Random thoughts, organized and categorized for your consumption.
Windows 7 makes networked media work
Apr 30th
I readily admit that I am hard on computers, I really do break them on a regular basis while seeming to find the absolute limits of what they are capable of. So with more than a little trepidation I installed the Release Candidate build (7100) of Windows 7 and set it to work scanning my overly large and complicated media library.
As a primer, it should be noted that my music library alone is somewhere over 30,000 songs and many of them have horribly broken tags that I refuse to fix, left over from many, many sessions of ripping the original CDs More >
Worst Service Nominees
Apr 1st
I have recently had the great displeasure of participating in three different levels of grief and suffering with three different technology companies. All three were so terrible that I felt compelled to write about it and post the results here, in the unlikely hope that someone might learn from my pain. So here it goes…
Adobe: decided that it is OK to hang up on my calls twice for support to activate a product that I had purchased, transfer me between two different call centers and different support staffs in India, force me to repeat the same trouble-shooting steps no less More >
A track day at Laguna Seca
Mar 11th
On March 9 I was fortunate enough to get some track time at the famed Laguna Seca Raceway in Salinas, CA. It was an interesting experience to say the least, and very different from driving at Thunderhill for past events. As a key point, it was remarkably cold at the track, never getting warmer than about 55 F, making the car develop as close to full horsepower as I’ve experienced but also making the tires a bit slippery for the first few laps.
As for the actual track, it seemed, well, small. At Thunderhill there are over 3 miles of ground to More >
My Latest Vista Test: Network Throttling
Dec 14th
Over the past couple of weeks I have been copying large amounts of data back and forth from my desktop PCs and my ReadyNAS in order to facilitate clearing some local hard disk space and to really, honestly begin scheduled backups. Today while copying a particularly large file (greater than 2GB if you must know) I found that the transfer rate to the ReadyNAS was a measly 10 MB/s. I have a gigabit network setup and this represents less than 10% of the available capacity. Obviously something is up.
I have my full-time, every-day PC running Vista with SP1 and for More >
When Malware Attacks, I Should Listen
Nov 25th
When your computer begins to slow down and then do strange things, you really do need to pay close attention because it is trying to tell you something. In my case Vista was attempting to communicate in a very inept way that it had been attacked by some malware and was in the process of going down the drain.
First I noticed the hard drive LED flashing rapidly all the time. Next I found that the machine wouldn’t stay in sleep mode any longer. Browser windows would pop open for no good reason. It was time to make a trip to More >
Last.fm integration for streaming radio sites
Oct 20th
I was in a mood today to make my music listening habits a bit more social, but I found that my two current music services, Pandora and Slacker, don’t naively support sending data to Last.fm. No problem, I thought, some enterprising hacker out there has solved this problem already. Right I was, and now you too can have the scrobble ability if you use these two services AND also use Firefox with them:
- Pandora plug-in for Firefox: get it here
- Slacker script for Greasemonkey: copy from here
So long as Firefox continues to be friendly with these plug-ins I’ll be using them to share the More >
Another Track Day Hits the Books
Oct 9th
October is here and that means another trip to Thunderhill to track the C6. This year was no exception, and although I’m tired and a bit sore the car and I are no worse for wear, so far as I can tell. The stats of note for this round of driving are as follows:
- Average gas mileage: 8 MPG
- Top speed achieved: 121 MPH (when I managed to look)
- New things learned: Skipping the cool down lap means cooked brake fluid (and no brakes)
- Sad fact: The gas gauge read empty at just 124 miles… while lapping another car, thus ending my driving for More >
CA DMV SMOG boondoggle
Sep 15th
For those of us living in the republic of California and owning older vehicles, we have to put up with an annual mandatory visit to a “certified” SMOG test station to see if our vehicle is still “legal” to drive on the road. Unlike safety inspections found in other states, however, this test is nothing more than a way to extract additional money from your pocket if you wish to keep driving on the roads. It works like this:
- You first pay about $90-ish for the registration and license fees
- Instructions tell you to go and SMOG test your vehicle for “a More >
The Continuing Sadness that is the HR20
Aug 3rd
It has been almost a year since I was forced to give up my wonderful HD-Tivo box for the “improved” DirecTV version called the HR20. Since I’ve had the box I’ve needed to make a lot of adjustments, but one new adjustment just isn’t sitting well with me: lock ups and reboots once per week.
You see, DirecTV doesn’t seem to understand the concept of QA or beta testing. Whenever they get a new update for the software inside the HR20 they just push it out the door to millions of customers. For anyone that has ever gotten a bad update More >