aim sucks, etc.

What kind of idiot "feature" is this? I hate AOL.

I'm constantly forgetting to log myself off when I leave work. I came in this morning to see three AIM windows chuck full of one-sided IM conversation. Why? For the love of baby Jesus, what good does this serve? *sigh*

I was sure I signed off last night, too.

Oh well. Besides that, I had fun with computers last night. I spent the most time playing with my iBook, applying this hack and plugging it into my PC's monitor. The poor little 32MB graphics card struggled a bit with the 1600x1200 screen, but it worked surprisingly well. I ended up watching Resurrection of the Daleks on the monitor whilst chatting with people on the main laptop screen. Neat!

I then moved the computer out of the living room and booted it with KNOPPIX, the Linux CD distribution. I haven't used the machine in the living room much at all. It's too noisy for watching stuff and it's awkward to use from the couch. The ATI Remote Wonder I got with the TV card for my main machine helped out a little, but not enough to make it nice and usable. That left me kind of stuck for a region-free DVD player, but we'll get to that.

The living room PC is a venerable dual-Celeron Abit BP6. The dual-celeron-ness was pretty much wasted most of its life. I'd gotten an All-In-Wonder 128 which was way cool, but didn't work very well with Windows 2000. Or Linux. I'd originally bought the machine to primarily run Linux, but that idea didn't last very long. Having used Amigas nearly all my computing life to that point, I was accustomed to running unsupported OSes, but Linux was just frustrating on the desktop. I hate having to configure hardware, for one thing. This is one thing I always hated about Windows, and the problem is just that much worse on Linux. So I stuck with Win98, which gave me the video capture stuff and games, at the cost of rendering a processor useless.

After I got my current PC about a year and a half ago, I was going to make the dual-Celeron into my Linux server. So I installed Linux and, much to my dismay, discovered that Linus had taken a dislike to my motherboard and made my system incredibly unstable.

I was kind of surprised that I didn't see any of the kernel errors I was getting before with SuSE 8.0 when I booted up KNOPPIX (without any problems, except for the dead PCI slot I tried to plug a network card into, but I already knew about that). KNOPPIX, for the record, is awesome. If you ever felt like just tinkering with Linux and didn't want to blow away your harddrive to do it, burn the ISO and try it out. It's got the best Linux hardware detection out there. No goddamn XF86config or anything. Anyway, I'm going to keep it up for a week or two and see what happens. I might start experimenting with distros and things to see if it can't replace my current aged server.

Back in the living room, I was now in need of a region-free DVD player. Emboldened by my earlier Mac hackery, I decided to look for a firmware hack for the DVD drive as well. It turns out I don't need it. VLC (the Mac version, at least) will ignore regions and play any DVD without complaint. Neat! And hooking the iBook up to my TV/monitor, the iBook didn't blow it up with a too-high sync rate. Neat! The only problem is that VLC doesn't go full screen on the second monitor. I think I can live with that.

Only remaining problem is running DVDsubber on region 2 discs. I think I'll get that working on my main machine. The dual-Celeron wasn't syncing things up properly anyway.

In short, I love my little iBook more and more each day and computers are fun to play with.

comments:

matt writes:

Very cool!

Maybe I should have another look at Knoppix... Actually, I did burn a copy... I should go check it out...

Sounds like the Mac has given you a groovy new spin on life!

Robin and I are playing with Mario Kart - Double Dash (that's pretty neat... Robin has unlocked three carts for us so far!).

Submitted 2003-12-03 17:30:08

1 writes:

Found a new test for you...

http://cac.psu.edu/~j5j/test/ipipneo120.htm

Submitted 2003-12-12 21:18:41

Hm.... I don't agree with most of the conclusions. I'll toss it up to the five-point scale, which doesn't work for me.

So when do I get to see other people's results to these things?

^n°

1 writes:

I agree that it would be better with a 7 point Likert scale, at lest that would better discriminate on most of the items. I don't think that some of the items are worded very well either. Put things back in their proper place was one that threw me. I generally put other people's things back in the proper place but generally leave my things wherever they happen to be left.

Anyway, the problem with personality tests is that they attempt to set a score on something that is fairly dynamic. They're most useful when one is attempting to change a part of their personality so that a measure of improvement/change can be established. Of course, I did score pretty high on the Neurotic part of the test so maybe its just my personality that is fairly dynamic and normal people tend to stay more static.

As for seeing other people's results, this is flyingsquirrel.ca, we come here to read about, and bug, you.

Submitted 2003-12-14 13:50:17

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