Jan 062005
 

The reward for winning my fantasy football championship was a brand new 40 GB 4th generation iPod. It’s my first Apple product, and I must say I am very impressed.

I’ve already transfered over a ton of music, and the scrollable click wheel lets me navigate from Alice in Chains to U2 with ease. I know I sound like some sort of Apple fanboy here, but the thing is that good. I’m not ready to buy a G4 or head off to Macworld, but Apple seems to know what they’re doing with this thing.

Lately I’ve been checking out accessories, hacks, and other information to realize the full potential of my iPod. Heck, I might even stick Linux on it (although I’ll have to wait for 4th generation support).

May 142004
 

It seems I’ve been having some back luck with our PCs as of late. I was getting an event id 51 on one of them and it was insufferably slow to do anything on it. The error was appearing in the system log file every three or so seconds so the PC was spending all of it’s time telling me something was wrong. Even trying to get to see the system log file was an exercise in futility; there’s nothing like an error occuring and the system that tells you about the error makes it virtually impossible for you to see what it’s telling you. Thank you, Microsoft. :angry:

I was finally able to figure out that the problem was the hard drive failing (or about to do so), but luckily I have a couple of others lying around from other PC experiments. I had to install XP again, and I’m in the process of copying all of my multimedia back over (thus the reason for brimon radio not functioning currently), but everything will soon be back to normal.

 

As you probably noticed, we haven’t posted in awhile, and the site has been up and down more than the stock market lately. It was frustrating trying to figure out exactly what the problem was – banging my head against the proverbial wall – when after talking to some co-workers, I finally figured it out.

Bad Caps.

That’s bad capacitors to you and me – a case of industrial espionage gone awry. After researching the issue on that site, I cracked open the server upon which this site runs and verified that I indeed did have bad caps.

So what do you do if you have bad caps? One of three things:

  1. Buy a new machine.
  2. Try to replace the bad caps.
  3. Replace the motherboard.

Option one was a last resort for me because aside from the caps, my server was still good, and I didn’t feel like shelling out a few hundred dollars right now. Option two seemed a little daunting, as I have zero experience with motherboards, and the task of ripping the caps off of one and trying to buy the correct ones and solder them on correctly just seemed too easy to screw up.

So I went with option three. I looked on eBay for a motherboard (I had to do some research to find out what would be compatible with my current hardware), and I was fortunate to find an auction that was ending that very day. I bid on it and patiently waited for the auction to end. After fending off a last minute bidder with some shrewd bidding on my part, the motherboard was mine (and pretty inexpensive to boot). Four days later, it was sitting in my basement.

Now we come to the easy part. I was able to swap the new (to me) motherboard with the old one. I couldn’t believe how simple it was to do it. And now my server has new life, and hopefully the bad cap gremlins will stay away.

Feb 192004
 

Here’s something that I thought was just cool: a map of every state that I’ve visited.

There’s alot in the Mid-West and West that I’ve yet to visit, but I’ve got most of the East Coast locked up pretty well (except for a few in New England). Would be nice to say that you’ve visited all 50 states, you know? Admittedly, alot of the ones I’ve “visited” have just been via the airport or driving through on my way to another state, but that counts, doesn’t it?

Jan 072004
 

So I finally decided to hack my xbox.

For those not aware, to hack your xbox, you have to disassemble it, solder in a modchip, and then reassemble it. It’s that easy. :)

Actually, I had never soldered before and the thought of it seemed quite daunting, but after much research and some practice on an old soundcard, I decided to give it a shot. And what do you know, it worked on the first try. That never happens.

So what does hacking your xbox get you? Well, for starters, I can upgrade the harddrive and then copy games to it. This makes for lightning quick load times. But the best part of the whole process is the ability to run other software on your xbox, my favorite of which is the xbox media center. It lets me stream mp3s, photos, and video from any PC and display it on my TV screen, all with an intuitive GUI. It’s the bomb, as the kids say, or as they used to say I guess…I’m so behind on the hip lingo.

I can’t really direct you to where to get this software of which I speak, but suffice it to say that IRC is your friend. So get out there there and start hacking!

 

Not been too much going on here as of late. Just been really busy with the wedding and other stuff. Doesn’t make for much of a blog if there’s nothing to read, right?

So on Sunday, we’re putting together our wedding invitations. I’ve just printed out the directions and start to fold them to put in the envelope when I notice I’ve made a mistake (let’s just say you can’t reinforce an enforcement). So I go to print out seventy more directions when after about 22 of them, my black ink runs out!

Now, eight o’clock on a Sunday evening…not exactly prime printer-ink-buying time.

Luckily the local Target is open so I head up there with our friend, Mike, who had come over with his wife, Laura, to help us with the invitations. We head over to the ink section, scan the aisle, and there seems to be plenty of ink for every printer imaginable…except mine. Every rack is ten deep with inks except the black ink for my Canon printer.

Inconceivable! :angry:

The Target girl checks in the back and nothing. So, reluctantly, we trek over to the ghetto Kmart, which is surprisingly still in business. It’s the only place where they actually have printer ink in a locked cabinet. I guess they’re a really hot item on the black market.

But the ghetto Kmart actually comes through. They have the black ink for my printer! We get it, speed home, print off the remaining directions, and finish putting the invitations together. Unfortunately, Monica had already sealed two of the invitations with the directions that included my faux pas. So, to Danny and Scott, please ignore my blunder.

Mar 272003
 

Thought this was pretty funny. At the time of this post, the english al-jazerra site has been hacked. For some reason, I don’t think the US gov’t will be looking into this any time soon.

In case it’s already been fixed, you can see a screen shot of what it looked like here.

 

Yeah, I know, I’m a big slacker for not posting much lately. What’s my excuse? We’ve been very busy. And I’m lazy.

So no snow the last two weeks and it’s been wonderful. Who knew no snow could be so much fun? There’s still a few piles of it on the ground, but things are starting to get back to normal. Don’t tell that to our wounded bush out front.

So I mentioned in a previous post about making VCDs and SVCDs. Well, as it turns out, I got a great deal on a DVD burner, so now I’ll be making our very own DVDs. Now if I could just perfect my machine to stop time so I could actually do all of the things I would like to do.

I’m cranking out some long over due updates for our wedding section. It will be a work in progress this week so bear with me until I get it done.

Oh, and don’t forget to vote in our new poll.

Feb 282003
 

Snow update: about four or five inches on the ground currently. Still snowing pretty heavily so we’ll get some more accumulation today. I just love shoveling snow every week.

On a good note, I figured out how to extract video from my TiVo. It’s incredibly easy. After fiddling with a program called TiVoApp, I finally found something called TyTool (this link describes the whole extraction process, but you can find TyTool and other stuff there). So I have the raw video streams on my computer; now I just need to turn them into something useful for making VCDs and SVCDs. Hopefully I can do that this weekend (in between shoveling snow, of course).

 

Updated the about us page. Also did btss (behind the scenes stuff in case you haven’t been keeping up).

What is it with people still having Christmas lights up? And they’re still turning them on even! It’s two weeks into the new year, people! I don’t consider our neighborhood white trash, but, come June, I may be telling a different story.

I found out today some of our friends got bit by the home theater bug. You know who you are. There’s nothing like sitting down to watch a movie in your own home, knowing that what you’re watching and hearing rivals that of the local theaters (and your neighbors can attest to that fact too, usually :) .

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