We moved a year ago and in that time I think I’ve had to replace about 4 light bulbs in the new house. In the old house I was replacing what seemed like 2 or 3 a month. I’m not sure if it’s a property of the wiring, or some quality of service from the electric company.
I don’t think I’ve had to replace a single CFL bulb in either house.
Bought a new router (net connection was dropping for a second a few times a day) and replaced it with a Belkin N Wireless Router. All hard wired computers were back online pretty quick.
The Airport Express that I use to play music in the office did NOT connect though. When I tried to configure it I would get this:
An error occured while trying to access the Apple wireless device. Make sure your network connection is valid and try again. Error 10057
After trying MANY things I flipped my router from “802.11b & 802.11g & 802.11n” to “802.11g” the Airport Express now works. I don’t know what this does to my range/speed for devices that are able to talk 802.11n.
The bigger problem is the long network cable that no longer works… zero changes to that end of things but connecting a computer directly to the other end fails to work. Little choice but replacing the entire cable, about 20ft long… through the basement… through a hub.
I hate networking – but not as much as I hate printers.
After upgrading to v3.0 of the iPhone operating system the eReader Pro application can no longer switch what book your reading. A big problem. The reader still worked, but if you finished a book (as I did last night) and tried to open another one you’re kinda just lost… it didn’t crash, it just didn’t go to the bookshelf.
To the developer’s credit their company, Fictionwise responded to an email I sent complaining with this:
We apologize for the trouble. A fix is currently in progress. We do not have a definite time for when it will be made available at this time. But it should be soon.
The most surprising thing about the response is that I got it about 5min after sending the complaint. Expected response from this kind of thing is days, not minutes.
I found reports of this problem in a couple places, but only buried in the iTune store application reviews did I find the work around: Delete eReader Pro and re-Install it. This gives you a chance to open a new book – but has the side effect of deleting all the books you’ve downloaded as well as resetting your application preferences.
Had I got this from fictionwise I would have been much happier. Ideally I would have liked to find a great big, top of the page kinda support link on their help pages detailing the problem and the work around.
I’ve been encouraging the boy to understand how things work – and decided a fun way to do that would be to take things apart, after all that’s what I did at his age. So we headed to the Flea at MIT on a hunch they might have some fun stuff to take apart.
Turns out it was the perfect place to find exactly what I had in mind. The place is a geeks dream come true. So much old technology I didn’t know where to start. I was tempted to buy an old oscilloscope, as their were at least a hundred of them in different stalls.
I ended up finding a reel-to-reel tape recorder a guy was selling for $50. I started talking him down on price and asked, “Does it still work?”
He replied, “Perfectly.”
I told him the plan was for me and my son to take it apart, and that I didn’t want to ruin something that still worked well. He agreed and told me to take the reel-to-reel recorder sitting next to it for free. It weighed 30pounds easy and I had to carry it all over the place.
Nick really enjoyed it – although maybe next time I’ll get something that we can see working first and maybe keep plugged in (low volt DC something) to watch it work.
Anna was along for the whole ride – and I had a screw driver ready for her. Instead she played repoter with the stuffed weasel beanie baby she got at the Flea at MIT.
They really don’t make things like this any more – hardly any plastic.
The kewlest part of this device in my mind was that it had vacuum tubes. I was tempted to try to get the amplifier part of the thing working and maybe build a small guitar amp or something… but my ambition escaped me.
Here’s a pretty kewl shot with the tubes visible:
We got it apart as much as we good – with a ton of screws and bolts lying around. The carcase sat on the table for a week or so – hard to dispose of that much metal.
All in all the project was a complete success. Quality dad-kids time and maybe a little education.
Earlier this week the White House unveiled an online system to submit questions to the President and vote on other people submitted questions. My first reaction was very positive. I liked the fact that I discovered this as a post in the stream on my FaceBook page. I was eager to see what kind of technology they would be using for the system. I have been impressed with the WhiteHouse.Gov web site team’s work ever since they switched it on at exactly 12:00pm on January 20th.
I navigated to the site and was pleased to see it was very responsive and handling what had to be an incredible number of users. I would like to see their roll out plan and how they ensured it’s scalability. I signed up for an account and submitted my question in about 5 min. My question was, verbatim:
How will you prevent gaming of this system? I imagine there are special interests with the technology to get their agenda onto this system – submitting hundreds of votes for the questions they want to appear important etc
In a matter of hours my question received 10 negative votes and 7 positive votes. It didn’t come close to the 5k+ votes that the most popular questions received.
As it turns out, the people at NORML did exactly what I thought would be done. They rallied their large following online to game the system, and all of the most popular questions in several categories were questions about the legalization of marijuana.
So I’m a bit disappointed by the White House technology team – they should have seen something like this coming. I don’t know if there’s an iron clad method to prevent this. I don’t think it’s even so much a technology problem. I am also not faulting NORML in this – as they did exactly what they were supposed to do.
The only idea I have that might help is less anonymity in the system. In this particular instance it might have prevented people from publicly stating their position on the marijuana issue – but more importantly, if you can tie the voting system to real people you can prevent the “multiple votes” problem, which I suspect was the case here.
There is some technology that might help as well, like the fully open online voting system called Helios. It’s a system that uses pretty standard computer security techniques to enable people to submit votes secretly but still verify that their vote was used in the final tally. I don’t propose that such a system be used to the point where every person who votes does the math to verify their vote was counted – but the existence of such a technique in the system would ensure that someone could audit the election, and anyone questioning the validity could do so.
Helios doesn’t solve the “one vote per person” problem, but I believe it could be used in conjunction with some other system to do so. What that other system will look like I have some ideas about – but it opens up privacy and indenty theft issues that mass media has convinced people are more important than things like participation in government.
Played with a bunch of these when I was a kid – figuring out ways to make them swear mostly – but this one is the best I’ve heard.
I used it to updated my voice mail greeting.
I have to assume the developers tested it a bit with this one.
I’ve got a HP NC6000 Laptop that I used heavily for several years. After we moved it started to hang occasionally. About a month ago it was hung, and nothing would bring it back, so I put it on book shelf.
It’s been running ubuntu for the past couple of years, and I’d like to try the windows 7 install on it – but I fear the hardware is very underpowered.
This morning I finally have some room on the desk, so I plugged it in and it started up perfectly. Ran the updates and am now looking into the hanging problem. Found this useful link, and am now running the memtest utility for a while.
To be honest, one reason I want this thing working is because of the kewl stickers on the case.
Ran memTest for 1.5hrs. Completed 2 passes. All green. Gonna bring this laptop back into the fold.
Booted fine 3 times in a row.
Following Day: It won’t boot. Get’s to BIOS select drive screen – let it auto choose as I did yesterday – and now it locks at the “Starting up …” screen.
Useful info here
Steps to get a little futher:
Now I have to figure out how to make it work every time.
Found answer to edit grub here
Not sure if it’s related – but the touchpad mouse is sketch now.
Rebooted without USB mouse dongle and things seem okay. Not getting the power icon on the task bar – but I can probably live without it.
Pretty sure the kids are gonna be staying home from school tomorrow due to an incoming snow storm – so I wanted to bring up the closing notices from NHPR. I was pretty sure I had bookmarked it, but all I had was a link the WMUR closings page.
So I went to the NHPR page and started looking for anything having to do with “snow” or “school closing” etc. Spent a while – even found page with a dead link on it – so I was just about to classify myself as frustrated and send a complaint email kinda thing, when I noticed that the 2nd link on the page (literally the only thing above it was NHPR News) was a link to “Weather Delays”
At this point I felt pretty stupid – but that condition was down graded to ignorant when I clicked the link and it brought me to the WMUR closing page I had already viewed about 10min earlier.
Trying to get an airport express back up and running after mucking around with the house wifi network (got a new router etc.)
I installed the apputil program from Apple that let’s a windows machine manage the airport express devices – and it installed fine, but when I launched it I get an error message reading “cannot start – cannot find dnssd.dll”
Called apple support – and the promptly discovered I was not longer eligible for phone support – so I played the transfer game and got some software support guy named Paul who was very nice, but said they’d had a big meeting just that day about not giving out free support (he phrased it much better) – we joked about Mr. Jobs, to which he replied, “Yes, he is in Sick Bay.” And I hung up with my problem unsolved, but not unhappy.
Much more web surfing later (I did some googling before resorting to the dreaded real support people) I discover that dnssd.dll is something that gets installed with iTunes. So I installed iTunes on the Wife’s computer without asking her… and… (it’s installing now, I’ll update this if there’s an update)
Success! If you are installing the airport express util app and get the dnssd.dll error – you need to install iTunes. I suppose the apple devs didn’t imagine someone would want to manage an airport device without iTunes installed. Go figure.
Stumbled on a very kewl web site called degreedays.net – it allows you to pull up a spreadsheet of heating degree days for locations all over the world. I was able to quickly generate a spreadsheet for a weather station not too far from my house – and use it to calculate the heating degree days in a specific time frame.
I’ve been keeping track of how much oil we use to heat the house – but it’s pretty difficult to use that information to predict things because of the constantly changing temperature. For example: I had calculated gal/day based on the data I had – and realized that this number is going to fluctuate wildly throughout the year and it isn’t a really useful number because it doesn’t take into account the outside temperature.
Enter heating degree days (HDD) – which allow me to calculate how many gallons of oil I use based on the outside temperature. There’s a very good explanation of HDD on this website.
I’ve only had 3 oil deliveries, so I only have 2 periods to measure. Right now I’m averaging 0.14 Gallons of Heating oil Per Heating Degree Day.
The real goal is to know that 0.14 number today, and work on lowering it for tomorrow.
