Cops in Snow
God I love our local police. Stupid cop pulls me over tonight. “It’s a SNOW EMERGENCY!” I explained I was out getting baby food and I didn’t want to be out here either. He says it’s a BAJILLION DOLLAR fine if I get stuck and he’s going to be nice and cut me loose. “Don’t get stuck!” From behind me I heard the wheels spinning on the cruiser. I leaned out the window – “Officer, DON’T GET STUCK HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA”
It’s Official
Pennsylvania will have more snow than Portland, Maine if we get 12 inches over the next few days. This is also a PA record, even moreso than the Washington crossing which was the previous record for brutal winters.
Snow!
Snowblower:1 Joshua:0
I got a free snowblower, but the stipulation was that it wasn’t running.
Figuring it’s just a small engine I thought it would be a slam dunk. So far I’ve done a weedwacker, a lawn tractor and a chainsaw and I haven’t had any problems.
The difference here is that all the previous stuff was craftsman, this is a yard machines blower with a tecumseh engine. Read: Cheap chinese crap.
GOOD LORD THIS THING IS LAID OUT LIKE CRAP.
I mean, it’s a small engine, it’s a snowblower. There is no reason, whatsoever, to run a fuel line between the crank flywheel and the block. And guess which line has holes in it?
Now, I probably shouldn’t bitch because free is free, but if you happen across a tecumseh powered product, keep in mind they do terrible, terrible things with the engine. To add insult to injury, this blower was originally purchased from WALMART under the Yard Machines brand. WALMART doesn’t sell parts. Home Depot has their brand, also a tecumseh engine, and so does lowes (Toro brand and something else). Neither one of these sell parts. The fuel line I can get at pep boys, but getting the carb is not going to be fun.
MOO2 Patch Problems for 1.31
Trying to play Master of Orion 2 and having problems?
If you’re getting:
error racestuf.lbx [entry 8] exceeds number of lbx entries
It’s not a bug. I know right? I’m playing it in DOSBOX, and it’s working swimmingly well. The problem is that all the files in the installed version of the 1.2 and 1.1 games are lowercase names. The patch to 1.3+ has all uppercase names. If you’re running WinXP or Linux, extract the patch and then fire up DOS or DOSBOX and use that to copy all the patch files into the MOO2 directory. The old behavior will happen (overwrite) and the game will run as normal. Simply extracting the archive in Windows Explorer or using unzip without having a proper dos shell will result in ORION2.EXE, orion2.exe, ORION95.EXE and orion95.exe all of which are different versions and will refuse to run.
If you’re a total glutton for punishment, you can download the unofficial patch to 1.40 and make the game harder. I found it’s crashy in DOSBOX, your mileage may vary.
What the Hell. Seriously.
Todays happy fun UNIX error message:
/etc/X11/xim: Checking whether an input method should be started. /etc/X11/xim: line 72: You can write a small letter to Grandma in the filename.: command not found sourcing /etc/sysconfig/language to get the value of INPUT_METHOD INPUT_METHOD is not set or empty (no user selected input method). Trying to start a default input method for the locale en_US.UTF-8 ... There is no default input method for the current locale. Dummy input method "none" (do not use any fancy input method by default) Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian .... To him is ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said: "And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible." Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. -- C. G. Jung, in Psychological Types (Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church). startkde: Starting up... kdeinit4: preparing to launch /usr/lib64/libkdeinit4_klauncher.so kdeinit4: preparing to launch /usr/lib64/libkdeinit4_kded4.so kdeinit4: preparing to launch /usr/lib64/libkdeinit4_kbuildsycoca4.so kbuildsycoca4 running...
And so on. I was trying to connect from my XOrg host running KDE to a Sun (Solaris 7) box running X11R3 with CDE. I have no idea how jesus got involved.
Babies and Woodstoves
Alex is finally sleeping eight hours a night if we feed him at the right time. Managing food is important, it’s worth it to feed him smaller amounts during the day to get him to sleep at night.
The more I play with the woodstove idea in my head the more I realize the correct way to do it is to go through the living room wall and into the garage. This means there’s going to be an elbow in the install but I don’t imagine it’s going to be insurmountable. So why the garage?
For one, the garage has fireproof drywall on the other side of it already installed. For two, if we change our minds later we don’t have to redo the floors and ceilings. For three, if I put a cleanout T at the elbow, cleaning it out becomes a matter of opening the bottom of that, taping a garbage bag to it and running a flexible sooteater or similar spinny-brush device up there to clean it. It keeps the mess out there. Finally, god forbid we have a fire, it’s much better it be out there than in the house.
Is it up to code? I sent an e-mail to the township codes office asking if I needed a building permit and inspection and if it were up to code. We’ll find out.
XBOX 360 Wireless Part Deux
I scored the D-LINK DWL-G730AP for the XBOX 360. This was suggested when researching wifi solutions. Amazon shipped it and it got here the next day. Hows that for service? To make a long story short, I had exactly an hour to set it up yesterday before I was supposed to hop on for work.
How did that go?
For one, I’m running Linux, so I never got to review their quick start CD. The manual, however, is total crap and I ended up downloading the PDF from the website. D-Link tends to be better and consistent across their administration interface, and I had owned one previously before getting a netgear for the XBOX 360’s wired connection. The XBOX 360 shits fat packets, and if your hardware isn’t certified your connection used to completely suck. Nowadays people figured out the trick and the firmwares work, but be aware if your router crashes (and the REV A hardware and firmwares before 2 do for this device) you need a newer device. The old D-Link did this to a T and the Amazon reviews pretty much say nothings improved since 2006. It either works, or not. Thankfully buying it news means you get Rev B, and firmware 2.
This does nothing for the UI.
The UI is junk, frankly. To start with it depends on a swith on the bottom to configure it as a client (what you need for the XBOX), a router (with only one uplink port, lol) or a firewall. The last mode is next to useless, but if you’re looking to add wifi connectivity to a switch or router, it might scratch your itch. The problem is that the firewall settings are godawful. This doesn’t become a problem if you’re not using it as an AP. On the other hand, the other settings are godawful too and it’s not hard to see why there’s a totally seperate UI on the disk.
Configuration is the standard D-Link blue and white UI. The problems start with that switch. The UI changes from the position of the switch, but the modes are all roughly the same and bits and pieces either appear and disappear based on that switches positon. Sometimes this makes no sense at all. Trying to configure the device for a bridge lets me set the LAN side to DHCP. This makes sense, right? We want the XBOX to get a new IP when we plug it in, right? No. This means the LAN side of the bridge is DHCP, which means that it’s no longer 192.168.0.30 and now expects to have it’s IP assigned. Since the XBOX, or your laptop isn’t a DHCP server, this makes no sense at all in bridge mode. Similarly the gateway should be unconfigured (0.0.0.0) and the DNS server too. Since this device cannot be a DNS server (or relay) I’m not even sure why they put those features in there. Also completely weird is the SSID search - you must find your router using the wizard and select it with the radio-button. You also need to specify a channel and it can’t figure out the authentication on it’s own. Why? No idea. The Netgear stuff can cloak the SSID and hop channels to avoid interference, but not using this device.
The final insult was that – for configuration – you need a static IP. After configuration, you need a dynamic IP. This is probably something gracefully handled by the install disc, but it’s not mentioned anywhere in the manual. I spent most of my time second guessing the config. Finally I fired up the DHCP client and bound it to the eth0 device which already had a static IP configuration and it magically worked. However, you’re not told (or prompted) to switch your settings once the device is configured. If you’re wondering, the gateway is set to the IP of the LAN side, but DNS needs to be another server. Your IP address is dynamically assigned and the device actually treats the whole process as full NAT, which is exactly what needs to happen to host XBOX games.
I’ve thrown these things under the bus pretty badly, but to be honest, once it’s configured you don’t have to worry about it. I played Modern Warfare 2 last night with no hiccups, and also watched a few Netflix. I saw no issues with either, and Netflix gives me the “five bars of signal”. If you can put up with the terrible UI once, it’s worth the money compared to the same crap from Microsoft. It has the bonus of being usuable for any device with an ethernet port, so in this way it’s superior. Friends and hunting buddies who want to get online with their computers now can just use this business card sized device instead of me having to run cable. If I had to reconfigure it many times, I probably would suggest passing on it.
WTF Steampunk
Steampunk seems to be some crap trend that maybe everything could be powered by steam. Missing from the equation – where are they getting this steam from?
While I like the brass look of it all, I doubt this is going anywhere.
