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Sat, 26 Sep 2009 @ 21:24 || redx || Technology

I was running Fedora 10 for a long time on my laptop, for the most part trouble free. Connecting to a projector was always a challenge. I usually got it working, one time at a user group meeting, it stopped working after the screen saver kicked in and I couldn't get it working again. Had to switch laptops with my sales woman to start the meeting.

So a few weeks back I decided to upgrade to fedora 11. I've always wanted to get an upgrade to work flawless via yum. I almost got the upgrade from fedora 9 to 10 to work via yum, but it had multiple problems, so I wiped the system clean and put a fresh copy of fedora 10 on it, which solved most of the problems.

The yum upgrade seemed to work this time, but knocked out a lot of things that were previously working. The Audio, VMWare server, wireless, most of the video apps all stopped working. Also yum broke itself, so fixing all the stuff was a nightmare. Yum was complaining about missing Python packages. I installed them manually but yum wasn't happy. I fought with yum for two evenings, before giving up, backing up the files I wanted to save and doing a clean install of fedora 11.

That worked, it did seem like it took longer than usual, many hours in fact, to download all the updates and additional packages I wanted. I spent two days tweaking the laptop to be exactly how I wanted it. I was getting ready to fly out to CA for a week, and this laptop is my lifeline to my company. I rebooted after adjusting the 3d driver for the graphics card... and it died. The laptop refused to boot up. At first I suspected the graphic settings, but it wasn't even loading that far into Linux. After rebooting several times I saw that it was randomly failing on different packages after loading the kernel.

I was flying out the next day and hadn't gotten anything else ready yet. I grabbed my Windows 7 DVD and installed that. In a little over an hour I had a working laptop again. It seemed sluggish, but I wrote that off to running Windows instead of Linux. After downloading Firefox, Thunderbird and openoffice, I had something I could use while traveling. I wasn't happy but I could get by.

While I was in CA, my laptop crash and froze up a number of times. Turns out my hard drive was failing. I had a clue, when I had fedora 11 running, for all of two days, it did warn of a hard drive failing, but didn't really give me any other details, like which one, or why it thought it was failing. I ordered a new hard drive from NewEgg, 500G for just under $100. My old hard drive was only 120G. I figured I would now have decent space for multiple virtual machines.

Last week the hard drive arrived, and instead of saving anything from the Windows 7 configuration, I just swapped out the hard drives and installed fedora 11 fresh. I left the laptop running in my new home office.. um.. I mean my son's room. It's been running about a week and seems fine.

I'm running VirtualBox from Sun instead of VMWare server. It seems to tax the system less. I created a Windows 7 virtual machine, I need it to watch my slingbox as they don't have a Linux viewer yet. I also play Starcraft on it when I'm bored. VMWare needed to be recompiled each time I had a new kernel, which was too often, and always seemed to happen when I was on the road. Not sure VirtualBox will load my old VM images, if not I'll probably setup VMWare server again.

I'm installing minor stuff on RedX tonight while updating some GSA docs I should have done yesterday, I'm happy I'm back with a Linux laptop, and hope I get another year out of this one, it's 3 1/2 years old now. I'd like to set a company precedent of making a laptop last 4 years. The company is 10 years old next month, and I've had 3 laptops, a Sony, a dell and currently a lenovo. Of all of them, I've kept the lenovo the longest. I still have the dell, it still works, running Windows XP, but it's very temperamental. If you move it, it might take hours to get it running again. It's like Fonzie's jukebox, if I bang on it just right while pushing the power button, it might start. If I get it to boot, then getting it to load windows is the next challenge. I leave it running in my kitchen, mainly to check email in the morning and to IM employees before I head out to work. Can't really do much more with it. I'm mainly waiting for my wife to yell at me to get it off the kitchen table, she hasn't yet and it's been there about 2 years.

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Wed, 22 Jul 2009 @ 15:46 || Vinyl Dye || Technology

Vinyl Dye, I'm going to see if I can find any of this stuff so I can start dyeing all my old beige computer parts.

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Tue, 23 Jun 2009 @ 19:44 || Fedora 11 || Technology

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Sun, 25 Jan 2009 @ 19:35 || dots || Technology

Zombies Ahead

Also a good lesson to always reset your password from the default. And when designing road signs not to make it so easy to reset the password back to the default.

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Sun, 25 Jan 2009 @ 17:06 || Changing Distros || Technology

I recently upgraded to Fedora 9 then 10, in the last few weeks. I'm not sure which upgrade broke what. But I had to fix a lot of stuff that should have just worked. The wireless, audio and vmware always seem to break between upgrades on this laptop. Those all broke this time too, but as I was finding the fixes for them, other more annoying things broke, my CDMA support disappeared, then my wired network. I got them back up after a few hours, but had the hardest time getting wireless back. It would see all the APs in the neighborhood, except mine. I assumed I had my ssid in some config file somewhere that was blocking it from showing up in the scanning window. Never could find out why, but using the heavy handed approach of manually attaching to my AP via iwconfig I was able to connect. I wrote a startup script to manually connect on startup, need to remember to turn that off the next time I'm traveling. No idea why Network Manager still doesn't show my AP.

The audio was easy enough to fix.. or so I thought. I got it playing flash and YouTube videos/audios, but found out that streaming audio and mp3/wma's no longer played. I'm not sure which version of Fedora when out of their way to remove support for mp3s and other 'non-free' formats. I tried installing multiple codecs, but it took me most of today to find the right combination to get things working. It's still not exactly how I'd like it, but I can now play mp3s and wmas again. The streaming audio still has problems, some radio stations play on my laptop but not all. For the most part it seems good enough.

Not sure which distro I'll switch to, or if I'll bother to on this laptop. It is 3 years old this spring, about time for a new laptop. This one's only shortfall is the harddrive, 80gigs, I can't load it up with multiple VMs, maybe I'll look into upgrading it's harddrive first..

I like CentOS, but not sure I'll like it any better than Fedora for a laptop. The issues with file formats will be the same, as CentOS is a clone of RedHat, and I doubt they'd add support back in for something RedHat took out.

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Wed, 31 Dec 2008 @ 22:16 || Korean Sat TV || Technology

We've had Korean TV via satellite for a couple of years now, from a company called TanTV. It costs about $240 a year, gets about 6 time delayed channels from South Korea, a music channel and about a dozen christian channels and one Fox Network affiliate, never figured out why. I have it wired into the house so the master bedroom gets both the Korean channels and the regular cable.

The dish needs to point straight west at a very low azimuth. I have two problems. I have a two story house to the west, and these large things called the Rocky mountains. That leaves me with very few places to mount the dish. Every place that would be convenient to place it, was either blocked by the neighbor's house or too low to clear the mountains. I ended up placing it just above my son's bedroom window, this leaves it completely exposed to the wind. When we get wind storms like we had Sunday and are having tonight, Sukki can't watch TV. She is really into instant gratification, so hangs out of the 3rd floor window with a broom and bangs the crap out of the dish. She then runs back into the master bedroom to see if it fixed it, repeating the process till she gets lucky and fixes it or gets frustrated and calls me. Often Shane will get involved. He probably is more concerned about his mom falling out the window than I am. I just hope she doesn't fall on my BBQ grill.

Tonight, her TV was out, and she asked me to help before trying to break her neck. We ended up having her hang out the window and whack the disk with a broom. Sometimes if you treat technology right it just works.

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Wed, 10 Sep 2008 @ 14:15 || Twitter || Technology

I'm not sure how often I'll keep my account up to date or if I'll continue using it. For now, if you want to follow me on Twitter, but user name is doyleshawn.

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Mon, 08 Sep 2008 @ 11:08 || Hadron Collider || Technology

What could possible go wrong? Since it's not the year 2012, I'm not too worried. Any investment that pays out after 2012 is probably a bad one.

It's nice to see this project finially go online. It's a shame it isn't one here in the US.

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Mon, 28 Jul 2008 @ 20:13 || Tech Karma || Technology

I'll have to offer up some VCRs and old remotes as a sacrifice, maybe even a tape recorder.

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Wed, 12 Mar 2008 @ 21:36 || Fry's || Technology

I found a 4 pack of 2Gig SD cards for $49 bucks. I could have done a little better online, but then would have to pay shipping and not have the fun of spending a couple hours looking at all the cool stuff at Fry's.

I got side tracked at the 2TB storage devices, I'm so going to buy one.. someday, then at the GPS display, a ton at the $249 price mark, a few under and a bunch over. Not quite ready for a new GPS yet. I was there for almost 2 hours, yet forgot to look at a new backpack. Looks like I'll use an old IBM conference backpack till I see something I really like for a long term replacement.

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Tue, 02 Oct 2007 @ 13:09 || diabetes3 || Technology

Science Daily: Insulin, it turns out, may be as important for the mind as it is for the body. Research in the last few years has raised the possibility that Alzheimer's memory loss could be due to a novel third form of diabetes.

No wonder I can't remember anything lately. However since my wife stopped poisoning me my memory has been improving.

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Wed, 26 Sep 2007 @ 12:01 || Time Math || Technology

So assuming I figure out how to move an object, like my van, (if I am traveling in time it would be convenient to have a vehicle to drive around, and the van should blend in, in most time eras). The following math seems to apply.

So if I have the van sitting in my driveway, and move it backwards in time say 1 hour. And the earth moves at about 1000 miles an hour, would this also place my van 1000 east of Denver, probably near St. Louis? Need to figure out if time travel is relevant to the current location or if it's fixed in space, meaning not only do I need to figure out how to move in time, but also in space.

In my above question, I assumed I only needed to worry about the earths rotation, and not it's movement around the sun. which is 67,000 miles per hour, so not only am I 1000 east of Denver, I'm also 67,000 miles out in space, which I'll have to modify the van for, not really speced for space, will need more duct tape.

Of course, now I'm assuming I don't need to account for the solar system's movement, 559,224 miles per hour, which I probably would. So accounting for that, if I traveled back in time 1 hour, I would be 1000 miles to the east, 67,000 miles behind the earth and 559,224 miles away from our solar system. Which is too far for my Van to drive back to in my lifetime.

So this equation should be valid assuming we don't worry about how fast our galaxy is moving inside the universe. To make it easier, I'm flattening the universe to two dimensions, odd, since I'm trying to figure out four.

x = 627224t
x = distance from starting location
t = time traveled in hours (negative for going back, positive for forward)
627224= g(speed the sun is moving from our galactic center)+e(earths speed around the sun)+p(earths rotation)

At least I can pinpoint fairly crudely where I think an object moving thru time would end up. One must also be careful to record the starting location.

Scarey, thing is if you go forward in time, it's possible the solar system will crash into you, which will probably hurt.

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Thu, 06 Sep 2007 @ 14:35 || On Off Switches || Technology

Actually, the meeting shouldn't be called a Design Review, as I don't have a design yet, other than , "it should look cool", why have a time machine if it looks clunky? When traveling thru time, one should do so with style.

So, back to the on/off switch. It made sense to me if a system is powered, we should be able to shut it off. What happens if we had a short or a fire in the life support system? Or worse, an alien entity takes over the life support system! That doesn't sound good.

I do see his point, the name of the system suggests that if it were turned off, that would be bad, maybe really bad. Why name it the "life support system" if you didn't really need it to support life, might as well call it the air conditioner.

To tell the truth it wasn't really a meeting, just us goofing around waiting for something good on TV, which never happened. However, I've been in a lot of real meetings that were less productive .

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Wed, 05 Sep 2007 @ 14:19 || Time Machine Project || Technology

I mentioned I wanted to start doing some projects, like some of the stuff found in Make. Especially I want to work on my time machine. Shane mentioned that if I actually do succeed in building a time machine, we probably would have already been visited by our future selves.

Depending on your version of the space time continuum, and the time travel paradox. I don't see the lack of a visit from our future selves as an issue, for the following reasons.

• We're not that interesting
There's probably plenty of stuff our future selves would rather do than visit us now.
• We're kinda jerks
Why should our future selves travel back to help us build the time machine? we should build our own, lazy current selves!
• Worried we might destroy something
Some sci-fi shows make the claim that if you were to meet yourself space/time would be destroyed. Not something I want to be remembered for, tho, if I destroy it enough who would know?
• Probably stuck somewhere
After building our time machine, one of the following happened.
• Broke down in the distance past, need to wait for technology to catch up for spare parts
• Got attacked or eaten, or both
• Got sidetracked
• Ran out of whatever powers the time machine, I'm thinking methane, tho, not sure if that could run out.

Theres probably other reasons why we haven't been back to the present since inventing the time machine, I'll have to wait to find out.

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Tue, 04 Sep 2007 @ 08:59 || RFID chips anyone? || Technology

Interesting article. However it doesn't mention what company, if any, were suggesting mandatory implants. I'm sure there's a boob joke in there somewhere, I'm better at finding the fart jokes.

I've always wanted to toy around with RFID, build my own scanner, find out what people are saving on RFID chips, shouldn't be that hard, the scanners aren't all that big, Maybe when I finish my basement, I'll start some more interesting projects.

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Mon, 13 Aug 2007 @ 16:47 || To regurgitate or not to regurgitate? || Technology

The question comes down to, should I include more gurgitation or should I stick to boring you about my basement rebuild and work related stories?

BTW: We made another small, 4 trash cans, dent in the debris that was my basement ceiling and walls. Now we are waiting for Friday's trash pickup, then we'll fill up four more trash cans. We should be done with the cleanup in three more weeks. I could speed things up if I got a dumpster or more trash cans, but I'm pacing myself.

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Mon, 16 Jul 2007 @ 11:21 || T60p || Technology

It's really nice traveling with just 1 laptop now. It took me a while to get all the applications and stuff from my old Windose based laptop to my new linux based laptop. I'm still using Thunderbird for email, via the addons, I was able to get all my filters and folder transfered over. I'm using Firefox for my browser. I even got it to support flash, which I've heard doesn't always play well on linux. I'm using pidgin as my IM tool, nice little tool. One of the biggest hold out for me was getting my Sprint PCS card working, which when I finally sat down and did it, wasn't so bad. It actually works better in linux, on windose it disconnects it self a lot and you'd have to click on 'connect' to get to back. In linux, I set the connection time out parameter, so if it disconnects, it reconnects in 2 seconds, without me doing anything.

So far I haven't found anything I really needed the Windose laptop for, but the week is young.

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Thu, 12 Jul 2007 @ 21:18 || Metal || Technology

The dentist switched me from invisalign to metal braces. In the middle of them gluing the stubs to me teeth, I got thinking that I'm now going to set off the metal detectors at the airport.

According to the dentist, Titanium doesn't set off metal detectors. Really? I found that hard to believe. And I was right, Titanium will set off a Metal detector, however the amount used for dental braces shouldn't, unless the detector is set to be very sensitive. Many web sites claim that the hand wands will be set off by braces, but not the walk thru detectors.

That got me to thinking, how much titanium do you need to make a gun? Clearly you can make one completely out of plastic, do you really need any metal at all? Are the metal detectors just more security theater, even more than we thought? Wouldn't we be better off with hired thugs on each flight, instead of trying to screen the hundreds of thousands of people who fly?

I'm starting to travel a lot more again, it's been nice driving places and staying mostly in Denver. This Sunday I fly to San Jose, CA again. They can't keep me away...

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Sun, 20 May 2007 @ 08:27 || K9 || Technology

He doesn't work well on carpets, but does well on my wood floors at home. His best feature is his nose laser, it extends and makes sci-fi laser noises.

Next I'll have to get a Dalek.

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Fri, 20 Apr 2007 @ 13:10 || wifi || Technology

I've been fighting this on and off for the last few weeks. I finally hit on the right combination yesterday. Turns out the driver really wanted to write to a config file it's self, once I let it, things started working better.

Now that I have the wifi working I'll start migrating everything from my old windows laptop. That should be fun.

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