Author: cosmo

07/06/2008

Woo hoo! After several hours of yanking cables and spilling the guts of various old computer systems, I think I finally managed to resurrect my Xbox.

07/05/2008

This is simply awesome.

From Flickr comes the “Song Chart Meme”, which is a series of over a hundred graphs and charts that represent popular songs. Many of them are terribly obscure, but most of them are absolutely brilliant.

07/05/2008

Zack is finally getting his front teeth back. For the past few weeks he’s looked like a real hillbilly, missing three of those four teeth.

We had corn on the cob a few nights ago, and the poor kid couldn’t have any.

07/02/2008

From an article on AlterNet titled “The Ten Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency” comes this list of honorable mentions. It’s a trip down (bad) memory lane:

  • warrantless wiretapping
  • Valerie Plame
  • Scooter Libby’s sentence commuted
  • Bush believes Rafael Palmeiro is innocent
  • soldiers face neglect at Walter Reed
  • signing statements
  • the Kyoto treaty ripped up
  • loyalty oaths
  • the fake turkey
  • a staged teleconference with troops
  • staged FEMA press conference
  • extraordinary rendition
  • support for junk science
  • endorsement of neo-creationist “intelligent design”
  • inaction against global warming
  • record oil prices
  • record budget deficits
  • record trade deficits
  • record number of Americans without health insurance
  • two recessions
  • no-bid contracts
  • bin Laden still at large
  • the Federal Marriage Amendment
  • stem cell research vetoed
  • waterboarding ban vetoed
  • “Bring it on”
  • “I’m the decider”
  • “I’m the commander guy”
  • “I’m a war president”
  • “This is the guy who tried to kill my dad”
  • Cheney shoots some guy in the face
  • the Military Commissions Act
  • Jose Padilla arrested and held without charge or access to counsel
  • endless tax cuts for the rich

    • The article also includes some priceless quotes about the legacy that Bush will leave:

    One of the Bush administration’s favorite pastimes over the past eight years has been gleefully urinating in the faces of the other two branches of government.
    In what will no doubt go down in history as one of the craziest things our federal government has ever done, the U.S. House and Senate both passed an emergency law to save the life of a woman who had been near-brain dead for more than a decade. The case of Terri Schiavo, who collapsed in her home and who later lost oxygen to her brain after her doctors misdiagnosed the cause of her collapse, was undoubtedly tragic for everyone involved; it was also undoubtedly none of the federal government’s business. But Bush, who seemingly never misses an opportunity to take a naked ride on the crazy train, interrupted one of his frequent Texas vacations to sign the thing into law.

    We can laugh at Bush’s antics over the years, but in reality there’s a hard, sad truth to what he’s done to this country. I sincerely hope those who voted for him, and those who continue to support him, realize how his legacy will endure to the detriment of all of us and to all this country has stood for these past two hundred years.

06/29/2008

This afternoon I suggested we make a bunch of chocolate-chip cookie dough and eat it, then use whatever was left to make some gigantic cookies. The plan was met with great enthusiasm by the kids, so we whipped up the dough, snitched a few spoonfuls, and then made the big cookies.

Mmm.

06/29/2008

So I love my Xbox Media Center, and when my friend Dave decided to get rid of his (we had built it a few months ago) I called Tom to see if he wanted it. Sure thing, so I bought it from Dave and hooked it up so I could upgrade it to the latest version of all the software.

But something went horribly wrong, and now the Xbox is pretty much toast. After messing with it for a while I realized it really wasn’t going to work (I’d deleted the wrong file or something). Chancellor sent me the hardware hacking goods which I’d used last time, but even they don’t help because it turns out that I erased the default Xbox “dashboard” used to boot the system and copy the hack.

Long story short: I’m dead in the water. The Xbox can play games but it can’t be hacked to become a media center any more.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that I’m not the only bonehead who’s done this before, so there are a few places in the dark corners of the internet where I can get even more esoteric hacks that will essentially rebuild the Xbox from scratch. They’re pretty crazy and involve a lot of very detailed steps, making sure the planets are aligned properly and I’m saying the magic incantations.

Hopefully it’ll work, because if not then I’ve got a nice piece of hardware that doesn’t really do much…

06/22/2008

On Amazon you can buy an amazing cable manufactured by Denon for only $499 ($1 off the suggested retail price of $500, so it’s a real steal). The description is almost comical in the way it makes ordinary data transmission seem like hyperdimensional physics:

Get the purest digital audio you’ve ever experienced from multi-channel DVD and CD playback through your Denon home theater receiver with the AK-DL1 dedicated cable. Made of high-purity copper wire, it’s designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration and helps stabilize the digital transmission from occurrences of jitter and ripple. A tin-bearing copper alloy is used for the cable’s shield while the insulation is made of a fluoropolymer material with superior heat resistance, weather resistance, and anti-aging properties. The connector features a rounded plug lever to prevent bending or breaking and direction marks to indicate correct direction for connecting cable.

Keep in mind that it is, in fact, just a standard Category 6 ethernet cable– the same cable you could buy for $15 at Best Buy (where it would still be a ripoff) or in 500-foot spools at Home Depot for about $50.

The shameless ripoff of the product notwithstanding, it’s the customer reviews on Amazon that really shine. A few of the particularly hilarious ones:

* * * * * Solved Global Warming Locally, June 16, 2008
By Daniel A. Koblosh (Redondo Beach, CA USA)

After I took delivery of my $500 Denon AKDL1 Cat-5 uber-cable, Al Gore was mysteriously drawn to my home, where he pronounced that Global Warming had been suspended in my vicinity.

Yes, I had perfect weather: no flooding, no tornadoes, the exact amount of rain necessary, and he pronounced sea levels exactly right and that they were not going to rise within five miles of my house. Additionally, my cars began achieving 200 mpg and I didn’t even need gasoline. I was able to put three grams of cat litter into the tank and drive forever. What’s more, the atmosphere inside my home became 93% oxygen and virtually no carbon dioxide. In fact, I now exhale oxygen.

One heck of a cable.

Didn’t notice any improvement in audio quality though. The $800 Apple iCable is clearly superior.

* * * * Moves data faster, June 16, 2008
By Kevin Murphy (Los Angeles, CA USA)

One of the unmentioned qualities of these cables is the reduced latency of the signal. Normal copper cables pass signals at about half the speed of light, but these puppies pass the signal at up to three-fourths of lightspeed! This means that your data arrives faster, and since the Ethernet protocol involves collision detection, backoff, and retransmission this added speed means YOUR data is more likely to go ahead of competing data! Further, if there is no issue with other data sources, your data arrives hundreds of picoseconds faster than with other cables. This can be important for gamers in multi-player situations! Or even for folks who just hate to wait for their data to arrive.

Marked down 1 star because it still won’t let you do the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.

* * * * * Quoted length misleading, June 19, 2008
By Brad Grenz (Salem, Oregon)
I thought I should mention that while this amazing cable is supposedly 1.5 meters long, I find this quite misleading. When I opened it at first glance 1.5 meters seems accurate. It certainly didn’t feel much longer than 4-5 feet in my hands, but I have since used it to span much greater distances.

So far I have successfully used this cable to share my internet connection with my parents’ house across town, create a wired network connection to a nuclear submarine in the Pacific and, most recently, share files with astronauts on the International Space Station in orbit around the Earth.

I’m not sure how any of this is possible. I suspect it is made of supermolocules, but this cannot be determined with any certainty.

I am currently planning on buying another cable and sending one end on a rocket to Alpha Centari in hopes of connecting my network to any alien civilizations there. I expect the faster-than-light communication features of this Denon cable will be a great asset in growing our knowledge through contact with other intelligent species.

* * * * This Cable Improved my Health!, June 16, 2008
By MB
Thank you Denon! I suffer from a rare R/F allergy which makes it nearly impossible for me to leave my lead lined sarcophagus (unless there is a power outage). Generally i can only listen to music on an accoustic gramaphone and hence my library consists entirely of John Phillips Sousa. That all changed when i got the Denon AKDL1 dream maker. No random photons here! I’ve integrated the cable into a bucket I’ve lined with tinfoil and now my library has already expanded to include Count Basie and Sir-Mix-Alot. Life is once again worth living.

The list of reviews continues for nearly twenty pages. It rivals the hilarious hijinks that resulted from hundreds of reviews of the gallon of whole milk you could buy on Amazon a few years ago.

06/19/2008

On Tuesday Comcast took our office internet offline all day so they could “upgrade our user experience”. Yesterday and today the internet connection has been up and down pretty randomly– it’ll work fine for 20 minutes, then die for 5, then be up for 10, then down for 7,…

Good times. At least we can play some foosball while we wait for it to come back.

Finally, this afternoon I’d had enough of this so I called Comcast. I got transferred to the business department, which was stupendously unhelpful, and finally hopped over to the technical support department. There I spoke with a very nice lady who offered such helpful advice as:

Comcast Lady: Did you unplug your modem and plug it back in?

Me: Yes. Twice.

Comcast Lady: Did you clear your Temporary Internet Files in Internet Explorer?

Me: I don’t use Internet Explorer.

Comcast Lady: What about your browser cookies? Did you clear those?

Me: Again, this isn’t a browser thing. I don’t have internet access.

Comcast Lady: But is Internet Explorer having trouble connecting?

Me: Please understand me. I’m not using Internet Explorer, or even Windows. I’m trying to connect to remote servers with SSH, or ping, or anything at all. And it’s failing.

Comcast Lady: Perhaps you should unplug your modem again.

Me: Yes. Thank you. I’m sure that’ll take care of it.

I finally just gave up, and resigned myself to the fact that the Comcast-powered internet is going to be a dog today.