A dumping ground for overflow thoughts
I love LEGOs, and I’m so happy that my kids (now aged 4, 6 and 8 ) are getting into them. The time has come to make the LEGO a mainstay of the creative toys in our house, which means moving them to the family room.
But have you ever stepped on a LEGO? It hurts! They need to be in a common family area but corralled in such a way they they are never on the floor.
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In the fall of 1999 I got a Windows 2000 computer. This was a huge step up from Windows 98 and from NT, and I rediscovered that Microsoft could get it right sometimes. I ignored the eye candy version when it came out (Windows XP) until SP2 when they actually had something worth upgrading for. But I kept my venerable Windows 2000 box on the older OS where the processor and memory requirements were modest.
I still run that old computer. I’ve replaced the hard drive (not due to failure but as a preventive move), and each year I vacuum the dust, clean the fans, and run SpinRite. The machine does some simple tasks in its old age – it runs my company pop3 server, IIS for some development, hosts several small MySQL databases, acts as a print server, and it serves some files to my network. It also has some older software installed that I need from time to time which doesn’t emulate well in WINE, such as MS Access from the Office 97 suite.
In July of 2010 Microsoft officially stopped all updates for Windows 2000 and XP through SP2, but I figured that since I’ve got this machine fairly well locked down it would be fine running as-is until it breaks down completely. Then the shit hit the fan.
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I finally have my joojoo. After an agonizing 87 days and re-learning the lesson that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, it is in my hands.
I’m enjoying my joojoo – that’s not to say there aren’t serious issues or that I recommend it to all my friends – but it is most of what I was hoping for. With that tepid introduction, here’s my overly lengthy brain dump of my experience, thoughts and other flotsam and jetsam.
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When following a recipe it can be handy to measure all your ingredients. But more often then not I find I want to improvise which isn’t conducive to using traditional kitchen measurement tools. So many people have to track what they eat, from weight diets to carbohydrates, fat, or salt controlled diets. When cooking you want to make an awesome dish and then eat the appropriate amount based on the fat/salt/calorie/carb count, not the other way around. What I want is a new device that doesn’t tell me how much I am going to use but tells me how much I did use. Continue reading →
After 84 days I actually have a tracking number. Apparently the trick to getting a unit to actually ship is to hound their customer service relentlessly. My joojoo shipped from Singapore and it has just arrived at the FedEx facility in Memphis, TN. I’m excited.
My joojoobe.com wiki is coming along nicely as a basic joojoo information site. Its a good home for all the tablet specs nonsense I’ve been collecting, and although tables aren’t easy in a wiki I find it easier than WordPress. I’m looking forward to adding some unique content which should be pretty easy since there only seems to be about 100 joojoo owners in the world. I also want to put together a customizable joojoo portal page with alerts, something that the joojoo OS doesn’t do natively. Its going to be a waste of time where I should be doing stuff that pays the bills fun!
I’ve been sick for a few days and as I drift in and out of consciousness I’ve been watching some of my favorite movies such as the original Star Wars. Its amazing how simplistic the dialog is in that flick, but I think that has helped it to achieve classic status. Star Wars contains a ton of recognizable and memorable one liners that anyone from my generation can identify instantly. Why not turn them all into domain names and create a marketplace for pop culture domains?
I’ve contributed to many wiki sites but I’ve never put one together before. Now that my joojoo is on its way (yeah!) I decided to make joojoobe.com into a proper wiki. Beyond the typical issues of content aggregation, organization, and re-learning their markup syntax, I’ve found the process to be educational especially from a structural mechanics point of view.
I love 3D.
My first 3D rig in about 2002 used a pair of e-Dimensional wireless 3D glasses in front of a 19″ CRT monitor. It used a special nVidia driver to pump out the interlaced frames, a custom 15-pin CRT cable that split out the sync signal, and an IR transmitter that sent that sync signal to the glasses. Games looked great but the CRT maxed out at 85hz or 42.5hz per eye, which led to headaches. The glasses were expensive, uncomfortable, had small shutter lenses, didn’t fit well over prescription glasses, and would occasionally cut out. So I shelved the project, waiting for a better solution.
The 3D TVs being sold today are just a reboot of this 10 year old technology, just shinier and built into the TVs themselves. All the old problems still exist – they are clunky, non-prescription-friendly glasses, it is line-of-sight and the glasses require batteries so they can cut out easily, and shuttering leads to low frame rate and headaches. Its not much of a step forward, and I don’t want it.
I want to build something similar to what you get in the theater – a polarized dual source projection system.
I’m voting for Joe Sestak on May 18th. Rather than just repeating his message, here are my top 5 personal reasons to vote for Joe.
Please feel free to leave a comment, but be constructive and civil. I promise not to take down any dissenting views.
For years I tried on and off to get a complex MythTV setup up and running. I eventually came to the realization that a broadcast-based system wasn’t ideal as broadcast was slowly dying off, and I can continue to use TiVo through its demise. Currently I’ve got XBMC (mostly) running on a couple of machines and partially working on 2 old XBOX machines (thanks to eBay for really cheap hardware), and I’m fairly happy so far. But to look down the road, where do I want to go from here? Boxee is a possibility, as are Roku/Popcorn/etc, but they aren’t that much better than XBMC, and they all are less open. So what then?