Posted on May 18th 2005 in Hardware
Mostly a reminder to self, but the ViewSonic Aircync V210 Wireless Display is pretty cool…
Gotta check out the Airpanel Smart v100 series too…
Posted on May 18th 2005 in Software
WellGet is a download manager similar to GetRight (does multiple streams and all that good stuff), but here’s the thing: It works just fine in Firefox and IE. One installer, two browsers. Boom.
Of course, I’ve got the FlashGot extension installed, so maybe that’s why it’s working…
Still, kinda pretty, kinda smart. Oh, and allows you to start playing media files as soon as they start downloading, no more of this “I can’t play that ’cause it’s being written to” stuff.
Check it out.
Posted on May 18th 2005 in Hardware
Found today at Engadget, and looks like it’d be kinda fun at a club or something…
Also good for reminding people who talk really loud…
The Noise Shirt is a machine washable, wirelessly rechargeable garment that measures ambient sound via an LED equalizer bar on the chest. An embedded microphone measures the environmental noise level and displays it as a vertical 5 step EQ bar, in which the top two lights represent noiselevels beyond recommended limits for hearing protection. A small lithium-polymer battery in the shirt contains a wireless recharging induction loop in the neck tab which, when conjoined with an inductive coil on the shirts specially designed coat hanger, will recharge the shirt in about three hours. The next step is to add a mobile user interface to the device in order to access outside services and applications, giving it functionality beyond reminding everyone at the next Mudvayne show that theyll eventually be going deaf.
For a nice little text-only round of “what was that sample from?”
Posted on May 9th 2005 in Hardware
Let’s see if I can renumber this post to 236, and then have my next post be 237…
Posted on May 3rd 2005 in Hardware
Whip up the answering machine link (Here) and check out message #2.
Prepare to rock out.
[Listening to: Sesame Street – Counting (Pinball) – Shrill – (01:04)]
Posted on May 1st 2005 in People
There’s a thing in the LA Times today, about a group of police that spend all day, every day, hunting child porn creators. I just simply don’t know how the hell they do it. There’s a new thing that they’re doing now (now being over the last two years), where they literally photoshop the victim out of the photo, and then circulate the images and try to figure out where the photos have been taken. They’ve made slightly more than 500 arrests (world-wide) in the last couple of years doing this sort of work, but I can’t imagine the soul-crushing and nightmares that would come along with this sort of monster hunting. The article is not a happy-funtime read, but it is a quick peek into what’s being used these days, and a fairly simple method of tracking down where these things are being created.
Other things are not so easy to shake. Gillespie says he has nightmares about the young girls beyond their reach. While shopping at Wal-Mart, he sometimes finds himself staring at children, thinking that he has seen them online. Krawczyk says that after three arrests of Boy Scout leaders in Canada in the last six months, he won’t let his son join the local troop. Bulmer says he walks down the street looking at other men, thinking, yep, he looks like a pedophile. Yep, that guy is one for sure.
If I got into that kind of hunting, it would be extremely difficult to not go outside with a baseball bat in each hand, going “What?” at everyone who gave me the slightest creepy feeling. I’ve thought about it: working for the good guys, but I would end up just hating the world in very short order.
I remember once I was driving along Broadway, about to cross Cambie, and I stopped at a red light. My friend Emma and I sat there talking about nothing in particular, and someone was walking in front of the car (in the crosswalk). Nothing special about them, I don’t remember any details about the person at all, in fact. As he walked in front of the car, Emma’s foot slammed into the carpet on the passenger side, and she braced her hand on the dash. She looked at me with this “What the hell are you doing?” expression on her face.
The car hadn’t moved. Neither had I.
But I sure as hell felt it.
I wanted to run that guy the hell over. Wanted him dead. I was angry, mean, and strong.
For no reason.
My ol’ sensei, David, would’ve said that it was the “grandfathers” making the call. During my training, there were always questions about how much force was used, and how to deal with something random. David always said that you simply defended yourself and/or those that couldn’t defend themselves, and let the grandfathers decide how much force to use, or when to stop.
This guy with the car though? It made me wanna jump out, grab him, and yell “What did you DO?”
I wonder if these cops can still hear the grandfathers, and grandmothers, and the kids that weren’t saved before it was too late.
Bulmer, a goateed 16-year veteran with bleached spiky hair, speaks longingly of finding an 11-year-old girl he has tracked since 2002. After extensive analysis of online videos of her, the team has pinpointed her location to a city in the American Northwest and handed the case to the local police.
“Why can’t they find her?” he asks. “Give me a plane ticket and I’ll go there and find her myself.”
Bulmer, you let me know she’s in my city, and I’ll pick you up at the freakin’ airport, baseball bats in hand.
Posted on April 27th 2005 in General
Working on getting everything moved over to the new server hardware, and while it’s all going fairly smoothly, the first “off the cliff” test wasn’t exactly a smashing success. I redirected my ports to the new server, shut down the old one, and then tried browsing, etc.
Wordpress freaked out, and thought that it hadn’t been configured yet. Got that all set up with a new username and password, and my posts were all still there, but my stylesheets (CSS) had ‘asploded.
That was due to my forgetting to set the security right to be the IUSR_servername rights, instead of IUSR_oldservername. Doh.
But we’re getting there. Slowly but surely.
- Windows Server 2003 – Running (DNS is still a little silly, but that’s due to my lack of Goode Brane, not because of Win2k3
- Exchange 2003 – Running
- PHP is running happily.
- MySQL is running version 4.1, which isn’t compatible with phpmyadmin (and since I don’t know diddly-foo about SQL from a command line, I’ve gotta have that running). Probably going back to a 3.x.
Bit by bit, I’m getting it there. Public Enemy playin’ as I go, ’cause mofugga, tha’s how I roll…
Luckily, while I was trying to get stuff working, I read back through some of my old posts and found some of the problems (blogging: the new paperless office). Actually, I get a lot of Google referrals on similar problems. I think if everything at-home sysadmin posted stuff they ran into and couldn’t find results for, we’d be… Well, we’d be Linux. :)
Posted on April 24th 2005 in Hardware
Jinzora is a web based media streaming and management system, designed to stream audio and video files to any internet connected computer – anytime, anywhere.
