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Category: Gadgetology
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Untethered
It’s official: I’m dangerous again.
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The play(s) (are) the thing – Northside drama DVDs revisited
I burned the completed 13-minute “1981” segment of PDF Level 2 to DVD tonight (via the dip-a-toe-into-the-analog-pool method I described earlier in this blog entry), and had ample space left on the disc. Since I hate to waste disc space on that silly a scale, I thought I’d have a go at a transfer of the troublesome VHS tape of the Northside High drama department’s production of “Up The Down Staircase.” As it turns out, there’s even a helpful slate at the beginning of the tape nailing this down to the January 14, 1989 performance.
That’s just about the only thing helpful on the tape, though. … Read more
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BLO SNO
The sight of snow blowing practically sideways today was an interesting counterpoint to the impressive (and just a little bit scary) lightning show not even 24 hours earlier. Nothing’s really making travel impossible here, it’s just nice to look at. Anyway, it reminded me of the early days of the Weather Channel, when “blowing snow” as a weather condition was displayed by the automated local forecast gadget as: … Read more
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Building a better audiovisual mousetrap
Work has been completed up through the “1980” segment of Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2, a ~3 hour DVD project that I just realized I have only about 40 days to complete. The end of the “1980” segment roughly coincides with the 45-minute mark…and it’s taken me since the beginning of the year to get this far. To put it lightly, I’m a little worried about pulling this one off – especially with a few minor last-minute issues to do with the CGE DVD project cropping up at the same time, to say nothing of daddy duty and the work that always needs to be done around the house. … Read more
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Beating the radar rat race
(That’s the name of an old Commodore 64 game, by the bye.)
In a recent forum conversation about how the public has to rely on either TV stations or the Weather Channel for radar views, I thought I’d try to edumacate folks. All you need for an almost-live animated weather radar view is the interwebs! Here’s the recipe:
- Go to https://www.noaa.gov/
- Punch in your ZIP code under “Weather.gov Forecast”
- When your local Weather Service page loads, page down to “Radar & Satellite Images”
- Click “Loop” under “Reflectivity”
- Give Java a moment to spin up and do its funky voodoo
- When the animated radar starts running, go down and click “AutoUpdate is OFF” so that it says it’s ON.
- You now have a self-updating radar view with about a ~15/20 minute lag!
You can also click on the radar and zoom in on your city if you like. Or someone else’s! Watch destruction and mayhem rain down on those other guys for a change.
#7 is important – the Weather Service’s web radar is really an afterthought compared to their meteorologists having live data. Call it a nice side effect, but don’t be a bonehead: use this only to give yourself a heads-up advance warning of what’s inbound – there’s too much of a lag to wait until it’s on top of you and then suddenly make life-or-death decisions on 20-minute-old data.
During tornado season, I have one older PC that’s almost exclusively dedicated to running the local radar view, and maybe one out of Tulsa or OKC if there’s some big bad stuff heading in from there. Your tax dollars are paying for the Weather Service bandwidth – use it!… Read more
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Resolutions high and low
I was amused to run across this post from a year ago, in which I apparently – and I had forgotten this – set working on the PDF DVD and finishing it as a new years’ resolution. Holy crap, I actually kept a new years’ resolution? Put a star on my calendar. Now let’s talk about this year’s resolutions (or lack thereof). … Read more
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Ah great
Once again, Obi’s decided to run out the door full tilt and inspect the property. It upsets me when he does this, on behalf of Evan – he’s supposed to be my little boy’s cat, and ya know, it’s gotta do a real number on your self-esteem when your bestest furry buddy routinely runs away from you.
It’s just as well then that Evan’s spending tomorrow with other members of the family, mainly because his daddy’s sicker than a dog. I’ve taken so much Benadryl in the past 24 hours that I feel like I’ve been smothered with a blanket. Several times. I’m switching to a less ….debilitating antihistamine tonight, to deal with the chills, the fever, the aches and pains, and the fact that the hills are alive with the sound of mucus. And yeah, I know, I’m a real pansy if Benadryl knocks me out. Hey, I’m a square. I don’t drink or do drugs recreationally. It doesn’t take much. I didn’t go to the farm today – which is okay by me. I’m not sure I can handle a farm routine that Hannah isn’t a part of. I’d prefer feeling better to feeling like crap with a crapital crap, but I was relieved to not be at the farm today, as much as it might’ve inconvenienced everyone.
I did make the mistake today of watching some Sarah Jane Adventures; don’t get me wrong, it’s a great little show, and almost more like classic Doctor Who than the current Doctor Who is. It’s gotten a big boost this season from getting to cherry-pick from Who mythology as background info, as well as developing its own ongoing stories. But the two-parter I watched today was a slightly more convoluted take on the Doctor Who episode Father’s Day, with a nearly identical paradox. Benadryl-addled brain + temporal paradox = not my friend. But I kid SJA – it’s a great show, and so amazingly unlike anything that’d be rolled out for the early teen age group over here. In some respects it’s almost Buffy-esque in how it deals with “real life problems.” I’m glad it’s back for a full season in ’09, because with “light duty” for both Doctor Who and Torchwood, it’s gonna be a painful year.
Finally, a big shout-out to Jess Ragan for selling me a shiny new Mobilepro – well, okay, not new, and he keeps trying to warn me that it’s not especially shiny – but it’ll be a huge help to be able to stay connected while on the move. Evan’s entering the “stick everything in his mouth” stage, and as much as I’ve tried to keep hazardous objects out of reach, it stuns me what the little guy comes up with – he finds hazards that I didn’t know were there – and as such, sitting at the computer and merely listening isn’t an option. I either need to be close at hand, actively engaging him, or at least close at hand keeping an eye on him. Not having the means to walk around and do the wi-fi thing has been aggravating for the past month; I look forward to being “on the air” again.
Hopefully there’ll be an Obi cat at my feet while I’m doing it, too.… Read more
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So I finally got around to creating a Facebook account (how 2006 of me, huh?), and I’ve gotta say, I’m way more in love with Facebook already than I think I ever have been with Myspace or, lately, Livejournal. Facebook automatically does what those services damn well ought to be able to do: take the RSS feed from my blog and incorporate it into my profiles as if I’m writing it there as well. I’ve grown really tired of reposting my blog entries on LJ and MS, and let me tell you, Facebook’s ability to do that one simple thing makes me think seriously about letting those others slide. I used to be able to add stuff to my Livejournal blog automagically, but somewhere in there, LJ changed things around and broke the WordPress-to-Livejournal plugin. And as much of a pain in the butt as everyone on LJ thought it was to have to log in to my blog to comment, I kinda miss having all the commenting going on in one place instead of two or three places – it makes the “real” blog look pretty barren. 😆
Anyway, if I do make any drastic decisions, you’ll hear about it here. In the meantime, here’s ye olde Facebooke profile for anyone who wants to add me.… Read more
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Exterminate the ice trays!
Don’t ask for them in your grocer’s freezer aisle: That’s right. There are Daleks in my freezer. (There’s a real and logical reason for this…which you’ll have to wait until the end of the post to see. In the meantime, my wife’s going to be pissed, looking in the freezer for some manner of foodstuff and finding evil armored mutants and stuff.)
They really like the moon: check out this link for a really cool project – a small NASA team has set up shop in, of all places, a disused McDonald’s, and they’re restoring and reprocessing raw data and pictures from NASA’s 1960s unmanned lunar missions with jaw-droppingly spectacular results. Apparently the data gathered by such probes as the Lunar Orbiters circa 1966 could be beneficial to the next generation of lunar mission planners, but hey, I’m okay with it if all we get out of it is more of these great pictures. That’s a perfectly good thing for my tax money to be going to. Be sure to check out their series of pictures showing where these open-reel data tapes have been for the past four decades or so, too! That information makes the restored data and pictures all the more remarkable, and makes me feel a little better about my own housekeeping practices. (Not that I couldn’t use some improvement…)
MobileProWoes: fifteen bucks later, I have a new wi-fi card to replace my horrendously abused one for my handheld PC…and it turns out that the wi-fi card may not, in fact, be the problem at all. It’s the port inside the machine. I’ve had all sorts of advice about what to replace the MobilePro with, but in the end I’m fond enough of the machine that I’m going to be happy to replace it with an only slightly newer MobilePro. There are fully capable laptops out there, but I’m on too tight a budget to even get into the $300 range. I don’t need this to play movies or MP3s – I just need something extremely portable for writing purposes that isn’t a Crackberry or anything of that nature. I’ll let you know how the hunt goes. In the meantime, the fact that the MobilePro won’t fire up a perfectly good new card raises the interesting possibility that I might just have two working wi-fi cards – one slightly battered and one backup.
Electric cattle pod: still working on the year’s-end best-of podcast thing, which is now looking like…ready for it?…five hours, split pretty evenly between soundtrack and non-soundtrack stuff. The frightening thing is, every time I think I’m ready to finish writing my material and start recording, some other really cool release pops up and I’m all “ooh, got to work that in somewhere!” So by the time Christmas actually rolls around and I unleash this puppy, it’ll probably be two days long. And yeah, I’m writing a script for myself; it’s bad enough that I’m going to have to listen to my own voice while putting this thing together, so I’d like to at least have the benefit of the illusion of sounding like I know what the hell I’m talking about.
Okay, okay, here’s why: I just got the Doctor Who Stolen Earth figure set, which has two Daleks, Davros and yet another Doctor (if anyone needs the spare tenth Doctor I wound up with here, give me a shout – if you can cover shipping and maybe lunch, he and his sonic screwdriver are all yours). Apparently, many of the Daleks manufactured this year by Character Options had some issues with the plastic of the ball joints behind both the “sucker arm” and “gun” swelling up; freezing them for a few hours gets things back to normal. It also works wonders for Davros’ head/neck joint, apparently. You learn something new every day, huh? Look for them wherever your grocer carries frozen genetically engineered mutants in bonded polycarbide armor. (If I was less tired, I’d totally geek out on you and regale you with the fact that freezing both the Daleks and Davros have actually been major plot points, but…….naaaahhhh.) I picked up this and the classic series Dalek 3-pack, along with the new wi-fi card, in a recent round of eBaying which is pretty much my early Christmas for this year. I picked up one other fun thing, but I got it for Evan…and you’ll see a photo of it soon enough. 😉… Read more