Legos never cease to amaze me.

Posted by: Boviate at 01:11 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 10 words, total size 1 kb.

Hil is a big fan of Breaking Bad, a TV series about a high school chemistry teacher who turns his skills to evil. We don't get the cable channel that runs new episodes, but the episodes show up on NetFlix the next day. So I was instructed that by the time the new season starts up, there would be a way to watch NetFlix on the living room TV.

I love building computers, so I put together a HTPC ("Home Theater PC"). It cost about $300 in parts, all told. I tried to get Linux running on it, but there didn't seem to be good graphic drivers or sound drivers for the hardware. It took a good four hours to get the graphics to work at all, at the end of which I was too irritated to work out what wasn't working with the audio. I had a completely legal extra copy of Win7 hanging around, so I installed that without issue.

Anyway, as long as I had Win7 going, I used it's built-in profiling tools to benchmark the new system, then I compared the benchmarks to my current primary desktop system. I'm depressed now, because the $300 computer was better in every respect other than HD access time and 3D graphics performance, and it was a near thing in both those cases. That's even though my main computer has a discreet graphics card, while the HTPC uses a fancy new AMD chip with the graphic processor as a CPU co-processor.[1]

So now I'm having new-computer envy. But I shall hold on for a while yet, I think. I don't need a new PC, I just want a new PC.

[1]: I remember reading somewhere about a humorous proposed law of computer design, that there would always be alternating cycles of the following two steps: (a) This special purpose processing would be faster if we did it on a specialized secondary chip! (b) We've got too many secondary chips and the new CPUs are crazy fast, let's re-integrate all those special processes into the CPU! This has happened for audio, Ethernet, video, floating-point math, and other stuff too.

Posted by: Boviate at 05:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 359 words, total size 2 kb.

Today in Buffalo, we've had heavy snow, then light rain, then sunshine, then snow again. All between 9AM and noon.

I love springtime in Buffalo. It keeps us on our toes.

Posted by: Boviate at 01:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 33 words, total size 1 kb.

Cornell has wished me luck in my academic endeavors, provided that I pursue said endeavors elsewhere. That's somewhat despiriting, as I had high hopes of attending the school build by telegraph wealth.

Posted by: Boviate at 06:12 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 34 words, total size 1 kb.

I got my first PhD program rejection today, from Georgetown. Which is unfortunate, because that's the school I most wanted to attend.

It's certainly not a good sign about my prospects with the other schools that have yet to send word.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

Being not a very romantic sort, for Valentine's Day I got Hil an inductive charging back for her smartphone, and a two-position inductive charger for us to share. (I also got her flowers, candy, and took her to a restaurant. I'm not completely hopeless at these things.)

I got it for her because her phone's charging port has been damaged, and it's a real PITA to keep the charging cable plugged in. Plus, her phone model doesn't have very good battery life. Combined, the two factors made charging her phone a continual irritation.

The Energizer-branded charger follows the Qi standard, which is a clever bit of branding. Basically, you lay your smartphone on top of a pad, and the pad and the phone do a quick EM handshake, then it starts to charge wirelessly. The handshake is so the charger won't operate if there's a chunk of unrelated metal sitting on top of it, which would be an obvious fire hazard. The phones charge about as fast as they do while plugged in, but without the hassle of plugging, tripping over cords, etc. I highly recommend inductive charging for everyone that has a compatible phone.

Posted by: Boviate at 05:49 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 197 words, total size 1 kb.

I have inexplicably failed to mention that Hil and I got a new cat, almost a month ago! Where has the time gone?

Anyway, Aria is now about seven months old. She's black except for a few stray white hairs, some of them clumped together but not in sufficient numbers to form a white patch worthy of the name. When we got her, she'd been spayed only two days earlier and was still recovering from the surgery. Once her incision healed, she got a lot more active and started meowing and purring with great enthusiasm.

The first few days in her new home, she was shy and afraid of strangers. As she's settled in, she's become much more willing to socialize. Last night we had a party, and I expected her to spend it in the basement; instead she wandered around demanding that people amuse her with cat toys. The people generally did.

As I write this, she's sleeping on my lap, the first time she's done that. I'd tried putting her on my lap before, but she always immediately left, seeking a higher vantage point on whatever piece of furniture looked most interesting. I think I shall build her some climbing structure.

Posted by: Boviate at 06:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 205 words, total size 1 kb.

It's just what the title says. Impressive work.

Here's the link!

Posted by: Boviate at 06:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 17 words, total size 1 kb.

Just two doors down from Hil's house is the home of her distant cousins Al and Mary. I believe that they've been living in that house not just since before Hil was born, but before Hil's parents were born.

I only went over to visit with them a few times, because each visit took forever. They loved to chat about anything and everything, and share fresh cookies. There was a time we stopped by at the end of a bike ride, all covered with sweat, and stayed an hour.

Once, Hil woke from a nap to the noise of hammering on her front porch. Al had come over and was installing a set of wind-chimes that he had just made. I think he thought she was at work, and he thought it would be fun for her to come home to a set of surprise windchimes. It was quite windy last night, and those same chimes were sounding constantly.

As men so often do, I bonded with Al over our shared military service. He told me that the only time he'd been outside of this city was during World War Two. He was an Army artilleryman, crewing 75mm howitzers in Italy and Germany. He came home from the war, married Mary, bought a house, and they raised three children in that house.

Al died yesterday, of pneumonia. He was 89.

As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-tones that, passing by,
In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar–
So memory will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.
—A. Lincoln, "My Childhood Home I See Again." 1846.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 285 words, total size 2 kb.

I bought a laser printer four years ago, and it's served me well. Today I wanted to print something on it, but because I've moved it to a different location I had to re-configuring it to connect via WiFi rather than USB. While doing so, I realized I'd never checked if it had a firmware update available. Turns out it was using firmware version 24, and there was a version 68 on the manufacturer's website.

When I had it upgraded, it's built-in webserver configuration system now offered a "telnet" option. I've never telneted to a printer before! But Windows 7 Ultimate doesn't have a telnet terminal, so I quick downloaded PuTTY and connected. It offered a rather boring configuration menu. Which was cool, but, well, boring.

But looking at the configuration menu reminded me that it offered a "Raw TCP/IP" printing option. That, I suspected, means one could just connect a terminal (like PuTTY) to the port the printer is listening on, and send it raw PostScript and whatever other languages the printer understands. It's been shown that PostScript is Turing complete; while it was invented as a way of describing documents to be printed, it's really a fully-fledged computing language. So I sent off a "Hello World!" program to my printer, and I could hear it printing, but I apparently missed the command that would cause it to eject the newly-printed page. So, off to the language reference to check what the relevant keyword was, when I suddenly realized that I'd originally turned on the printer with the intention of printing a document, and here it was an hour later and I hadn't printed that document, because I was having so much fun playing with my printer.

This is the same mental quirk that caused me to start with reading an assigned book on pirates and end up with a MA project on whaling that includes side sections on intellectual property law in mid-ninteenth century America and the career of actress Clara Bow.

UPDATE: When I telneted into my printer, the welcome message included the following line:
System Up Time: 0000:00:00:00:19:11 (YYYY:MM:DD:hh:mm:ss)
Note the four digits for years of uptime. Really? Who honestly expects that a printer is going to have more than 999 years of uptime? I assume that the telnet server code was copy and pasted from elsewhere, but who assumes that a computer of any type is going to have more than 999 years of uptime?

Posted by: Boviate at 05:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 407 words, total size 3 kb.