nuxx.net

Mammoth Cave National Park

November 8, 2004

Click for more…

Well, I sure was the cheap tourist today. I managed to visit three National Park Service sites, even though one of them was closed. Whoops!

So… What did happen today. (A word of warning about the photos… Something is odd with the automatic exposure on my camera. I think that it was set to ‘center spot weighted’ from when I was doing some eBay photos, so the exposure is quite a bit…. Off… In some of the shots. I’m sorta frustrated at that. At least it can be cleaned up if need be.)

Well, first I woke up at right about 8am, got dressed, then headed southbound on I-65 towards Mammoth Cave National Park. I stopped at Burger King for some breakfast (two egg/cheese crossants, hash browns, and a coffee) as it’s the only really veggie-friendly breakfast-serving fast food place that I know of. The trip down there didn’t really take too long, and while heading southbound I somehow hit a timezone border. WTF? I was headed practically straight south… Regardless, that all put me at the park at about 9:40am CST, which was just in time for the 9:45am Frozen Niagara tour. It turns out that this particular tour is the longest one offered on weekdays during the winter season. I wouldn’t have minded something longer, but with that being the only option, I took it.

Continue reading: Clicky if you really want to read this…

Help!

October 31, 2004

To all the electronics geeks, I need help finding something. I’m looking for a 1U enclosure for a project I want to work on, and I’d like it to be plastic. I’ve seen them around online, but I can’t find a place to buy them.

Do you know where I could get one?

I’ve got a piece of gear I want to mount in an enclosure, and a plastic box would work great… And being rack-mountable would be even better. :)

So, again, what am I looking for? A 1U rack mount plastic enclosure, similar to the one seen here. (No, it doesn’t need any knobs or switches or whatever, I’ll take care of mounting those.)

Thanks!

electronics making things moved from livejournal

Eclipse!

October 27, 2004

So, as most people know, tonight was the lunar eclipse which was visible all across North America (at the very least). So, what did I do? I took pictures of it, or at least tried to.

That image up above is a thumbnail from one of the images, slightly blurred to clean it up, just after the eclipse had fully taken effect. So, there you go: eclipse images.

These look a lot better once played with in Photoshop, mostly because I used some digital zoom, but this can be corrected for. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll end up with a nice Coolpix 4800 which should help alleviate this the next time.

moved from livejournal outdoors

:)

October 18, 2004

Ahh, I figured out the problem.

It seems that in my haste to get vpopmail reinstalled this morning, I gave it an argument of -DSPAM_THRESHOLD=5. Normally I wouldn’t have used that argument, but it seems that the updated FreeBSD port requires it. That, or I don’t remember using it last time… Anyway, that particular vpopmail flag made it DELETE all spam with a score of greater than 5. Sure, most stuff got through, but some was getting deleted. Oops! Since I’ve discovered this flag’s true use (note that this flag is NOT documented in the vpopmail docs) I’ve since recompiled with it set to 30. (And yes, that can only be set per-server, at compile time.) I figure that spam which received a score greater than 30 is hopelessly bad, and should not be delt with.

So, that’s that. Now it’s time to go home and have some dinner. I think tonight’s tasty treat will be veggie nuggets with a spicy salsa to dip them in.

computers food moved from livejournal

…

October 18, 2004

Hmm. So today I installed SpamAssassin 3.0. Things went good, except in the middle of everything an errant find command b0rked my vpopmail install. (Who would have thought that find . -delete -name “bayes*” would delete everything in and beneth the current directory, while find . -name “bayes*” -delete would only recursively delete all files matching ‘bayes*’.)

Anyway, vpopmail is reinstalled, SpamAssassin is doing it’s thing, etc. Except for one problem. I don’t get any spam. At all. I get messages that are flagged as not being spam, but I never ever get any flagged as spam. I’m really not sure what’s going on… SpamAssassin isn’t capable of deleting messages, and I’ve got nothing in place to ensure that the messages go away. And messages that are flagged as not being spam come through. So, I’m not sure what’s up.

One thought is that spam counts happen to be way down today (this is a distinct possibility) and that all the spam I am getting is the silly no body / no subject / no date mail, which the MTA is doing away with.

I guess the only thing to do is go home, reset the junkmail counters in Mail.app, and see if they increase over night. If I don’t get *any* spam, I’ll have to look further. Every message that I’ve expected to receive has gotten through… I just don’t have any test spam.

[UPDATE]

I’d forgotten I left this window open… In the mean time, I sent something that was apt to be flagged as spam, but it was legit. Now to figure out what’s going on…

computers moved from livejournal

!!!

October 14, 2004

Okay, now this is one of the most useful things I’ve installed in a long time. Google has introduced Google Desktop Search, and boy does it work well. It’s installed and picking through my email and my machine, and the searching is just great. Outlook search is notoriously faulty, taking a long time to pick through mail, being keyboard (and not context) based, etc.

Well, this tool sits there, indexes your whole machine, and offers searches on files, contents of files, email, chats, everything. It’s *exactly* what I’ve been wanting for quite some time. You know how it’s always been easier to search the internet than your local machine… Well, now searching your local machine is just as easy. This makes me really, really happy.

computers moved from livejournal

Mmm… Toxic!

September 29, 2004

Last night and I went wandering a rather interesting local park. This is Walden Ponds in Shelby Township, MI, which is located on part of the old G & H Landfill, which was a Superfund site. The restoration work is now done, and the wetlands have been turned into a Heron Rookery. There’s also an interesting trail which leads out the back of the park and eventually to Yates Cider Mill at 23 Mile and Dequinder. Oh, and you can’t forget the rather forboding water treatment plant which sits off to the side of the park, quietly cleaning up the filth.

Of course, we can’t forget an obligatory satellite photo of the site, complements of ‘s wonderful mapper.ofdoom. Set the format to Metro and the zoom to 0.5m/p for a good view of the site. This starts centered on the pond in front of the plant.

mapping moved from livejournal outdoors

Flattening Negatives?

September 23, 2004

Help! Could anyone who reads this who is familiar with photography stuff offer a suggestion? I’ve got some negatives I’m scanning, but despite being stored flat in sleeves for eight years or so, they seem to have a bit of a curl to them. Scanning them is producing a bit of distortion at the end of each negative, as can be seen here.

Does anyone know a good way to go about flattening negatives? I don’t have a tractor drive negative scanner I can feed them into, and the negatives slide into the carrier, not clip in. As such, it’s hard to fully keep them from curling. :(

acquired things moved from livejournal

Digital Cameras

September 20, 2004

So I’ve been poking around online, attempting to decide which digital camera would be best to upgrade to. I’m personally a big fan of Nikon digital cameras, and I want something smaller than my current Kodak DC4800. It’s a great camera that has served me well, but I think it’s time for something new.

Thus far I’m considering either the Coolpix 4800 or Coolpix 5200. One is 4mp and the other is 5mp, but the 4mp camera has better optics and a much larger CCD. Unfortunately, the 4mp camera is also quite a bit larger and a bit heavier, but it’s still only 9oz (sans battery).

There’s some nice reviews of both of these cameras over at Steve’s Digicams: Coolpix 4800 – Coolpix 5200

Currently I’m leaning towards the 4800, with a 512MB Ultra II SD card, spare battery, and carrying case. This is all likely to run around $500 total. Sure, there resolution isn’t that improved over my current camera, but hopefully the optics will be a bit better.

That said, is there anyone who would be interested in buying my camera? I’ve got the camera, bag, two batteries, wall charger, power cable, USB cable, TV cable, two CF cards (64MB and 8MB), USB CompactFlash (CF) adapter, a lens cleaner, and a few other bits for it. I’m thinking $150… So, anyone interested?

And before you ask, yes, this is the camera I’ve used to take pictures for the last while. Some of the excellent sample images are here, here, here, here, here, and here.

So, yeah. If anyone’s interested, let me know. It’s a very fair price, and the camera works great. I just want to part with it so that I can afford another one. I’d also appreciate any insight people have into either of those cameras, or preferences for other ones or whatnot. The reason I’m hesitant to get the Coolpix 4800 is it’s physical size. It might not quite be pocket sized… But the smaller CCD in the 5200 is apt to produce noisier images… There’s a sample full resolution 4800 image here and one from the 5200 here.

Price isn’t really too much of a consideration, as the 5200 is only about $30 more than the 4800.

(Odd that I’d go from a DC4800 to another 4800 model. heh.)

acquired things moved from livejournal

Roasted Corn on the Cob

September 13, 2004

[Crossposted to .]

So tonight I wanted something really tasty to eat… On the way home I swung by one of the local markets and picked up four ears of corn on the cob with the intention of roasting them. And, that’s what I did.

Well, not the only thing. ;)

As I have a habit of doing, I also took a number of pictures of the process, along with writing up a recipe entry for it. I guess I shouldn’t quite call it a recipe, as it’s more an outline of a process, but it accomplishes the task: showing people how to cook corn in one of the best ways possible.

It also gave me a chance to finally use my grill. As I haven’t been eating meat for almost a year now, I haven’t been grilling much. I tend to cook almost everything inside…

Anyway, here’s some of the other photo highlights (Click << and >> to move through the photos, or just go up higher in the gallery to see the thumbnails.):

· First Grill Marks
· Most of the Grill
· Done!
· Perfectly Colored, Ready to Eat!

So, enjoy the photos and this recipe, along with any of the other ones that I’ve got listed.

food moved from livejournal