You know it’s a good weekend when two days seem like five. We got in a movie, some swimming, game time, a bike ride, a bluegrass concert, and juggling class. That’s a pretty full weekend!
August 2009
I’m on a Boat
My friend Jamie sent a link today to a music video made by officers of the USS John Paul Jones (DDG-53). It’s set to the parody rap song I’m on a Boat by The Lonely Island (YouTube). The John Paul Jones version is a pretty good copy, considering the guys were limited in their props.
This video and another version of I’m on a Boat made by different sailors goes to show you what pulling six months worth of 12-hour shifts can do to one’s sanity. It’s a long way back from the Persian Gulf to California and sailors get a little slap happy. This is the kind of thing I would’ve put together on the end of a deployment if I’d had a MacBook back then.
Check out this version of Pump It by the VAW-116 Sunkings and the British Royal Navy doing Bohemian Rhapsody. Good times.
Warning: some videos contain explicit language.
Update 7 Oct 2009: The John Paul Jones video is also available here.
Roomba Doom-ba
Our Roomba has been doing what I call a “wiggle walk” lately, where it waddles about a foot in one direction then turns around and waddles in the other direction. I contacted iRobot’s support and provided a video clip of our Roomba’s walk. The diagnosis from iRobot was a problem with the wheel sensor. They suggested giving it a thorough cleaning to make sure the internal sensor wasn’t being blocked by dust.
I “popped the hood” today and vacuumed our vacuum out. That’s when I noticed the root of the problem: the left wheel sensor switch didn’t look like the right. The switch was broken, the little arm that goes with the switch was missing. iRobot’s support department told me iRobot can’t send a replacement switch and that the only thing that can be done is to replace the Roomba.
I just bought a new battery for the Roomba and don’t want to junk it just for a little switch. I refuse to believe I have to put Roomba down like a horse with a broken leg. I figure one can’t own a robot without knowing how to fix it, so I’m thinking about how to either fix the switch or work around it. Since Roomba is used mostly on the first floor and has almost no chance of falling, I think I may safely bypass the switch. We’ll see!
Update 10 Feb 2010: I did wind up hardwiring the switch, which breathed more life into my robot friend at the risk of having it run off a cliff someday. Fortunately I only use Roomba on the ground floor. Success!
Wrestling MythTV into submission
As the All Your Base video meme said, “main screen turn on!”
I got my MythTV frontend working with my HDTV again after a ridiculously tough set of issues to resolve. First, the PC in question is my old Thinkpad laptop and is barely functional to begin with. If you touch it ever so lightly, for instance, the display and keyboard will cease to function. I had to carefully position it through trial and error before I got it to keep its video alive.
Once that was done I was happy to see mplayer doing something on my big screen, only it wasn’t showing any video. GNOME would dutifully draw a border around where my video was supposed to be showing but all there was was an empty box. Instead, the ATI Radeon video driver was showing my video on the laptop screen – the booby-trapped one, remember? No good. No good at all.
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Free Small Coffee!
On my way to work this morning I saw a guy on a street corner waving a sign that said “Free Small Coffee!” I have to admit that my first thought was “who is this Small Coffee guy and why is he locked up?”
Too much politics on the brain.
More public service
I got a little more public service in during the last few days. I decided to help my neighbors on Edmund Street get the speed limit changed to 25 MPH. This requires 75% of the residents to sign a petition agreeing to the change. I spent parts of Saturday, Sunday, and today walking the street with a clipboard in hand and asking people to sign.
Tonight I got the 30th signature, making the petition valid. Now it’s off to the Transportation Services department of the City of Raleigh to be checked, after which it will be sent to the City Council for approval. The new speed limit signs should appear.within seven days of Council approval. Yay!
Happy Birthday, Linux!
Today is Linux‘s 18th birthday. On August 26, 1991, Linus Torvalds announced Linux to the world:
Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
(h/t Warren Myers)
Cheviot Hills Golf Course virtual edition
I put up the last webpage of the now-defunct Cheviot Hills Golf Course that formerly stood on Capital Boulevard between Gresham Lake Road and Durant Road. I’ve had this floating around for three years and figured I’d finally find a home for it. The webpage mirroring isn’t perfect as it missed some of the Javascript mouse-over graphics, but most of the content and photos are there.
Revisit the long, gone Cheviot Hills here.
Ted Kennedy
One one of our weekend trips early in our marriage, Kelly and I were waiting at the Boston airport for our flight back to Raleigh. I happened to look up from my Boston Globe long enough to see an older gentleman in a suit walking with an assistant up to the gate.
My jaw dropped. It was Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy. Before me was a living legend, one of the most powerful politicians in America. This man had seen so much history in his political life (and had so many triumphs and tragedies in his personal life).
I just stared at him because one does not approach a living legend unless invited. I kept a respectful distance as he finished up his conversation with his assistant and then boarded his U.S. Airways flight to Washington. I know Sen. Kennedy was holding up his flight but I still was kicking myself for not asking for his autograph.
Early this morning, Ted Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77.
MythTV fully in tune with digital TV
A few months ago I bought a used motherboard with the goal of upgrading my MythTV backend. The upgrade went smoothly from a hardware and operating system point of view but Myth was never the same for some reason. Adding to the confusion was that I could tune and watch channels using the command-line tool mplayer but Myth would never properly scan channels.
After a little tinkering (and Googling) yesterday, I decided to try increasing the scanning timeouts using MythTV-setup. Where the previous 3 second timeout was once adequate, I bumped both the tuning and signal timeouts to 10 seconds. By feeding the channels.conf file I created using atscscan, I avoided having Myth tune through all 83 channels. That mitigated the pain of the longer timeouts. Presto! I successfully added the channels back into Myth.
And boy, do they look good. The previous HDTV signals were good, but they were also spotty. Now that the digital antennas have claimed the top spots on the stations’ transmission towers, the digital signals are coming in rock solid.
Myth should save our sanity a bit at home, as the kids can now watch something other than the DVD shows they’ve seen 1,000 times already!