Category Archives: computing

computing in general

Terrific Tuesday, take 4 3/4

2007.12.11 – 9:35 pm PST

This is now the 6th time I’ve attempted writing this post over the last 2 hours not including breaks. I was fighting some bad behavior, a funky Wordpress plugin which had become outdated and needed to be updated.

I had the first post-op visit with my this afternoon. After waiting in the waiting room, and then a briefly some x-rays of my neck were taken, then more waiting. The surgeon, Dr Jon White, came in and took the tape off the wound, and said it looked great, and proceeded to show me the x-rays on his laptop. Very neat. He discussed the hardware that now occupies my neck, and said that I will begin physical therapy soon. I hope soon is the operative word here. Ahh progress is still progress, which is nice. I ask him if I could drive and how much I should move my neck, and was then on my way back home.

A week without shaving left me with a full beard. Shaving with a new thing on my neck was a task to get used to. The wound just feels funny to me, so I avoided it while shaving in the shower with out a fog free mirror.

Outside of my neck feeling a bit stiff, and the low back I’m feeling great.

PS.  I got the new Futurama Movie today in my Netflix if anyone is interested in seeing it on my big screen.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, personal, thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

a switch to ubuntu.

2007.10.23 – 2:31 pm PDT

A couple days ago I accidentally(and I did the first step of it on accident, truthfully. ) switched the on my ’s laptop from Windows XP Home*barf*, to . In that process I later decided to try out the encrypted drive option on the alternative install CD. With little hesitation after I decided on moving my ~/ stuff over from my Gentoo system running on a to the new Ubuntu system I easily setup for my dad. I was running a drive over usb which is only practical for so long, it really makes the drive feel slower to me. The only major configuration issue I had with the move was that not all my buttons were working the way I like them to. With a quick edit, by adding a new Input Device section to my xorg.conf, I was content.

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "USBMouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "SendCoreEvents" "true"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 8 9"
    Option         "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7 10 11"
EndSection

I wonder why this isn’t standard info for the Microsoft Intelimouse Optical USB/PS2 when it’s found plugged into my system.
I also gave him the Windows XP Home in a innotek virtualbox so he can run a certain proprietary piece of software which he needs.

By px | Also posted in Gentoo, Ubuntu, hardware | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Aloha Nokia N810!

2007.10.18 – 5:11 am PDT

If there was ever a good enough reason to get rid of my loaly N770, it’s now. Nokia let the lid off of the newer sexy version, the N810. Ebay is my friend.  Gotta get that top dollar for it.  :)

By px | Also posted in hardware, personal | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

The way home.

2007.09.27 – 4:00 am PDT

Here I am again on the road. Still my dad is driving home. Only 1.5 hours to go. We’re almost to Tuscon. I can tell from the construction on the highway right before it opens up into 3 lanes.

Why does the auto complete want to end almost ever word with a “typing ing”?
ion Completioning typinging almosingredient hmm.
That killed a few minutes. We’re now in Tuscon. Passing exit 248, almost to where the major construction is at. My dad just hit some debris on the road. It scared the crap outta him. ;)

I actually kinda like using this thing to blog while on the road. should try out Maemowordpy, and Canola on his Nokia 800 when he gets his. He got it.(I wonder if he’ll take up my suggestion on the software?)

BTW.. if I haven’t said it all before, I’ll say it again… Someone needs to get a bluetooth headset/headphones working with these internet tablets, then it could be a podcasting blogstation too. Very neat indeeding. Hehe. I bet the sound quality would be quite remarkable with even a crappy headset. I wonder how how long it will be before it happens, it’s only a matter of time as I’m pretty sure it’s already been thought up.

Killing time still… Exit 268 now. Not a lot of traffic. It’s nice. Ok enough random stuff, time to save. Iwish the default save filename for Maemowordpy was better than “File”. If it merely had a date and time and smarter save and re-open process it would be so much more functional for everyday folk. Ok done for real this time… Savinging

We got home about 1/2hour ago. Total trip tine, 36 hours and change. 22 driving. 12 in the hotel. 2 at the doctor’s office. The doctor appointment went pretty good by the way.

By px | Also posted in internet, personal, software, thoughts, travel | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Yet another reason to visit California

2007.09.24 – 5:28 pm PDT

Current Mood:Important emoticon Important & Sad emoticon Sad

Well I just got the utilization-review back and they only approved surgery for one level in my neck, not the two that was suggested by the 2 independent surgeons I had seen.

I have an appointment with my this Weds at 4:15pm so that means another lovely fast paced 1200+ mile drive to California and back in two days time. *sigh*

I really need to live in California again, this is ridiculous.

My birthday is Sunday the 30th, happy birthday to me.

And on another note, my blog is broken (behind the scenes) thanks to my attempts at messing around with SQL last night, hopefully I will remember to try and fix the issue once Wordpress 2.3 is out.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, personal, travel | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

blog upgrade

2007.09.15 – 8:51 pm PDT

I upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.3 beta3 today. Then upgraded to the latest Ultimate Tag Warrior. The upgrades went smooth and although I later chose to import the Ultimate Tag Warrior tags into the ‘new’ Wordpress system, it allowed me to go back simply by re-enabling UTW. Phew. The new system doesn’t yet have the same functionality out of the box, which made me a bit sad. In the near future I hope to see more plugins which take advantage of the Wordpress tag system so I can retire UTW. There needs to be support for bbcode [ tag | tags ] , [/ tag | tags ], which I’ve used in all my posts for the last year or so.

update: Christine from the Internet has a couple plugins to alleviate my pains.

Embedded Tag Thing and Tag Suggest Thing

By px | Also posted in WordPress, internet, software, wish list | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

bored on a saturday afternoon.

2007.09.15 – 4:38 pm PDT

Current Mood:Bored emoticon Bored

It’s been a few weeks since I actually posted more than a link, or tweet. I don’t feel like writing a lot about anything important. So here is an update, and enjoy the pix.

Today is a gloomy day in Sierra Vista. The weather report online says it should rain later, which is cool. It didn’t seem to rain much for our monsoon season this year.

I’ve spent the last hour or so finishing up watching a really cool DVD I started watching a week ago, called Walt Disney’s Tomarrowland. It has some really great old school Disney animation, and effects. I’ve really enjoyed the first 2 of 3 episodes on this disc.

My dad went to go see his College team play. So today I’m pretty bored and alone, and the dog is mopping around the house too. Coming out to the living room whenever there is a noise outside.

I’m kinda getting hungry so maybe I’ll go get something to eat later if I can decide on somewhere to eat. It’s amazingly difficult to choose where to eat in a city this small. I don’t know if that’s saying a whole lot for the choices around, but more or less where do I feel less disgusted eating at. Thinking of food, man-o-man was the food at Neil’s wedding good and tasty. This makes me wish there were more ethnic food places locally to patronize. Cheap mexican food is likely on the menu again tonight.

image012.jpgimage004a.jpg

An observation I’m having right now…

There is a flat bed tow truck across the street, it just pulled a car out of the garage. The thing is, the garage is like 3 feet raised above the street level, and the driveway is short, so the angle is like 30-40 degrees. It’s been interesting to watch for the last 10 minutes. Had I thought more about the flat bed truck, I would have made a video with my camera.

Ah, I know what else I can write about. I got a new phone when I was in California at the end of August. After just under 3 weeks with it, I finally decided it was not worth another 2 year contract to me. The Nokia 6085, just did not like my mp3 collection, and the quality of the camera phone was foul at best. I did manage to capture a couple nice pictures on the ride home from California though. I need to figure out the html code, or whatnot to get the pictures and text to line up better.

image003.jpg

By px | Also posted in hardware, personal, weather | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

I’ll be offline for a while.

2007.08.06 – 9:34 pm PDT

Current Mood:Sad emoticon Sad

My laptop has kicked the bucket. I’m unhappy about this for a couple reasons.
1. I just purchased new stuff for it. a DVD-RW, 1GB of RAM, all in the last month.
2. The new 8800 mAh laptop-battery I purchased not long ago, about a year ago, is now worthless.
3. It wasn’t a spectacular-failure, eg no fire or explosion.

Writing this post with my nokia-770 is OK. It certainly isn’t as easy as using a full computer operating system.

I need a new laptop. *sigh*

I am happy it lasted as long as it did, about 4 years. Pretty good for my first laptop I suppose.

By px | Also posted in hardware, personal | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

wrt54g serial port pin out.

2007.07.30 – 12:54 am PDT

With nothing better to do at almost 1am, and because I had already written up something on my , I decided I’d post the pin out information, for my usb to serial adapter on my .

I bricked my router a couple days ago, when I flashed the wrong device in CFE. Smooth eh? Well I’ll write up something when I get the adapter and patience to fix it. For now here is the pin out for my setup serial port. I soldered on the j-tag pins when I put on the serial port a few months ago. I don’t remember why I used different pin types.

dsc00550dsc00553

The pins are numbered so here is the information.
Pin 9, Pin 5, Pin 3, ttyS1
Pin 10, Pin 6, Pin 4, ttyS0
GND, Tx, Rx
Red, Black, White

Serial connection info: 115200,8N1

By px | Also posted in hardware | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

MaemoWordPy

2007.07.27 – 10:39 pm PDT

I’m writing this post using MaemoWordPy. It is kind of nice with the thumb keyboard. Not so much for the on-screen keyboard.
I’m bored. ™
*sigh*

By px | Also posted in blogs, internet, personal, software | Tagged , | Comments (0)

La Fonera serial port pinout.

2007.07.06 – 3:22 am PDT

I finally figured out the pinout of my la Fonera in relationship to my USB serial adapter. Now I can use RedBoot to unbrick my fonera. The connection is a bit wonky, and works 95% of the time. I have to make the serial connection before turning on the Fonera.
DSC00533DSC00534

From the power connector.
Pin 1, Pin 2, Pin 3, Pin 4
GND, Tx, Rx, VCC
Red, Black, White, No Connection.

Serial connection info: 9600,8N1

You should also be able to change the serial configuration by using the RedBoot command fconfig caution as you can make your Fonera not automatically boot if you change the boot script. Thanks to shadowyandy for this tid bit of information.

By px | Also posted in hardware | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

Bad Behavior has blocked 800 access attempts in the last 7 days.