Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 11:23. 0 comments
Thanks to kev for coming over this past weekend to help me wire up my office for ethernet, and the rest of my house for phone. My office feels much less ghetto now, and it sure is nice to not be using wireless on my iMac any more.
Current Tunes: The Crystal Method - Blast | Filed under Friends, Hardware, House
Posted 2 years, 2 months ago at 09:29. 1 comment
Dear LazyWeb:
Often when I come home from running errands I will be in the middle of a song/podcast on my iPod when I turn it off and come inside. Is there any way to have iTunes automatically cue up the same song at the same spot when I plug in my iPod so I can continue listening where I left off? I’ve tried everything short of full sync mode to no avail.
Current Tunes: Steve Lawler - BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix - 2005-07-17 | Filed under Hardware, Music
Posted 2 years, 3 months ago at 14:56. 1 comment
So, in general, I love my new iMac, but it certainly hasn’t been all sunshine and butterflies.
The two biggest problems I’ve encountered so far:
- a bundled keyboard that goes to sleep and never wakes up, which necessitates me unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in. All the USB ports are on the back of the machine, so it’s decidedly inconvenient, especially when the keyboard decides that it’s sleepy time in the middle of a WoW firefight or some such. Apple will apparently ship me a replacement keyboard if I complain, but not surprisingly, I happened to have an extra regular-old keyboard lying around which also fixed the problem.
- Perhaps more annoyingly, the built-in wireless is crippled. Generally I’m not a big fan of using wireless with desktop machines, but in this case I’m even less of a fan of running the required ethernet cable across the 3 storeys of my house to hook the iMac up to the router directly. Apple is aware of the firmware issue, but it looks like we’ll be waiting until 10.4.6 drops before we get the fix.
…
Update: no sooner posted than Apple released 10.4.6, which did in fact fix my wireless issues. Now back to your regularly scheduled butterflies.
Current Tunes: Albeniz - Zambra granadina | Filed under Hardware
Posted 2 years, 4 months ago at 11:57. 3 comments
Life imitates Penny Arcade.
Current Tunes: Lamb - Scratch Bass, courtesy of Pandora | Filed under Hardware, Mozilla
Posted 2 years, 7 months ago at 15:09. 0 comments
Kris and I have already treated each other to our Xmas gifts:
- My iPod arrived today. I love it already. I wish the car was in working order so I could take it for an inaugural road trip. Guess that will have to wait for December.
- Kristina’s Austrian Duvet arrived yesterday. Yes, it is, in fact, as decadent as it sounds, but it’s so worth it. No word of a lie, I had the best sleep I’ve had in ages last night. We also get to turn down the thermostat to 16°C at night now, which is an energy-saving boon. You see, I’m cunning because I benefit from Kristina’s gift too!
Not to ride Shaver’s coattails or anything — because I haven’t been doing that for the past, um, 10 years — but if others are looking for Xmas ideas for me and you are coming up blank, you could certainly do worse than a donation to Child’s Play.
Posted 2 years, 7 months ago at 13:45. 1 comment
The nursery is almost finished. We are so far ahead of the game, it’s scary.
…
Kev came by for dinner on Saturday and helped me get my “new” Series 1 Tivo talking to the world over it’s network card. The Tivo is now doing its thing, and has even begun suggesting things for me to watch. Desperate Housewives == Thumbs Down!
…
The engine of our car is now in many pieces on the floor of my in-laws’ garage. All I can say is that I’m thankful to have an engineer for a father-in-law. We would have paid for the car many times over in repair costs were it not for Don, and I’m pretty sure this most recent engine failure would have precipitated buying an entirely new vehicle were it not for his mechanical intercession. Thanks, Don.
Current Tunes: Innersphere - Out Of Body | Filed under Family, Hardware, House, Parenthood, TV
Posted 2 years, 8 months ago at 09:23. 6 comments
If Apple could just stop the world for a little while, I would really like to get on.
As it stands, I’m feeling very tentative about buying into a product cycle that seems to leave adopters in the dust rather quickly.
Current Tunes: GrooveSalad, courtesy of somafm | Filed under Hardware
Posted 2 years, 10 months ago at 09:20. 1 comment
I didn’t even know that I needed one until Beltzner told me I did, but we are now the proud owners of a Kosch DVD player. It is region-free out of the box — well, I’ve only tried it with discs from regions 1 & 2 — and has played everything I’ve thrown at it so far except Dual Layer (DL) discs. Now Kris can finally watch her stories, and I can have my laptop back! Recommended.
Current Tunes: GrooveSalad, courtesy of somfam | Filed under Hardware
Posted 3 years, 7 months ago at 22:40. 0 comments
As promised, here is a listing of the various problems I had getting Linux running on my new Fujitsu Lifebook:
- Wireless: due to licensing issues, the drivers for the Intel Centrino wireless card cannot be distributed with any of the packaged Linux distributions. Sourceforge to the rescue! And no, I never thought I would be uttering that phrase. Depending on how you kernel is configured, you may need to rebuild it in order to use the new driver. I’m running FC2, and I needed to recompile my kernel to include the necessary firmware modules;
- Sound: I thought the driver wasn’t being loaded, or perhaps it was the wrong driver being loaded, despite the lack of error messages in the logs. As it turns out, the volume for the sound device is simply controlled by the headphone and PCM settings; the master volume control is useless.
My brief gaming sessions today under Windows on the Lifebook were less than successful. Jedi Academy locked up a repeatedly, and Counter-Strike was almost unplayable, although that may have been due to the wireless latency. No danger of this laptop replacing my Xbox any time soon.
Current Tunes: Scumfrog - Essential Mix - 2003-04-27 | Filed under Hardware
