I have a 3-character.com domain name which I intentionally picked by using the random number function of a Casio calculator and a lookup table, just so I could have a 3-character name, and I thought it was a pretty decent one, too, for being random. That was back in March 2000.
But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part was back in September 2000, when I noticed someone had taken the.net of my domain. Sure enough, some idiots with more money than sense had registered every possible 3-character.com and.net name that hadn't yet been taken. Not surprisingly, they didn't renew the.net of my domain in 2001.
Finally, The main reason I worked on trying to fugure this out is because my wireless network was running very slow.
Well, at least that's all the problem you had. I put the 1.4f firmware into my WAP11 when I bought it, and the SSID would keep dropping out after a few hours, and come back after power-cycling the unit. Finally, when I demanded a RMA, they send me some newer firmware which fixed the problem.
In the meantime I found a good deal on a v1 AirPort ($200 at Fry's that weekend) so now I have them set up on opposite ends of the house for maximum coverage. Add a DHCP server which knows both my laptop's Ethernet and AirPort MAC addresses, and OS X, which automatically switches over when I plug/unplug the Ethernet, and I've got some sweet networking.
By the way, the hardware in this unit is OEM stuff from Atmel that is also in access points sold by NetGear, AddTron, and others. But LinkSys's version is the best because it has the removable antennas, and they have newer versions of the software available for download. (The v1.3 shipping with all of these brands, even Linksys, is supposed to have some SNMP security problems.)
Second, I think you can also turn off the SSID on your WAP using these utilities. I have not tried this but perhaps it could help if you are paranoid.
I'm just the opposite. I put my e-mail address as the SSID, since this is my home network. Except that Apple's software doesn't like the "@" character in an SSID. I don't have too much to be paranoid about, what with all the WEP-free DHCP-serving access points in my neighborhood being much jucier targets for drive-by spamming.
There will have to be secret police everywhere to make sure nobody actually hums along, because if anyone does, someone with a hidden microphone (banned decades ago, but available on the black market, nevertheless) might capture it and distribute it, not to mention the 20 other people in the room who will hear this humming and thus "steal" the music without paying the original artist/composer for it...
That would make having a tune that you "just can't get out of your head" become a real problem!
Hey Cartman, listen to this! "I'm sailing awaaaaayyyy..." >_<
In a world where you buy South Park episodes at 2 to a tape, or disk, what makes you think publishers want to fill the disk?
I don't know about your world, but in my world, I buy them 4 to a disc. When they bother to put them out. Let's see, first year three discs, 12 episodes. Second year, three discs, 12 episodes. Third year two discs, 8 episodes. This year, two discs, 8 episodes, and it looks like they may have stopped bothering to put episodes in the correct order, in favor of "collections" discs. Since I don't get pay TV any more, it looks like I'll get to see the current South Park episodes by 2010.
Universal, i will scout for your discs, and as a Mac user of self-proclaimed badassary, "hack" via insertion your CD, rip, burn and mail to your well-tanned California ass.... Mwahaaha... All right enough fevered fantasies of geek revenge... back to work...
Better yet, first be sure it's got the "copy protected" label. Then insert, rip to AIFF (just a copy command under OS X, which presents audio CDs as implicitly ripped AIFF files!), burn CD-ROM with AIFF files. Then go back to Circus Shitty (they deserve this kind of hassle because of their old Divx "rental" format), whine that "it won't play in my DVD player!" and demand a refund.
As far as I'm concerned, RIAA record companies have got the best kind of copy protection of all: they don't make anything new that I would want to pirate, much less buy. And the old stuff I can usually find much cheaper used, if I care enough to want to hear it.
Just about all the music I listen to these days, aside from talk radio bumper music, is from JASRAC, not ASCAP or BMI. In other words, anime music and J-pop. And I prefer the original CDs when I can find them, because they almost always include the lyrics, and printed lyrics are helpful in one of the most homophone-laden languages on the planet.
IBM's 'alphaworks' site had a english->chinese translation system (a long with other languages) online that actualy worked pretty well (or at least seemed to) Actualy working out the grammar as well as the words so you wouldn't end up with incoherent jiberish
I understand that grammatical word order in Chinese is pretty close to that of English. It's pronouncing those tonal shifts that's the hard part for us gwai-lo. If they made it work with translation to and from Japanese (or even Klingon, which intentionally had a fucked up word order), then you'd have something.
This really all is just nitt-picking though because the fact of the matter is that PS2 is crap. They put together a pile of crap as fast as possible and released it first, and it's earned a lot of money, but it's still crap. The Xbox is made by Microsoft, that's all I have to say to know that it's a big pile of horse dung. So, we're left with GameCube, and despite it's "kiddy" reputation, I find it to be the best game console.
I have about the same sentiments as yours as the reason I got a GC upon release, though you've said it funnier than I would. (The first system ever that I've cared to get on the release date, and I've been playing console games since the RCA Studio II, which even pre-dates the Atari 2600! But now that I think about it, I did get the N64 in its first month or two, before they became E-Bay bait along with Elmo, and with the GC I knew the availability window was much smaller.) But I'll have to say that even if the PS2 is crap (IMHO primarily because the hardware is as hard as the Jaguar to push to its limits), it's crap that runs games from what is clearly the most successful console game system in history, and it's an entry-level DVD player, too, just as the pre-recorded video market is switching to DVD.
As to the sold-out nature of the GC, while I was shopping for $10 PS1 closeout games about two or three weeks ago, one parent with a kid remarked that GC and XBox were impossible to find. (Of course I'm sure he didn't try that hard either.)
Well, I don't have a PS2 (I'm still waiting for the first price drop, which I expect may happen next month), but I did get a GC on the first morning that Fry's had them for sale.
But lately I've been snagging all the $10 PS1 games (and a few DC games as well) that look interesting. And I'm still only playing the one that started this whole quest for $10 games last month, something called "Torneko The Last Hope", which basically is a NetHack-style dungeon crawl.
So not only does the PS2 have a library of pretty good PS2 games, but there's a ton of $10 PS1 games that it'll play, too. The only other system that can say that is Game Boy Advance. (IIRC, the only other radical-new-design system with true non-adapter backwards compatiblity was the 7800, but Atari killed it by stupidly warehousing it for two years, giving time for the NES take over.)
Indeed. I use most of my blank CDs to store DivX anime videos. The ones that I put MP3s on get J-pop and anime music. I don't even bother with MP3s of USA music, because it's so much crap these days. The '90s were like a black hole in terms of worthwhile mainstream music. About all I care about from the USA is stuff like Wierd Al Yankovic, and I make a point of buying his CDs.
Peizo fans are at least 15 years old
on
Swaying CPU Fans
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I had a peizo fan in my old Mac (a 128 with a Levco MonsterMac 2 meg upgrade) back in 1986. It had two strips (about 1cm by 4cm) sticking out of the top, and the strips vibrated. It was held in there by velcro and just pushed the air around. (It did not attach to a CPU or anything like that.)
It's kind of hard to tell exactly what this article is describing, but it sounds like exactly the same thing at half the size.
Re:The PS2 modchip is a wondrous thing..
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 2
Old modchips worked by flashing the Playstation BIOS, or replacing parts of it on boot, so that when the game would call on the copyprotection, the new BIOS would say that every disc in the unit was good.
Incorrect. (Whose ass did you pull that crap out of?) PS1 copy protection worked by PS1 games including a special subcode signal of either "SCEJ", "SCEA", or "SCEE" in every sector of the disc. If the console did not see the appropriate code for its region, it would not boot the disc. So all the mod chips did was spew this code over and over again on the signal line which carried this subcode data, overriding it with an electrically stronger signal. Later games could detect this by having sectors without this special data, and the mod chip would keep right on spewing the code.
The mod chip makers had three ways around it: 1) "stealth" chips which stopped spewing the code a few seconds after reset, 2) some special trick like holding down the reset button for five seconds to disable the chip and allow playing of legit games with anti-modchip code, or 3) anti-piracy modchips which listened for the "SCE" and would only jam the fourth byte onto the signal line after the first three had already gone by.
Alas, Sony's region lockout was strong enough that it required the defeat of copy protection at the same time. Sega used option jumpers on the Genesis and Saturn, and Nintendo used physical parameters (cartridge and connector shape), except on the GC, which uses option jumpers. The Dreamcast made this much more difficult, but then people found the CD-R boot loophole in the original version of the Dreamcast.
What I think the real problem Sony has isn't the issue of playing import PS2 games or DVDs, or even of playing copies, but that the chips they're going after (at least Messiah) also disable Macrovision. But that's just my wild-assed guess.
They don't have my first month's worth from alt.religion.kibology, and they seem to be confused between the first posting I made from Schenectady (12/91) and my first posts to a.r.k (11/91).
If you do the right kind of search, you'll find that Google doesn't have any a.r.k posts before 1991/12/23, but that one of those first few articles quotes a message from 1991/12/22. I hope Google hasn't stopped looking for more articles, and that they simply decided they had enough to open them up to the public.
Searching for my own messages finds some wierdnesses, such as having two years between my first and second posts in alt.music.filk, and one of my earliest posts (from back when I still had a FidoNet BBS) got mis-filed into alt.missing-kids. (Fido echo-mail processors were called "tossers", and they often did end up tossing crap all over the place.)
I did try to find the first cross-posted-to-a.r.k Kibo troll, but couldn't. There's lots of stuff between 1991 and 1994 or so when I became a Kibologist. Lots of nice stuff in rec.pets, though. And just look how far you've gone since then--the Japanese even named a module of the space station in your honor!
You can even see the one I had before I realized I should only use.signatures ironically and made it 250 times longer.
I still have the 400dpi 11x17 color print I made of your 1 megabyte postscript.sig. I think the "regular".sig you included in there in flyspeck Courier is actually readable at that size and resolution.
Actually. I think 10-view DVDs will be the next big thing from the studios. They'll sell those babies for $5-10 and you'll only be able to play them 10 times (they put a film on the disk which goes opaque in the laser). Then its useless. They'll push them through rental shops to start with.
Yeah, and then they could make it only work for 48 hours. I wonder what they could call it? Maybe DIVX?
First of all, you've got the (potential) advantage of new construction. In my case, when I was shopping for a house this summer, one of the things I was looking for was a single-story house, so I could have access to all the walls from the attic. (In Austin you can't have a basement without using lots of dynamite.) With new construction, your best bet would be lots of 1" inner diameter PVC conduit going all over the house to empty electrical boxes. Make sure they don't run parallel to the electrical wires!
What I did was pull eight drops of six cat-5 and one RG-6 to six rooms. (Actually only seven RG-6 drops because I ran out.) I used up most of two 1000 foot boxes.
Don't pull single wires, pull bundles. When I had the holes drilled and the weather was cool enough to stay in the attic all day, I pulled the wire from both boxes through the house, along with the RG-6, then folded the end over and did it again twice. I used cheap box tape to hold the wires together in the interim, then I used cable ties to tie it together into one evil looking snake. It just barely fits in a 1" hole. So far I haven't crimped the ends of the RG-6, but when I do start using it, I'll just stuff the extra cat-5 keystone jack back into the wall.
In two of the drops, I didn't have to drill because there was no drywall over the cabinets (nowadays the ceilings go in first, so I was lucky), and in another, there was already a hole where I wanted it. The last hole was the toughest because it was on an outside wall, the roof about three feet above me. I cut a hole for three-inch pipe in my closet, giving nine times the area of a 1" hole, just right for eight bundles and the outside wiring, then put a pipe and a right angle joint at the top. The hole was cut well enough that the whole thing fits snugly with no glue or plaster.
Assorted bits of advice: Forget about fiber, it's too much of a pain in the arse for home use. The only fiber you want is one strand going out of your house (dream on!). And besides, there are two diameters, and single vs multi-mode, but cat-5 is cat-5. Don't forget about the RG-6, because that means you can have cable/satellite in any and every room in the house. And if you buy wood bits, get 1" bits, and get them made in the USA with lifetime warranty. Wal-Mart sells these for under three bucks each. The crap from China won't last for more than one or two holes. Ultrasonic stud finders kick ass. Wig pins are good for pushing through drywall to find out the exact point of a stud, both on walls and ceilings. Not all horizontal studs in your attic are directly over the wall; if you're not careful, you'll drill out the top of a wall or even worse, paneling. (Yes, I did drill out some paneling. That's how I know.)
Switched 100mbit Ethernet in the kitchen kicks ass. And it means you get to use more AC circuits for those big LAN parties.
That's a lot of monitors running at the same time there. All those computers have to be pulling a lot of juice that has to go through the building's electric wiring. Just getting power for all those computers is a feat in itself.
I feel sorry for the guy who kicks over the wrong plug in that place.:-)
Back in '78-'79, I had to turn off my TRS-80 whenever the family wanted to watch channel 12. The computer was in a far corner room, at least 30 feet from the antenna.
Way back in the real "way back in the day", around 1980 or 1981 or so, before the FCC got into the act, I was using the RFI from my TRS-80 to generate music. The cool part was that any code to generate sound out the cassette port was sufficient to have the sound show up on an AM radio via RFI.
I remember long ago reading about how some rich guy contacted the Star Trek folks and asked them how the doors worked. You see, he was going to build a rich guy's house, and wanted those doors. He was rather disappointed to find out that they were operated by stagehands, and sometimes (to the dismay of Shatner's nose) not operated by stagehands.
So apparently he went and had somebody invent automatic pocket doors that worked.
Don't forget that the Linux/DC and NetBSD/DC ports rely on being able to boot from a CD.
This is a functionality that Sega took away several months ago, meaning that the newer dreamcasts cannot boot Linux/DC, NetBSD/DC, the Bleem packs, the Utopia bootdisk, or anything else that isn't on a GDROM.
And that includes MAME discs, too. I wonder how much this affected DC sales? I sure know that I don't want a $50 DC that won't play imports or hacks.
So can anyone tell us how to tell the new ones from the old ones, preferably while they're still in the original box?
I've been using them since March 2000, and I've never seen any spam from them either (unless you count all the confirmation messages from the web interface). 13 euros/year (slightly less than $13 US), and they finally got a web interface that doesn't suck. Their old interface sucked horribly, especially when you had to move your DNS server to a new IP block. But you can send e-mail to a real human who (apparently) knows how things work. I guess they haven't discovered the evils of CRM yet. And there is a bit of translation wierdness from German to English in their documentation.
While that Nova or whatever show was on the other night, I dug out my old vaccination records, having found them a few months ago. It seems that I was given my four or five shots for smallpox over the period of a year or so, and the last one (in 1969) was stamped "Equivocal Reaction". No indications of what kind of reaction, but I have allergies to penicillin and aspirin, so maybe it was an allergic reaction.
As a counter-example, I once shipped a new-in-box rare (but sucky) old game system to someone. I packed it in a box that was at least four inches longer in all three dimensions, filled the bottom with foam peanuts, put the box I was shipping inside, filled around the edges with more peanuts, then filled it to the top.
(completing my paragraph) The package arrived at its destination looking like hell, but the box inside was in perfect shape.
If you absolutly need to ship PC parts, disassemble them and ship them in containers with lots of foam, packing "popcorn", etc. Even empty ATX cases arrive in boxes two and three times their actual size.
And don't forget that boxes have six sides. One time someone shipped me a new-in-box Atari 5200 trackball. By shoving it in the bottom of a box with the exact same "floor" dimensions, and filling the rest of the space on top with foam peanuts. Needless to say, when the outside box got a corner scrunched from being dropped, so did the inside box. This is because there was nothing to absorb the impact, so it got transferred directly to the inside box.
As a counter-example, I once shipped a new-in-box rare (but sucky) old game system to someone. I packed it in a box that was at least four inches longer in all three dimensions, filled the bottom with foam peanuts, put the box I was shipping inside, filled around the edges with more peanuts, then filled it to the top.
As a final comment, have you ever noticed how boxes (at least the ones made and sold in the USA) have this circle with lots of words and numbers in it? That gives the strength rating of the box. From what I understand, this guy shipped two computers and a monitor in the same box! Which was probably a normal-strength box. I'm sorry, but first, no amount of foam peanuts is going to stop such items from banging into each other, and second, the weight of two tower computers and a decent sized monitor has to be on the order of at least 60 pounds/30 kilos. No way is a regular cardboard box going to retain its shape when it's being knocked around during shipping. He might as well have wrapped it in tissue paper for all that it mattered.
And, as mentioned before, if it wasn't filled tightly, stacking of boxes would have crushed it, and cardboard tends to lose its strength after being crushed. I'm sure the square-cube law has an effect here, too. A box two feet on a side, with the same relative thickness of cardboard, is going to be relatively only 1/8th as strong as a box with one foot long sides. And that's the same relative thickness. Which means thicker than the smaller box's cardboard, not the same thickness, as this would have been.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's not the interesting part. The interesting part was back in September 2000, when I noticed someone had taken the .net of my domain. Sure enough, some idiots with more money than sense had registered every possible 3-character .com and .net name that hadn't yet been taken. Not surprisingly, they didn't renew the .net of my domain in 2001.
Well, at least that's all the problem you had. I put the 1.4f firmware into my WAP11 when I bought it, and the SSID would keep dropping out after a few hours, and come back after power-cycling the unit. Finally, when I demanded a RMA, they send me some newer firmware which fixed the problem.
In the meantime I found a good deal on a v1 AirPort ($200 at Fry's that weekend) so now I have them set up on opposite ends of the house for maximum coverage. Add a DHCP server which knows both my laptop's Ethernet and AirPort MAC addresses, and OS X, which automatically switches over when I plug/unplug the Ethernet, and I've got some sweet networking.
By the way, the hardware in this unit is OEM stuff from Atmel that is also in access points sold by NetGear, AddTron, and others. But LinkSys's version is the best because it has the removable antennas, and they have newer versions of the software available for download. (The v1.3 shipping with all of these brands, even Linksys, is supposed to have some SNMP security problems.)
Second, I think you can also turn off the SSID on your WAP using these utilities. I have not tried this but perhaps it could help if you are paranoid.
I'm just the opposite. I put my e-mail address as the SSID, since this is my home network. Except that Apple's software doesn't like the "@" character in an SSID. I don't have too much to be paranoid about, what with all the WEP-free DHCP-serving access points in my neighborhood being much jucier targets for drive-by spamming.
That would make having a tune that you "just can't get out of your head" become a real problem!
Hey Cartman, listen to this! "I'm sailing awaaaaayyyy..." >_<
I don't know about your world, but in my world, I buy them 4 to a disc. When they bother to put them out. Let's see, first year three discs, 12 episodes. Second year, three discs, 12 episodes. Third year two discs, 8 episodes. This year, two discs, 8 episodes, and it looks like they may have stopped bothering to put episodes in the correct order, in favor of "collections" discs. Since I don't get pay TV any more, it looks like I'll get to see the current South Park episodes by 2010.
Better yet, first be sure it's got the "copy protected" label. Then insert, rip to AIFF (just a copy command under OS X, which presents audio CDs as implicitly ripped AIFF files!), burn CD-ROM with AIFF files. Then go back to Circus Shitty (they deserve this kind of hassle because of their old Divx "rental" format), whine that "it won't play in my DVD player!" and demand a refund.
As far as I'm concerned, RIAA record companies have got the best kind of copy protection of all: they don't make anything new that I would want to pirate, much less buy. And the old stuff I can usually find much cheaper used, if I care enough to want to hear it.
Just about all the music I listen to these days, aside from talk radio bumper music, is from JASRAC, not ASCAP or BMI. In other words, anime music and J-pop. And I prefer the original CDs when I can find them, because they almost always include the lyrics, and printed lyrics are helpful in one of the most homophone-laden languages on the planet.
I understand that grammatical word order in Chinese is pretty close to that of English. It's pronouncing those tonal shifts that's the hard part for us gwai-lo. If they made it work with translation to and from Japanese (or even Klingon, which intentionally had a fucked up word order), then you'd have something.
I have about the same sentiments as yours as the reason I got a GC upon release, though you've said it funnier than I would. (The first system ever that I've cared to get on the release date, and I've been playing console games since the RCA Studio II, which even pre-dates the Atari 2600! But now that I think about it, I did get the N64 in its first month or two, before they became E-Bay bait along with Elmo, and with the GC I knew the availability window was much smaller.) But I'll have to say that even if the PS2 is crap (IMHO primarily because the hardware is as hard as the Jaguar to push to its limits), it's crap that runs games from what is clearly the most successful console game system in history, and it's an entry-level DVD player, too, just as the pre-recorded video market is switching to DVD.
As to the sold-out nature of the GC, while I was shopping for $10 PS1 closeout games about two or three weeks ago, one parent with a kid remarked that GC and XBox were impossible to find. (Of course I'm sure he didn't try that hard either.)
But lately I've been snagging all the $10 PS1 games (and a few DC games as well) that look interesting. And I'm still only playing the one that started this whole quest for $10 games last month, something called "Torneko The Last Hope", which basically is a NetHack-style dungeon crawl.
So not only does the PS2 have a library of pretty good PS2 games, but there's a ton of $10 PS1 games that it'll play, too. The only other system that can say that is Game Boy Advance. (IIRC, the only other radical-new-design system with true non-adapter backwards compatiblity was the 7800, but Atari killed it by stupidly warehousing it for two years, giving time for the NES take over.)
Indeed. I use most of my blank CDs to store DivX anime videos. The ones that I put MP3s on get J-pop and anime music. I don't even bother with MP3s of USA music, because it's so much crap these days. The '90s were like a black hole in terms of worthwhile mainstream music. About all I care about from the USA is stuff like Wierd Al Yankovic, and I make a point of buying his CDs.
It's kind of hard to tell exactly what this article is describing, but it sounds like exactly the same thing at half the size.
Incorrect. (Whose ass did you pull that crap out of?) PS1 copy protection worked by PS1 games including a special subcode signal of either "SCEJ", "SCEA", or "SCEE" in every sector of the disc. If the console did not see the appropriate code for its region, it would not boot the disc. So all the mod chips did was spew this code over and over again on the signal line which carried this subcode data, overriding it with an electrically stronger signal. Later games could detect this by having sectors without this special data, and the mod chip would keep right on spewing the code.
The mod chip makers had three ways around it: 1) "stealth" chips which stopped spewing the code a few seconds after reset, 2) some special trick like holding down the reset button for five seconds to disable the chip and allow playing of legit games with anti-modchip code, or 3) anti-piracy modchips which listened for the "SCE" and would only jam the fourth byte onto the signal line after the first three had already gone by.
Alas, Sony's region lockout was strong enough that it required the defeat of copy protection at the same time. Sega used option jumpers on the Genesis and Saturn, and Nintendo used physical parameters (cartridge and connector shape), except on the GC, which uses option jumpers. The Dreamcast made this much more difficult, but then people found the CD-R boot loophole in the original version of the Dreamcast.
What I think the real problem Sony has isn't the issue of playing import PS2 games or DVDs, or even of playing copies, but that the chips they're going after (at least Messiah) also disable Macrovision. But that's just my wild-assed guess.
If you do the right kind of search, you'll find that Google doesn't have any a.r.k posts before 1991/12/23, but that one of those first few articles quotes a message from 1991/12/22. I hope Google hasn't stopped looking for more articles, and that they simply decided they had enough to open them up to the public.
Searching for my own messages finds some wierdnesses, such as having two years between my first and second posts in alt.music.filk, and one of my earliest posts (from back when I still had a FidoNet BBS) got mis-filed into alt.missing-kids. (Fido echo-mail processors were called "tossers", and they often did end up tossing crap all over the place.)
I did try to find the first cross-posted-to-a.r.k Kibo troll, but couldn't. There's lots of stuff between 1991 and 1994 or so when I became a Kibologist. Lots of nice stuff in rec.pets, though. And just look how far you've gone since then--the Japanese even named a module of the space station in your honor!
You can even see the one I had before I realized I should only use .signatures ironically and made it 250 times longer.
I still have the 400dpi 11x17 color print I made of your 1 megabyte postscript .sig. I think the "regular" .sig you included in there in flyspeck Courier is actually readable at that size and resolution.
P.S.: beable
Yeah, and then they could make it only work for 48 hours. I wonder what they could call it? Maybe DIVX?
Don't forget the best 8-bit CPU every made, the 6809. I bought one of those things just so I could hack out some 6809 assembly code.
What I did was pull eight drops of six cat-5 and one RG-6 to six rooms. (Actually only seven RG-6 drops because I ran out.) I used up most of two 1000 foot boxes.
Don't pull single wires, pull bundles. When I had the holes drilled and the weather was cool enough to stay in the attic all day, I pulled the wire from both boxes through the house, along with the RG-6, then folded the end over and did it again twice. I used cheap box tape to hold the wires together in the interim, then I used cable ties to tie it together into one evil looking snake. It just barely fits in a 1" hole. So far I haven't crimped the ends of the RG-6, but when I do start using it, I'll just stuff the extra cat-5 keystone jack back into the wall.
In two of the drops, I didn't have to drill because there was no drywall over the cabinets (nowadays the ceilings go in first, so I was lucky), and in another, there was already a hole where I wanted it. The last hole was the toughest because it was on an outside wall, the roof about three feet above me. I cut a hole for three-inch pipe in my closet, giving nine times the area of a 1" hole, just right for eight bundles and the outside wiring, then put a pipe and a right angle joint at the top. The hole was cut well enough that the whole thing fits snugly with no glue or plaster.
Assorted bits of advice: Forget about fiber, it's too much of a pain in the arse for home use. The only fiber you want is one strand going out of your house (dream on!). And besides, there are two diameters, and single vs multi-mode, but cat-5 is cat-5. Don't forget about the RG-6, because that means you can have cable/satellite in any and every room in the house. And if you buy wood bits, get 1" bits, and get them made in the USA with lifetime warranty. Wal-Mart sells these for under three bucks each. The crap from China won't last for more than one or two holes. Ultrasonic stud finders kick ass. Wig pins are good for pushing through drywall to find out the exact point of a stud, both on walls and ceilings. Not all horizontal studs in your attic are directly over the wall; if you're not careful, you'll drill out the top of a wall or even worse, paneling. (Yes, I did drill out some paneling. That's how I know.)
Switched 100mbit Ethernet in the kitchen kicks ass. And it means you get to use more AC circuits for those big LAN parties.
I feel sorry for the guy who kicks over the wrong plug in that place. :-)
Back in '78-'79, I had to turn off my TRS-80 whenever the family wanted to watch channel 12. The computer was in a far corner room, at least 30 feet from the antenna.
Way back in the real "way back in the day", around 1980 or 1981 or so, before the FCC got into the act, I was using the RFI from my TRS-80 to generate music. The cool part was that any code to generate sound out the cassette port was sufficient to have the sound show up on an AM radio via RFI.
So apparently he went and had somebody invent automatic pocket doors that worked.
This is a functionality that Sega took away several months ago, meaning that the newer dreamcasts cannot boot Linux/DC, NetBSD/DC, the Bleem packs, the Utopia bootdisk, or anything else that isn't on a GDROM.
And that includes MAME discs, too. I wonder how much this affected DC sales? I sure know that I don't want a $50 DC that won't play imports or hacks.
So can anyone tell us how to tell the new ones from the old ones, preferably while they're still in the original box?
I've been using them since March 2000, and I've never seen any spam from them either (unless you count all the confirmation messages from the web interface). 13 euros/year (slightly less than $13 US), and they finally got a web interface that doesn't suck. Their old interface sucked horribly, especially when you had to move your DNS server to a new IP block. But you can send e-mail to a real human who (apparently) knows how things work. I guess they haven't discovered the evils of CRM yet. And there is a bit of translation wierdness from German to English in their documentation.
Not anywhere near the mark. Arcadia 2001. The system where whoever programmed the sound effects for the games was obviously tone-deaf.
While that Nova or whatever show was on the other night, I dug out my old vaccination records, having found them a few months ago. It seems that I was given my four or five shots for smallpox over the period of a year or so, and the last one (in 1969) was stamped "Equivocal Reaction". No indications of what kind of reaction, but I have allergies to penicillin and aspirin, so maybe it was an allergic reaction.
(completing my paragraph) The package arrived at its destination looking like hell, but the box inside was in perfect shape.
And don't forget that boxes have six sides. One time someone shipped me a new-in-box Atari 5200 trackball. By shoving it in the bottom of a box with the exact same "floor" dimensions, and filling the rest of the space on top with foam peanuts. Needless to say, when the outside box got a corner scrunched from being dropped, so did the inside box. This is because there was nothing to absorb the impact, so it got transferred directly to the inside box.
As a counter-example, I once shipped a new-in-box rare (but sucky) old game system to someone. I packed it in a box that was at least four inches longer in all three dimensions, filled the bottom with foam peanuts, put the box I was shipping inside, filled around the edges with more peanuts, then filled it to the top.
As a final comment, have you ever noticed how boxes (at least the ones made and sold in the USA) have this circle with lots of words and numbers in it? That gives the strength rating of the box. From what I understand, this guy shipped two computers and a monitor in the same box! Which was probably a normal-strength box. I'm sorry, but first, no amount of foam peanuts is going to stop such items from banging into each other, and second, the weight of two tower computers and a decent sized monitor has to be on the order of at least 60 pounds/30 kilos. No way is a regular cardboard box going to retain its shape when it's being knocked around during shipping. He might as well have wrapped it in tissue paper for all that it mattered.
And, as mentioned before, if it wasn't filled tightly, stacking of boxes would have crushed it, and cardboard tends to lose its strength after being crushed. I'm sure the square-cube law has an effect here, too. A box two feet on a side, with the same relative thickness of cardboard, is going to be relatively only 1/8th as strong as a box with one foot long sides. And that's the same relative thickness. Which means thicker than the smaller box's cardboard, not the same thickness, as this would have been.