nuxx.net

New Camera!

January 29, 2005

Well, I went and got it after all… A Nikon Coolpix 5400. From what I’ve read it’s a pretty good camera, despite it’s lack of AF assist lamp.

Not a bad price, either. At Costco it’s $499.99 plus tax, then minus a $200 instant rebate. So, $329.99 after tax.

As long as I like it, I’ll still need to get a second battery, 1GB card, and a carrying case. The starter card it came with was only 16MB. Ah well… I would get the 1GB card locally, but the cheapest I’ve found it for was $126 plus tax. That’s a lot when Amazon wants around $100.

acquired things moved from livejournal

Basement Rearranging!

January 24, 2005

Click for more…

For some reason I had the desire to rearrange my basement. I’d been thinking about it for a while, so I finally did it. For what it’s worth, I put things in roughly the positions I’d thought they would go had I finished the basement, and in doing so I’ve realized that things wouldn’t quite fit as planned…

Anyway, for those of you that have seen my basement before, you’ll see it’s quite a bit different. I also have plans to have the (everlasting) rod hole leak in the corner fixed, and as you can see here, there wouldn’t have been much room to work on the wall.

So, I did a bunch of rearranging, some cleaning and straightening, made an impromptu run of CAT5 (for the Airport Express) and set the levels on the home theater speakers. I’m going to try to remember to grab some coax from Home Depot tomorrow so I can run a CATV signal over to the TV. So, everything is in order, and I’m pretty happy with where it all is.

Oh, I do still have to run power to the arcade games. I almost forgot that, and they are useless without electricity.

around the house moved from livejournal

===

January 21, 2005

In case anyone is interested, here is a rather interesting article about Sports Illustrated’s workflow for digital photography. It’s mostly about how Superbowl 2003 was handled, but it’s really interesting to see the techniques they use for enlarging images, dealing with RAW files, etc.

found things moved from livejournal

The Henry Ford Museum

January 18, 2005

Click for more photos…

On Sunday, January 16th I woke up around 8:45am. Suddenly the idea of visiting The Henry Ford Museum, a place I haven’t been to in almost 10 years, popped into my head. I’ve been wanting to head back there for a while, so I decided to go. Well, less than two hours later I was pulling into the parking lot.

For those who don’t know what this museum is, it is a technology-focused historical museum which tends to concentrate on transportation and items from the after the 1700s. It’s a top-notch place to visit, including such exhibits as the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, the chair in which President Abraham Lincoln was sitting when he was shot, the limousine in which President Kennedy was riding when he was shot, the Rosa Parks bus, and many, many more amazing items. There is all sorts of transportation exhibits, too, from the 1950s tourist / travel culture to locomotives, from stage coaches to bicycles. This museum is well worth visiting.

Per usual I took a number of photos of the trip. These can be found here, and include some of the following highlights:

· Lincoln’s Chair
· Kennedy’s Limo
· The Rosa Parks Bus
· Internet In A Box
· The Dymaxion House
· Brushes and windings of a Generator

In addition to visiting the museum, I took in a showing of a newer IMAX film about Mt. Everest titled appropriately, Everest. This was pretty good, and was prefixed by a very enjoyable IMAX film showing many of the beautiful scenes around Detroit. It was really nice to finally see Detroit shown in such a beautiful light.

found things moved from livejournal travel

ATI HDTV Component Adapter

January 11, 2005

Has anyone here ever tried one of these, the ATI HDTV Component Video Adapter, with their Mac. See, this device can adapt a DVI-I output to be component video out, but supposedly only with certain ATI cards.

Well, with the advent of the Mac mini, and relatively cheap bluetooth mice / keyboard bundles, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this…

computers found things moved from livejournal

Griffin SmartDeck

January 11, 2005

[Crossposted to and .]

I hadn’t seen this mentioned yet, but it appears to be really slick. Griffin has released a tape adapter that also handles volume level adjustment and bunches of other things. It seems that it detects what your tape player is doing (FF/RW/Play/Whatever) and tells your iPod to do the same.

This just might be *the* cassette adapter to buy, and at $24.99 it’s marginally more than decent-quality cassette adapters originally meant for CD players.

More info available here: http://www.griffintechnology.com/images/products/prod_image_deck.jpg

acquired things found things moved from livejournal

Kernel Core Dumps

January 10, 2005

I hope someone here can help me out with this…

I’ve been reading through Apple TN2118: Kernel Core Dumps and it seems pretty straight forward. There is one thing I’m not quite getting, though. I can’t seem to find a way to make a machine panic and then dump core to the local disk. It only seems possible to dump to a remote machine running ‘macosxkdump’, not the local disk.

And, well, since I’ve only got one Mac at home, and macosxkdump hasn’t yet been ported to any other OSS platforms (an OpenBSD port would be stellar right about now), I’m kinda sunk.

Has anyone else done this, or come up with a way to get dumps to go to a local disk?

UPDATE: It appears that kdumpd from the network_cmds part of OpenDarwin is all that one needs to handle this. I’ve found postings online which say it’s trivial to port, but I don’t have the skill to do it. :( Would anyone else be up to this task?

computers moved from livejournal

SSL Accelerators

January 9, 2005

Has anyone who reads my friends list ever worked with any sort of SSL (or other type) of cryptography accelerator? I’ve been thinking about setting up one to accelerate SSL in my webserver. It seems to be possible to obtain a few fairly cheap via eBay when one uses some inventive searching.

Have you found them to be useful? Did it really speed things up? I’m hoping to use this under FreeBSD…

computers moved from livejournal

I, for one, welcome our new white trash overlords…

December 22, 2004

Click for bigger!

Heh. Today UPS delivered, straight from Amazon, the world’s trashiest piece of cooking gear. It surpasses any Ronco product, and even the mighty Pasta Pot. Yes, it is a turkey fryer…

That said, it (fortunately) will not be used for it’s intended purpose. See, it was US$20, delivered, for a 30qt pot on a nice powerful gas burner. This is just about exactly what I need to make beer, as doing it in a smaller pot on the stove is kinda half-assed. See, if you don’t boil the full volume of what gets made into beer (the wort) the beer can have a bit darker color… Going this route should just make things a bit nicer, and it should allow me to get it all up to a boil in a bit less time. I’ll just have to work outside. Ah well. :)

acquired things beer moved from livejournal

Biscotti & Coffee

December 19, 2004

[Cross posted to and .]

Whole Pieces · Side View

Well, today I did both some baking and some coffee roasting. See, with family Christmas celebrations coming up, I needed to get started on the baking of things I’ll be contributing to the food collective. The first part of my contribution is the previously pictured biscotti, and the second is a home-roasted 50/50 blend of Organic Mexican and Organic Sumatran coffee purchased from The Runcible Spoon in Bloomington, Indiana..

I figure that people would like to see photos of these items, but in hopes of not jamming someone’s friend’s page, beyond the image at the top of the page I’ve linked everything else below, including the recipe for the biscotti.

Enjoy!

Links:
· Chocolate, Toasted Hazelnut & Almond Biscotti Recipe
· Whole Biscotti Logs (Old Picture)
· Top View of Finished Biscotti
· Side View of Finished Biscotti
· Green & Roasted Coffee Beans
· Bagged Coffee from the Runcible Spoon

food moved from livejournal