Category: Gadgetology

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Gadgetology

Not the kind of surprise I was really looking for, but thanks

So… two things. As of today I’ve got a few days off, for the first time in a year that didn’t involve anyone dying. After the past two weeks at work, I can safely predict that someone would’ve been dying if I hadn’t gotten a few days off. Even the expanded-hours training schedule we’ve been on lately was truncated today, so I got to go home today after – get this! – only eight hours.

And then the fun really began. I get home and bring my two desktop machines out of standby, and my older machine – a Dell Dimension I’ve had since ’05 that has served faithfully even though I sometimes think the best thing for it would be a reformat of the ol’ C drive and a solid kick right between the registry – sounded like it was gonna freakin’ take off. The fan keeps getting louder… and the pitch of this loud whine it’s making keeps rising… and I had a bit of a flashback.

So I did now what I did then: pulled the plug out of the back.

Bad move. When I waited a couple of minutes and reconnected the power cord to the power supply, the thing stayed asleep when I tried to wake it up.

Let’s pause for a moment and see what all this machine does that I don’t/can’t do on any other machines in the house:

  • My entire DVD-burning capacity is tied up in this machine.
  • This machine plays cartoons out to a TV (hooked up as a secondary monitor) for Evan.
  • This machine has my entire music/audio collection on it, and the vast majority of my digital video files (all Doctor Who and Star Trek, and spinoffs thereof, reside on the F drive on this machine).
  • This machine has the master DVD ISO files, and all of the master video files, for all of my DVD productions to date.
  • This machine has my (half-dozen or so) books-in-progress on it.
  • This machine is my LAN hub.
  • This machine has all of my photos of my son on it.

Okay, I think you get it: double-plus-non-good. Fortunately, after about half an hour of trying to call friends in the know, I tried to power the Dell up again… and this time, it woke up.

I think the plan is to keep it awake until further notice, giving me a little bit of time to buy a new power supply, without it being an ohshitgottagetanewonenow thing. But I’m under no illusion that it’ll stay awake forever waiting for me to finish that search at a leisurely pace.

This has not been my year for power supplies.… Read more

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Gadgetology Music

Eruptive, disruptive, the whole works

Evan’s having a hard time sleeping, so daddy’s having a hard time sleeping. There’s some strange correlation there that I can’t put my finger on – maybe it’s the whole disrupting-daddy’s-sleep-by-coming-into-the-room-and-crawling-on-top-of-me-in-bed thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll love little E until I breathe my last, but man is it ever hard to sleep through a little 40-pound person climbing on top of you. Try it sometime (pending the availability of little 40-pound people in your immediate vicinity). You know I’m right.

Whiplash-inducing gearshift… CRUNCH! … Read more

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Funny Stuff Gadgetology ToyBox

You. are. kidding. me.

Oh, Facebook sidebar ads, now I know you’re screwing with me.

In other news, the Avid lives! I’ll be picking it up this weekend, in what will almost certainly be the least stressful thing I do all weekend. I’m looking forward to having it back home and working – especially since we’re having more cold nights and I could use some heat in my room. 🙄

One other thing – admittedly very geeky – that has brought a smile to my face is this prop replica made by a friend who usually turns his talents to customizing action figures and the like:

…give up? This is, of course, a shockingly good replica of an original Blake’s 7 teleport bracelet. About 23 years ago, I would’ve proudly worn this thing out in public. 😆 For now, I’ll settle on displaying it next to my HAL-9000 prop… at least until Jump Cut City goes back into production (oh, the screen time this thing would have gotten back then). Many thanks to Hoosier Whovian.… Read more

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Gadgetology Home Base

Enjoy this photograph of my dongle

Remember all the fun I had in 2006 with the mystery of the missing Avid dongle? And what Avid said to me about replacing said dongle? (and how I was able to give ’em the finger anyway? $10,000 my ass!) Well, I’m not losing the Avid dongle again; seen at right is my simple solution for that problem. (To be fair, Kent reminded me not to lose the dongle again; it’s just possible that I was a little bit less than… erm… diplomatic when I panic-called him in 2006 looking for it…)

I’ve had a few leads on a replacement power supply; thanks to everyone who’s responded. I’ll be following up extra-soonishly.

Arkansas Valley Electric Co-op is sending someone out to look at the wiring tomorrow; the thought occurred to me that, only a couple of weeks ago, someone from Cox was out here and had to restring our entire cable run from the tap to the pole to the house to my room. It’s just possible that he might have bumped or jarred something along the way (don’t cross the streams, man!). Given that there have been three electrical incidents in the past 9 days (so far…), a wiring check would seem to be called for. Almost everyone looked at the power supply photos in yesterday’s post and said “massive power surge,” but I’m not sure if that theory sticks. The fuse on the surge protector (and yes, for a multi-thousand-buck editing workstation and its multitudes of outboard gear, I have a really robust pair of surge protectors, not just a power strip) was not fried, and nothing else on that surge protector (which also powers about half of the outboard SCSI drives) fried. While I think a wiring check is probably warranted from last week’s frying-of-the-central-heat-and-air-system alone, I have a feeling this may not necessarily be related. I’m no expert in pushing electrons through copper wiring, but that’s what my electrical physics gut-check is telling me: a power surge big enough to do that would’ve done that to more than just one component. Then again, my gut-checks have bounced before due to insufficient funds, worm attacks and whatnot.

Still, I’m hoping to have a fix in place soon – not being able to power my Avid up and edit something, even if it’s just something goofy using someone else’s footage for a laugh, is like having an arm cut off. I’m so used to firing the thing up about once a day and just… doing… something, you know? It may be that it bugs me more now because I don’t have access to an Avid at work. To me, not being able to edit video is like not being able to walk. It’s just something I do.

My electrical wiring will be checked out tomorrow. In a moment, the results of that trial.… Read more

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Critters Gadgetology

Puck, the amazing Avid-repairing cat

For the past six months, I’ve had a problem plaguing my Avid video editing system: direct output from my other PC was a no-go. Running that same PC out to a DVD recorder, and then playing the resulting DVD-R back into the Avid, was okay. But direct recording, which is much more desirable? Nope. For some reason, the video signal was arriving weak and out-of-phase – the color was nearly 180 degrees out of phase, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to resolve the issue, even after re-seating/swapping cables, swapping out distribution amps at the source, and basically rewiring everything. This is a big item for me to do without, because I record a lot of video for the site this way (including Phosphor Dot Fossils video pieces).

Lo and behold, the first time Puck gets behind the Avid and starts playing with the wiring, the problem is fixed. Seriously. The video quality is just beautiful. He wouldn’t even have gotten back there except that I had removed some obstacles so that I could get behind the machine. Maybe if I let him get back there again, I’ll wind up with HD.

Puck

The sad thing about this whole story is that the only reward I have for the little guy is taking him to the vet in a few hours so they can snip his boy bits and, after much delibration, his front claws. He’s literally torn apart some of our furniture, just doing routine scratching. This was a tough decision, because that aside, he’s actually very judicious in his claw use: as much as Evan has been getting a bit rough with his feline friends of late, he’s accumulated all of two or three scratches. Puck normally just looks at me as the boy is trying to drag him away by one leg, as if to say “Help! I’d rather not shred your kid here.” For an ex-stray, Puck is a very gentle cat, with both Evan and the other cats. I think he knows he’s got a better gig here than in the big field behind the TV station. Unlike Obi, our other adopted stray, Puck shows zero interest in returning to the outdoors; obviously he’s not feeling any nostalgia for checking transmitter tower lights. If he keeps embarking on successful rewiring projects around here, though, I may start bringing Puck to work with me. Not to drop him off where I found him, but to lend his expertise to the engineering department.

The standard instructions for a cat who has surgery in the morning is to cut him off from food and water at 10pm the previous night. The key words here again being “ex-stray,” this has proven amazingly difficult. That little cat can get into just about anything. He’ll also eat just about anything. Dirty dishwater? Check. Fig newtons left out on the counter? Check. Who knows, by 7 o’ clock this morning, we may have to postpone the snipping of his outboard gear on account of not being able to enforce the food/water embargo.… Read more

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Gadgetology Gaming

MAME a la MobilePro

Earl vs. MobilePro MAMEMost anyone who’s seen me in person in the past seven or eight years knows that I carry around with me, nearly everywhere, a slightly dated handheld PC that weighs in somewhere between the size of a modern netbook and what they used to call a “palmtop.” The NEC MobilePro, long out of production, was way, way the hell ahead of its time: it was a netbook, 5+ years before the concept of the netbook caught on with, if not the general public, then the general geek populace. It can get on the web via wi-fi with few problems. It has Word, Excel and Powerpoint on it, so I can write articles for my site while I’m away from my desktop, I can keep my inventory spreadsheets of my game collection on it, and so on. It reads PDFs, so I recently made it a bit of a personal crusade to figure out how to get it to play nice with my home LAN so it could access the huge number of ebooks I have on my home server. The MobilePros, at least the later ones, are touchscreen devices. You can use a stylus (provided with the unit), but you can also tap it with your fingers. I usually use my fingers, because how cool is that? To complete my journey to the dork side, I had a custom “DON’T PANIC” sticker made up for the “cover” (i.e. the reverse side of the flatscreen); admit it, if you had a portable device with a tiny screen that you could look stuff up on, you would do this too and you know it. The little machine has become something of a trademark of mine. … Read more