Andrew Underwood

My Computer Monitor Garbage Can

Could this be the first garbage can that has a linux commands directory stuck to the top? I just took the guts out of my old monitor that was dying to get this awesome refuse receptacle.

Binary Analog Clock

The last place I moved into had a clock hanging on the wall, didn’t ever pay much attention to it since it was in an unnoticeable place in the kitchen. When I moved out I took it with me and had plans to make it into something more interesting since it was as plain as clocks come.

I put this background on it that turns it into a binary clock. Black is low, white is high. Read it by seeing if the blocks the hands intersect are high or low (the minute hand isn’t quite long enough and the hour hand is a bit too long). It’s read from the outside to inside. The inner 4 rings correspond to the hours and the 6 rings past those are for minutes. This clock is a bit different since it counts from 0 to 11 instead of 1 to 12.

In this picture (it’s not upright) the hour hand is over black, white, white, black. Which corresponds to 0110 in binary equals 6 hours. The minute hand is over black, white, black, white, white, white. Equivalent to 111010 binary = 32 + 16 + 8 + 2 decimal = 58. So the time is 6:58.

CD/MP3 Player

I’ve had my CD player for three years now and I dropped it tonight while out running.  It exploded sending parts everywhere.  This is most likely due to me taking out all the screws two years ago and never bothering to put them back in.  The reason I was trying to take it apart was that I had dropped it before and the only thing that broke was the spring on the open/close slider.  I wanted to fix it but never was able to since I couldn’t even seem to get it open.  Thus the reasoning that it doesn’t need screws.

I picked up all the parts after it was dropped tonight and went home.  I’ve been thinking about MP3 players for a long time now but I wasn’t going to buy one until my CD player gave out.  This is because it plays MP3s too.  Storage was cheap, just writable CDs and it had great battery life. The biggest downside was the large size of it, even though it’s small for CD players.
When I got home I spent some time surfing around different MP3 player sites.  I didn’t really find anything that I liked that wasn’t really expensive.  Finally I had a look at my broken CD player and amazingly I was able to put it back together.  I put a CD and it works fine, it just has one more dent.  So it looks like I won’t be buying a new MP3 player quite yet.

A battle’s end?

Two knights have been battling since they first met. Every fight they start gives them new experience, a new understanding of their weapons and armour. The fight hardly hardly ever produces a clear winner and the meeting of the knights is different every time. After every battle they go back to their tool shops and develop new and better armor, better swords, and other new technologies to help them win. If one knight dies or stops caring, is that the end of the incentive for the remaining knight to keep developing his battle system?

I’m talking about ATI and nVidia, two compainies that developed graphic card technology. Personally I always rooted for ATI since it was a Canadian company. There was a HUGE competition between these two companies, driving 3D development ever since 1996 when 3d cards first started appearing. The last decade has witnessed a change in availible graphics technology.

Recently AMD, a company that mostly makes CPUs bought ATI. Since AMD has always been about cheaper chips (compared to Intel) I’m worried that it will pull ATI from the front lines of high end, high cost 3D development and leave nVidia the whole high end market. It will be an end to the competition that was responsible for driving the amazing 3D developments over the last ten years. They can’t stop now! Not while we are so close to photorealism.

Hopefully the opposite will happen and it will use it’s ’synergy’ to develop entirely new platorms that make the most of CPU power and graphic chipsets. Only time will tell… or perhaps an interview with AMD. All you real journalists out there, get on that pronto!

The Printer

I mentioned before that my Brother Multi Function Centre (MFC 4420C)stopped working. I actually got it going again for a little while before it started displaying the infamous error 41, effectively crippling it. The really annoying thing is that it can still print decently because it was doing fine right before it stopped and refused to do anything. From printing tests before it went sour I could see that three or four squares out of 100 were bad. I really don’t think the entire machine needs to become unusable, like the fax, scanner, memory card reader. Those functions don’t need a print head to work.

So I called up Brother and they gave me the number of a company in Edmonton that repairs them. I phone and find out it will cost $106 to get fixed. The lady informs me that this is a very common problem, confirming what I had read about it on the Interweb. She also tells me that I’d probably be better off just buying a new printer since even if they replace the print head, it has a mean time to failure of about 6 months.

I’ve owned about three different ink jet printers and they are really a pain in the neck. They seem to require multiple cleanings every time I go to use it. I’m fed up with ink jets, with their expensive ink, and seemingly made to be disposed of at the first sign of trouble.

This is why I’ve decided to get a laser printer. I’ll avoid the headaches and be able to enjoy the soothing warmth that comes with each freshly printed page which is characteristic of laser printers. So I’ll be without fax and scanning capability for a while, which is no biggie. I can use my digi cam &&/|| email to replace those functions.

Upgrade

I just upgraded my blogging software Wordpress to the latest version.  I hadn’t upgraded through the last few releases since I couldn’t be bothered.  The new version has cool features like category modification on the fly.  It was really easy to upgrade, the hardest part was copying over the new files… but that more tedious than hard… and all that involves is a single click and drag.

In other news Peter and I ran the stairs on the river valley for an hour yesterday.  These are the stairs you can see from the LRT bridge, on the west side of the high level, north side of the river.  There were a few others doing the same thing, including this one guy with huge thighs.  He looked really weird, like it was the only exercise he ever did.

Desktop Earth

This is a sweet program that updates your wallpaper according to what the earth would look like from space at that precise moment. I’ve got it set up so that the part of the world in night is on the my left screen and the the parts that in in daylight are on my right screen. Right now it looks like the eastern tip of Africa is waking up to a sunrise!

Are all men from the future loud mouth braggarts?

I vacuumed today, with a new (to me) vacuum. When my roommate left she took her vacuum so my parents got me another one. I’m not sure where they got it, but it seems to work well despite being old. I’m not sure how old it is but I imagine it dates back to the 70s or 80s indicitive by it’s “shag” setting option. The only date I can find on it is a patent date of 1951. Anyhoo, I like it because it’s retro tech. Much like these rabbit ears from the seventies I bought from the Junque Cellar on Whyte. It’s really stylish and feels solid, a feeling far from any other set I’ve ever laid hands on. It’s a Zenith Chromantenna, I adore the loops at the top.

Solution

In regards to the post below, Jigga came the closest as to identifying what material was in the picture. It’s my desk, or more specifically, the fake wood on it. My Dad was right in that I put my camera up to a microscope to get the image. It works better than I would have imagined, and the microscope I used is one I’ve had for years. It’s 100x and hand held, called the Smart 2. It comes with a base and some slides, but I usually just put it up to things. I had friends who had different versions of this, one combined a microscope and a telescope.

My desk sags under the weight of my computer monitors. The drawers can’t shut properly because of that.

Damn shoddy power supplies

So yesterday I was in the middle of a time trail in Colin McRae Rally 2005 and my computer shut off with a loud click. I quickly determined that it was the power supply. It came with my case and was just a 350W one. So I went to a computer store and bought a new 400W power supply, it cost more than the case itself. After installing the new PSU I couldn’t get my hard drive to be recognized during POST. I fear it might be fried… So today after work I went and got a new 160 GB drive. I just finished installing Red Hat Fedora Core 4 Linux. I usually install Windows first but I couldn’t find my disk. Anyway, sweet sweet Internet has been restored. I haven’t been having good luck with hard drives lately. Perhaps I will consider a redundant RAID array.