I’ve given up trying to play Far Cry: Vengance. The game’s crashes combined with the typical console “save point” nonsense has broken whatever desire I had to see the ending. It was fairly weak as a game but it did prove that I could reasonably play a FPS with the Wii’s UI. The graphics engine was clearly [...]
If you have to fly across the country, Jet Blue is a decent way to do it. Nice seats, better seat pitch than the economy-class of other airlines I’ve used, and free DirectTV in the seats make for a better-than-average experience.
Wii I won the opportunity to buy a Wii from Amazon. UPS delivered it three days later — Amazon apparently took a day more than usual to ship it. The results among my friends that also applied to win the opportunity to buy a Wii caused speculation about the effect of being an Amazon Prime [...]
Important safety tip: Don’t disable anything in the “Common Dialogs” section of TweakUI for Windows XP if you also use CorelDraw 12 or X3. Disabling “Enable AutoComplete” and “Remember previously-used filenames” caused CorelDraw 12 and X3 to crash whenever they displayed a File-related dialog box. Reinstalling CorelDraw had no effect on the crashes nor did [...]
The software update seems to have fixed the problems I had with the Comcast DVR. The UI is still a little clunky compared to the TiVo but the DVR does work and I’ve been using it instead of the TiVo for the last week or so. The search interface abysmal but On Demand is probably cool [...]
Best Buy delivered my new TV on Wednesday. It’s pretty great. I wish I could say the same about Comcast HD service. After the TV came I went out and swapped my digital cable box for a new Comcast HD-DVR. The HD signal is great but the box does not have accurate channel information. The [...]
In normal operation my PC plus monitors uses between 180 and 320 watts. It’s much more variable than I expected. The monitors by themselves account for a fairly stable 70 watts (30 watts for the 18.1″ Sony and 40 watts for the 20″ Dell). When “off” the monitors use 0.5 watts (more or less, that’s near [...]
I saw a large bird gliding around in San Jose the other day. It was too far away for me to see enough detail so I could remember details to try to identify the species later. I marveled at how his economical motions allowed him to glide apparently effortlessly between updrafts. In 20 minutes of watching the [...]
I thought I’d give Windows Live Writer a shot. It aims to be a WYSIWIG blog post editor. It supports photo upload, but only via an API that the version of WordPress I use doesn’t support and FTP. Dreamhost obviously supports FTP but I don’t want to use cleartext passwords. The HTML it generates seems to [...]
Stories like “Google developing eavesdropping software” remind me why I have a healthy distrust of any company where the end-users are not the source of revenue. In theory, if I’m paying a company $x/month for some service then that is how the company makes money. If a service is “free”, then I must assume my [...]
I recently extended my Amazon Marketplace scripts to print shipping labels with postage using Endicia. I’m in the “30 day free trial” now and it is very convenient to be able to print shipping labels with postage and skip the lines in the post office. Alas, probably not $10/month convenient for the amount of shipping [...]
I’ve been selling some books on Amazon.com Marketplace. The listings are offered as a link from the product page for the book. People that follow that link seem to be selecting purely on price, so I don’t bother listing when the existing lowest price is too low for me to make money with my current [...]
Tonight I sat down, flipped the TV on, and browsed through the TiVo menu trying to find the movie I had been watching last night. Then I remembered it wasn’t a movie. I was reading a book. It’s been a long few weeks.
Important new information I learned: One can have LILO boot Linux to single user mode by adding “single” to the end of the image to use e.g. LinuxOLD single — this turns out to be important when… Linux 2.6 uses LVM 2 (only), so you need to have upgraded to LVM 1.x BEFORE you fire [...]
From: Amazon.com Subject: [placeholder for winning team] Wins the NCAA Tournament! Dear Amazon.com Customer, Congratulations, [placeholder for winning team]! As someone who has purchased sports-related products, we thought you should be the first to see our selection of NCAA championship products. Amazon.com trying to say they don’t care who actually wins the NCAA Tournament? Or [...]
I whimsically (after backing everything up) tried Dreamhost’s new(ish) One-Click upgrades. Since I installed both notes and whatcartoon.com using One-Click installs of WordPress, I decided to give One-Click upgrades a shot. I already upgraded this site (notes) by hand, but What Cartoon was woefully out of date. It all worked very smoothly on the first [...]
I don’t remember what I was searching for. Somehow, I stumbled upon Radio News on Radio Days, which has a collection of Creative Commons-NC/ND-licensed recordings of old radio broadcasts, including Edward R. Murrow’s Orchestrated Hell broadcast of December 3, 1943. I had never heard such extended recordings from this time — just snippets and samples [...]
Also, apparently something else is also behaving differently on NearlyFreeSpeech, breaking the ImageMagick processor. I compensated with an awful hack and, just to be sure, pregenerating all of the view images so I can go to bed without, hopefully, leaving photos.xythian.com woefully broken. I think NearlyFreeSpeech is going to have to go. They seem fine [...]
It looks like Windows media Player will cheerfully play tracks downloaded by Yahoo Music Engine. Indeed, I didn’t realize this before but it looks like YME is using WMP at a much higher level than I thought to play tracks, since WMP knows about recently played and most frequently played tracks. Sooo, I can log [...]
It’s been a couple weeks now. I have some more comments about the Dell DJ: 1) In shuffle play mode, the random track selection happens with the “next track” rather than when the playlist starts playing. This means if you navigate back a song or two and then forward, you get different songs. It’s as [...]