Archive for February, 2008
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Someone at work left an open tub of Trader Joe's chocolate-covered espresso beans in the break room. Unable to resist their chocolaty siren's call, I soon myself munching them down like Skittles. Since I'm unavoidably somewhat morbid, this got me thinking, just how many of these would it ...
Posted in Funny | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
I have an Antec Fusion Black 430 HTPC case, which has a built-in LCD and IR receiver, and I want to control it using my Logitech Harmony 880 programmable remote.
Getting it to work was a major pain.
Overview
The lirc_imon module is used to communicate with the iMON PAD. LIRC has ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
I came across a series of Japanese videos on YouTube. Initially, they appear to be rather mundane and cute. By the 11th video, things take a different turn, and by the 12th video, they're downright weird. The videos seem to be a promotion for Gears of War ...
Posted in Internet, 日本語 | No Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
While at lunch with coworkers, I was looking at an Ebisu beer flyer and noticed something odd: the katakana began with ヱ. But I've never seen that character before!
As it turns out, it's an obsolete character for 'we'. In this usage, the 'w' sound would be dropped, ...
Posted in 日本語 | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
The lm-sensors website says that recent K8 processors have 'broken' temperature diodes. I assume that this includes my shiny, new BE-2350 dual-core AM2 processor.
Note: most recent K8 models have been reported to have broken thermal sensors so the k8temp driver will return bogus values and there's nothing we can ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
I use Yodlee MoneyCenter to track all of my financial accounts. It's always bothered me that the Portfolio View, which breaks down your investments by fund or stock, doesn't provide any links to information on each investment.
I decided to make life easier by writing a simple Greasemonkey script ...
Posted in Finance, Projects, Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
The Antec Fusion Black HTPC case has two of their TriCool fans, which provide a three-position switch for speed selection. They flow tremendous amounts of air, but even at their lowest setting they're audible, and they're not controllable by the motherboard.
Antec TriCool fan performance
RPM
CFM
dB
2000
79
30
1600
56
28
1200
39
25
In order for the motherboard to ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
As boxed, the Biostar TF7050 supports multi-channel analog audio, and HDMI audio, which is digital but encrypted. In order to pass-through AC3 streams (for Dolby Digital and DTS), I needed a standard digital audio output.
The motherboard has headers for digital audio input and output, but Biostar doesn't supply the ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
I'm tired of wrestling with my Mini-ITX PVR/DVR/Media PC setup which has worked a total of three weeks in the last three years. So last night I ordered a new batch of much more standard items.
All parts were ordered from ZipZoomFly, since they had some of the best overall ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Monday, February 11th, 2008
Attempting to compile Handbrake using jam resulted in a strange error, something like:
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lz
error: C compiler
cannot create executables
According to the Internets, I needed to install the development version of zlib. However, zlib-devel does not appear to exist in any Ubuntu apt repository. Ultimately, ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
The OEM drive in my MacBook was a Toshiba 60GB (MK6034GSX, 5400RPM, 8MB cache, 0.75W at idle). This drive was quick and almost entirely silent, but my photos were quickly eating up the space. So, in July 2007, I ordered a Hitachi Travelstar 200GB hard drive (7K200, 7200RPM, ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
Cracked.com had a so-so article which mentioned Russian discount airline Aeroflot.
The winning comment was by Kostanza:
Posted in Funny, Internet | No Comments »