out for Merrill until she knew more one way or another. When that called ended, she called my sister and I assume a very similar conversation took place.

Meanwhile, in Fairmont... Jay called a fellow he know who knows more than a little of cardiology and said that while he could not be sure, from what was described to him (now third-hand, at least) it sounded like a coronary and tried to be reassuring. That call ended and Jay said, "Go pack." I didn't get it right off, evidently I need to hear the rest, "Go pack (your stuff for the trip to Merrill)." I did, or got most things in place. I decided I really needed a shower if we were going anywhere and so did. And just as I was turning off the water, the phone rang...

It was my cousin Betty who didn't realize (despite efforts on his part to explain) that Jay was not me. So, on speaker, she told Jay and I heard the bad news. Betty was careful not to let my mother do much - no phoning, certainly no driving - just then. More packing followed and various arrangements made to deal with my sudden absence from the area. I didn't say anything right then on LJ or Twitter as I really didn't feel like advertising my absence and I was rather preoccupied.

Somehow I managed to get some sleep on the trip to Merrill. Arriving, we found some funeral arrangements were made but more were needed and that happened the next day. The funeral was Saturday the 8th (the anniversary of his plane crash a few years ago - and a few other nasty things less related.) Jay & I returned to Fairmont on Sunday the 9th due my resuming work schedule.

In between there was much meeting with friends and family and sorting through stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. And we only scratched the surface, really. I foresee more than a few trips to deal with everything, and the problem of how to merge some things into the house here in Fairmont which seemed big when we moved in.

My sister stayed longer and is likely returning to Minneapolis today. So much needed (and needs) to be done. And I'm glad my mother wasn't alone on the 15th - wedding anniversary. I expect this coming week, which includes my mother's birthday, will not be easy either.

Current Mood: sad

There are many, many things I could talk about but right now I'll settle on a more mundane one. I've been running ConnochaetOS on caspian for a while and some things about it grate a bit. So when I heard someone gushing about Bodhi Linux that could run on even a 386, I decided to try it. I am both impressed and disappointed in the result.

Impressed: It boots as a LiveCD, even on caspian. Takes a long, long time, but it does come up.

Disappointed: Like ConnochaetOS it defaults to an ugly 800x600 rather than correct 1024x786, but the showstopper is: Network? What's a network?

I can deal with the resolution, but the network issue? No. Not fiddling with that, not right now. I'll keep running Conn...OS and maybe try Bodhi again later. And since I've heard that the plan is to move away from being Debian-based (something I consider as a Good Thing) later may be better.

Current Mood: disappointed

That cheap LCD monitor I picked up not long ago has now been pressed into service as my primary. Not because it's anything great (it isn't), but because it's the one that works. The 19-inch LCD monitor I've had for a few years no longer lights up. If I'm lucky a few dollars of new capacitors and some time (of which I don't have much just now...) will resurrect it. If not... I'll be on the backup for a while.

I had been planning on getting a newer, and bigger, monitor, but not just yet. Even with this, that won't be happening right off. I do hope that prices will drop by the time I am truly ready to buy and that is apt to be several months. So I hope I can manage to get things working again with a fairly cheap repair.

Current Mood: irritated

After rebuilding jmaynard's old computer and then rebuilding what is/will become percheron I must have gotten into a get old hardware working again mood. A few years ago I out DeLi linux on a 90 MHz Pentium machine and was impressed with icewm, though getting things working was a bit involved.

( Not quite as involved now... )

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Cosmic Radio Show - AstroCappella

Friday morning I drove up to Mankato for a few things. One was to see if Computer Renaissance had any really inexpensive monitors. They did. I decided not to look at any of the CRTs (which I was told were really cheap, and these days I'd be surprised if they weren't). I wound up with the least expensive thing on display: A 15-inch LCD that could do 1024x768 for $50 and tax.

Once that was home, the rebuilt machine (which will be the "new" percheron, replacing a P-III system) booted up nicely and Xubuntu 11.04 appeared nicely. Yet another attempt at ArchBang did not. I have no idea why, but ArchBang which is supposed to be a neat thing has never even booted properly for me. *shrug* So I re-partitioned the drive and installed Xubuntu 11.04 on about half of it. I did that install almost in my sleep, Saturday morning.

Almost everything went well. The updates updated. The video card's proprietary driver worked. The 32-bit compatibility was already there due to a question asked (and carefully answered) at install time. Out of curiosity I tried Phoenix and it ran - at nearly 30 frames per second, though the graphics settings had to be at 'Mid' for that. It dropped to about 8 fps for 'High' and I wasn't about to fiddle with 'Ultra' considering the video card is old/low-end enough it doesn't have its own fan because it doesn't need one.

The only problem I had was the network connection which came up at 100 Mb/s rather than 1000. There is an issue with *buntu 11.04 and the Realtek 6168 but it turned out it wasn't the problem I had. Instead of my having to play games with drivers, jmaynard found that the cable was plugged into a 100 Mb/s port on the switch. Moving that to a gigabit port (and restarting percheron - yeah, I know, but it wasn't doing anything important anyway) and everything seems to be fine.

Right now I'm just letting it run. I'm more concerned about any Xubuntu flakiness than any trouble with the hardware now. I don't want to install 11.04 on andalusian (the laptop) only to find it has some screwiness I could/should have avoided.

Current Mood: pleased

The past few days have been a bit of a (mis)adventure in the world of overclocking, in a way. I did not set out to overclock or overvolt anything. I simply assembled the parts I had and hoped or expected to have things just work, or at least mostly work since the hard drive's OS was installed with somewhat different hardware. This almost happened.

If I set things to use only the standard Sempron single core, things worked about as expected. An old PCLinuxOS install came up but needed the invocation of CONTROL-ALT-MINUS a time or three to get viewable video on the (now ancient) CRT monitor and I needed to fiddle with the filesystem permissions a bit. No big deal, the drive will be wiped anyway.

The kicker was that I couldn't even get a memory test (and the memory itself seemed to pass it well enough) more than about 4 and half minutes if I tried to unlock/enable the second core. Following the suggestions on an old overcloking/unlocking forum [1] I eventually found that I needed to adjust the NorthBridge voltage up a notch to get stability. I then finally noticed it was running the RAM at 1333 MHz rather than 1066 (which is the actual rating of the hardware). I tried switching things from AUTO to 1066 to see if that helped. It didn't. Since I have to run the NB voltage a bit high anyway, I may as well run the memory at 1333 since it can do it. The memory test ran overnight and only stopped because I stopped it.

All this is a bit annoying as the same RAM and CPU worked fine without any odd tweaking on the Gigabyte motherboard. Had I started with this one, I doubt I would have made all the adjustments I did (upping voltages always feels risky to me) and just figured I got one of the (rare?) truly single-good-core Semprons even though I had not.

One thing ASRock does get right, that Gigabyte earns a big fat FAIL for, is having BIOS updates in regular plain ZIP files rather than some silly Windows .EXE thing. ASRock would be more impressive if their US servers worked properly. As it is, I had to go to an Asian or European server to get both the BIOS update(s) and the manual pdf.

An odd thing is that there is no obvious option to boot from USB, yet it supposedly is there. According to ASRock's FAQ one needs to press the right function key (F11) at boot and then select the connected USB device from which to boot. It's not exactly transparent.

I've now run into the next roadblock: An old monitor with limited resolution and frequency, which isn't working with a couple LiveCDs, even when I set the vga option in the boot line. I really don't want to play cable swapping games to something that should be simple. I also don't want to pay a lot for another monitor or a DVI (or HDMI) switch. This should easy, but I suspect *buntu is being "helpful" yet again.

Current Mood: irritated

I've managed to get jmaynard's old, spare computer back together again and working in a smaller case. I tried to upgrade the memory but the system refused to boot then so either that's a bust or I need to dig more. Any such digging will wait. I know I have another processor around that will fit the socket, but I must've put it someplace "safe" as now I can't find it. That's not a big concern as the system might not be able to take that particular CPU. It might be too new and fast for the old board.

I also have my machine, such as it is, together and almost running. The parts replaced by upgrades to belgian, plus a "new" (to me, anyway) motherboard run enough to boot past the POST and I can navigate the BIOS menus. I have yet to get it to run more than a minute or so past that, so I likely need to make some adjustments I don't have time (nor much patience anymore) for just now.

In dealing with the "it boots, but not quite" issue I checked the CD I was using by booting the laptop with it. It's Xubuntu 11.04, which has some plusses and minuses...

MINUS - Not Long Term Support so I can't count on it being supported for as long.
PLUS - Newer kernel, that actually runs 32-bit programs once the compatibility libraries are installed[1]
PLUS - Native support for the laptop's wireless.[2]
PLUS - It will run Phoenix (with 32 bit libraries) despite a non-ideal video system
MINUS - But Phoenix's audio streaming is repea repea ted ted every every seco seco nd or nd or so. so.

Yet, if I take the stream URL and feed it to VLC, VLC seems to handle the stream if not perfectly at least reasonably well. I have a few random gaps or dropouts, but I am running all this as a LiveCD so far.

I will probably "upgrade" the laptop to Xubuntu 11.04, at least until PCLinuxOS has a stable, released 64-bit version. Watch that happen the day after I finish doing that.

I thought I'd make some progress on the old computer(s) while jmaynard was off going through some more western states and visiting Howard Tayler. Instead, I mostly slept. But this morning I finally cleaned up belgian's old case and moved the motherboard from another case into it. I had to find a PDF of the manual to make a couple connections and I'm far from finished rebuilding that system since I am taking things very slow.

It's a Gigabyte 7VM400M-RZ motherboard, which is Socket A. I don't know if the CPU in it is an Athlon or Duron. (I haven't connected the thing to a monitor yet. I said I was taking it slow.) If it's a Duron, I have a spare Athlon to put in its place. I might also be able to use the old belgian's RAM and go from 512 MB to 1 GB.

Left to do: Get a couple more screws to properly, fully mount the motherboard in place. Secure the power supply. Add hard drive, network card (for gigabit, the motherboard has 10/100 already). Add SCSI card since the machine is supposed to be a disk(array) controller again someday. Connect up monitor & keyboard (and mouse) and see what everything really is. Upgrade what can be upgraded with parts lying about.

Oh, and then there's this whole other computer... not sure what that will be. I might make it the new percheron and have it as a backup/testbed desktop rather than the P-III system.

Also, the new DVD burner is in the new belgian and working just fine.

Current Mood: calm