Category Archives: Projects

Into the Void

I really wanted to make a “we can’t stay here, this is bat country” reference in this post, but I didn’t want to piss Edwin off and I’m falling a little short.

The first thing I remember was the light.

It wasn’t bright or blinding, like one would expect from the desert sun; it was cool and blue.  My head buzzed with questions and the remnants of the previous evening.  Where had I gone?  What had I done?  My memories were clouded by drink, a hodgepodge of flashing lights, ringing bells, and spotty memories of recalling the TCP/IP stack.

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Look Mom, I contributed to society

Before I head to the beach for the rest of the week (I won’t be at Game Night™), I thought I would unleash unto the world some code I wrote a while back. My brothers and I like to share a modest music library. I encoded my library in Apple’s AAC format using iTunes, while my brothers wanted everything to be in MP3 format to be able to play it on their portable devices. So I wrote a Perl script to combine the powers of faad, lame, and id3v2. I set up a cron job to run this script every night.

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Dreams Really Do Come True

My Dad walked into my nerd cave and saw it. His response: “Oh. My. God.” Not the “this is totally awesome” OMG, but the “what the hell is wrong with you?” OMG. What was it that I had done? Did I take a sledge hammer to my computers? Did I paint the room pink? Did I take a crap on the floor? No! I built a server rack:

2 Post Rack

In living room, after assembly

Since I love being at work so much, I decided to make my house look like it. Who needs peace and quiet when you can have 2 80mm fans roaring away? It’s the way computing should be.

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UltraVNC SC

A few weekends ago,  I went to my hometown to see my parents and dog. And being the good son I am, spent some time working on my parents’ computer, a Dell running some sort of XP Home Media center or whatever. “Working on” their computer usually means patching, defragmenting, and uninstalling whatever crap the FiOS installers or my sister put on there. This time, I replaced the AVG Home Firewall/Anti-virus monstrosity with Microsoft Security Essentials, and installed XP service pack 3. I also deleted the Verizon and Google toolbars, and some icons off the desktop.

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They have television over the air now?, Part 3

In my two previous posts about antennas, I explained what I did to research and install an over-the-air TV antenna. Now that I’ve gotten everything installed, I’ll share with you my results.

The Channels

These are all the stations (including subchannels) that I pull in with my new installation.

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