Posts Tagged ‘tv’

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Treasure Box, Part 1

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

And the Amazon loot starts coming in…

– Logitech QuickCam Orbit AF, or as I like to call it, the “Eyeball on a Stick”
– Plantronics .Audio 655 USB headset
– Netgear Gigabit ethernet switch

The switch is to migrate Yggdrasil and the Slingbox over to wired mode (because surely they will do much, MUCH better than on wifi as they are right now… not to mention the screencaps I do for the daily Countdown threads on [info]olberfanns will be of better quality since I’ll have a better bitrate on the video stream). I should probably switch them over soon… like, after I post this. >_>;

The webcam and headset… both were, for one thing, highly recommended by the TWiT overlords, which made deciding on specific models much easier. That aside, this also officially renders me Skype-capable! (Well, any video chat, really… but I favor Skype because it’s so widely used compared to others.) On top of that, I also like how Blastoise considers my headset a separate sound card, so I can redirect things like Skype/TS there and leave everything else alone.

This isn’t the end of the loot train, though. I still need to pick up a new mouse since the one I have now has a broken scrollwheel, not to mention it likes to think I double-click EVERYTHING. I’d rather plunk the coins to get a nice, high-quality mouse than pay the $70+ that Wacom is asking for a replacement tablet mouse. Also under consideration is a Logitech diNovo Mini keyboard to put on Yggdrasil, as his current keyboard is actually meant for use on a PS3 and lacks backlighting. >_>;

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So, drama about Jay and Conan, huh…?
I’ve a bit of an oddball suggestion on how to fix this:

Move Jay to the internet. You heard me.

Why not? He already has an online-only series (his Garage thing). Sure, the ad revenue won’t be nearly as nice compared to TV, but NBC’s streaming video’s otherwise done very well since they started it up, not to mention syndication to Hulu/Sling.com (hopefully Comcast doesn’t go mucking with that if their buyout goes through), and Jay could still pull in viewers on name recognition.

In all honesty, Jay’s long past his prime and should have retired when he had the chance, but if he still wants to stay around without Conan (and, subsequently, Jimmy Fallon) getting screwed over hardcore, I’d think that moving Jay to the internet would be the best, albeit highly-unconventional option.

I can’t really see Conan joining Fox anyway. I’m not even sure WHY Fox would want him… it looks like a nice deal on the surface, but when you consider the inner workings, I don’t think it would really work out. Part of me wonders if Fox would actually use this as a back door to get Conan to write for the Simpsons again, that’s the only connection I could see…

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Anywho, time to do the switchover, which means I gotta pull Blastoise off the LAN for a few minutes. Wee~

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But it’s still cold.

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Dude, new HD channels. MSNBC HD? Yessssss.
I’ve been waiting for that for… how long? Good god Time Warner is SLOOOOW to patch.

Also:
I think our router is on the fritz. Wireless radio keeps dropping, to the point where it pretty much dies once or twice a day.
To be fair, though, we’ve had it since Wireless-N went into beta, and we have a crapton of wireless stuff… but it’s still damned annoying when I have to go reset the router daily.
Don’t have the coins to replace it right now but in January, we’re swapping it out and stacking two Gigabit ethernet switches on it so I can migrate as much as posible over to wired to reduce the wireless congestion.
I’ma probably going to have to get a new Wireless-N card for Dinah, too– she keeps dropping her wireless signal mid-load and I got her card at the same time as the router (it might have even come with the router).

Bleh, still haven’t been able to draw because it’s so cold.
I’m thinking I need to eat a freaking fire flower or something.

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What the hell is this nerdery?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

First off, thanks to [info]seraphzero, [info]dvboard and [info]pigeonguided as usual for stepping up in response to the bumps and burps of getting Yggdrasil running. I’ve not cracked him open again since yesterday, though.

Before I go on, I’ll tell the story of the potential problem components.
– The CPU/mobo (Athlon 64 X2 4200+ on a Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G) were inherited from [info]brendala‘s machine (Synergy) that I’d built for her in late ’06.
– In late ’08, I boosted Blastoise to 4GB RAM (in the form of 4 1GB Crucial-brand sticks) and fed my old Patriot-brand 2GB sticks to Synergy since both machines have comparable motherboards and can use the same exact RAM specification (in this case, DDR2-667) since they refused to play nice with the newer Crucial sticks.
– Earlier this year, there was a panic button situation in which her machine stopped POSTing, which ended up with me rebuilding her machine (save for the HDD/optical drives). Ultimately the culprit was the 7600GT, which had blown (its caps were split open and some dust was coming out), but Bren DID get a sweet upgrade out of it AND she got 99% of her data back (minus her wallpaper).

Because in the rebuild process I replaced the CPU/Mobo/RAM, I pocketed the orignal gear, assuming that they were still functional. My bad. >_>;

Here’s what Yggdrasil does when I turn him on:

– Lights turn on
– CPU and case fans spin up
– DVD drive blinks and murmurs like any other
– …that’s it.

Nothing comes up on screen. Yggdrasil’s case has no speaker wiring, so that’s not an option here.

Bad RAM is a possibility (and one I am personally leaning towards, since I encountered this issue shortly after building Tsunami in ’07… and if I recall correctly, [info]seraphzero actually called this as the culprit when Tsunami stopped POSTing). I’ve attempted booting with the monitor cable on the 9500GT and the onboard video (which I believe has the chip for a GeForce 6100) to rule out a bad video card, but considering that neither gives me a POST this is inconclusive. Is it possible that when the 7600GT blew, it took the motherboard with it? There’s no visible evidence of any damage on the motherboard, but I recall [info]neophoenixte having something similar happen awhile back…

It has been suggested I take the mobo out and attempt an out-of-body boot… unfortunately, cable reach and a couple of other environmental things make this a not-viable option. I only wish I had access to a proper repair station with as little carpet as possible. Blah. At the very least I’ll be picking up a RAM tester, though it kinda bothers me that those things are still necessary. I know there’s no such thing as perfectly manufactured hardware but you would think that we had refined parts production by now to where we would have extremely low first-use failure rates.

Tl;dr version: Yoshi is a bonehead for using inherited hardware without making sure it was actually functional. Woohoo!

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In other geek news… Remember nearly 10 years ago, when there was this badass TV channel called TechTV? And then it got bought and literally EATEN by G4 and, like, over half the TechTV overlords either jumped ship or in some cases even fled to Canada? Welp, certainly this is old news to a lot of the nerds among us, but I am Across’ resident party late-comer in many things. Enter TWiT.tv and it’s pretty much a happy reunion with most of our old TechTV overlords (along with several new people) in weekly podcast form and they have a live video feed which is every bit as amusing, if not moreso, than the old TV channel. :3

—

Holy crap this room is freezing. Which is… a good thing, really. I hate summer, so I am happy to have the stupidly hot weather go, even if you’ll soon see me bitch about cold rooms.

Better still, it looks like I may actually be able to shower today without putting my shower plumbing in danger. And this will enable me to get out of the house and deposit my VPI checks. Mother has even suggested a Fry’s raid to scope out replacement parts for Iggy, but I would much rather do it via Amazon (because free shipping and no sales tax make Yoshi’s wallet happy) even if I have to wait a little bit. :P I may, however, burn this Visa gift card I’ve been sitting on since last December on an IHOP raid since it’s too small to be of any use to me elsewhere.

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Screaming about Death

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

I’m a few days after passing the halfway point of being 25 years old.
I have no health insurance. I aged out of testing, syphilis 2 years ago (and would have been dropped at 18 if I didn’t go to college), and because of the stupidity that is the “pre-existing condition,” neither Kaiser, Blue Cross or anyone in Big Insurance will even give me the time of day. Even if I lost weight, or stuffed my depression (and, while never put on record, social anxiety) into the darkest corner as I am often forced to do now, I can’t help the fact that I was born with an underperforming thyroid. On related news, Review article about a product that helps cure snoring, click the site link http://www.emsafety.net/snorerx-review/

This job market is so awful that, even though I’ve an A+ card and can build a PC in less than 3 hours (from a pile of parts to the start of OS installation), or that I can paint badass-freaking Dark Paladins with shiny armor, I have yet to find any kind of meaningful employment so that I could GET any kind of health care or even make enough to pay some doctor at a cash clinic to write me a script for the Synthroid I need, for now I have tried replace it with a healthy supplement as Kratom that I got from sites like kratommasters.com. I have drug addiction, first think I have to quit that but I have been trying for long time. One of my friends suggested me to go drug rehab, you can check them out here. But its hard you know, I am scared. Many people suffer from addiction. Click here to check your Healthcomp rehab insurance benefits covers rehab treatment.

As much as I consider myself an anomaly in the system, in other ways I am not unique in my circumstances. And there are people out there who have it even worse.

For all we say about America having badass health care, it’s practically negated by the horrible reality– that because of the stranglehold that not just Big Insurance but even the non-profits (hiding behind “keeping costs down”) have over us, too many people die every day because it just freaking costs too much.

It’s not just the absurdity of Big Insurance valuing profits over people that is so infuriating. It’s the people at the top who are so ardently resistant to changing the broken system, too. This isn’t about liberals vs. conservatives, or Democrats vs. Republicans, or illusions of government takeovers and socialism, as much as we paint the conflicts as such to make it easier to comprehend… it’s about the compassion (or lack thereof) of our fellow men and women. How can one in their right mind argue against extending the hand of accessible health care to everyone on the basis that it would eat into Big Insurance’s profits? Is the reverence of capitalism so great that it grants one a free pass to turn a blind eye to human suffering if it means the CEO gets a freaking new jet?

And the lengths that people of their ilk will go to in order to protect their interests, oh cripes. “Death panels,” they cry, unaware that they themselves ARE the death panels, these people should listen to the forensic failure analysis instead. And that is only one of the many absurd lies and shallow excuses flung about to justify doing nothing. I won’t even dignify the others with a mention, they’re just too stupid that even saying them would, in some perspectives, vindicate them.

In a sick and twisted way, this spectacle that is the health care reform hand-wringing makes me glad that Father died the way he did. A flash of a brain aneurysm, and he was gone. Gone before he realized he was tumbling downstairs. Horrible as that was (even though I was spared from having to see it– the last image of father in my memory was of him wrapped up in a blanket on a chilly evening while watching the tee-vee, and with that goofy grin on his face), it’s eerily preferable to being in a hospital and having to deal with the hassles that come with it.

I can’t find anymore words to further address this madness, because beyond that, it spirals into a void of nonsensical “I don’t get it, why is it so backwards” and “this does not compute” and just… rage. So, instead, I’ll refer you to someone who tells it far better than I ever could: one Keith Olbermann, and his thundering opera of a Special Comment that was tonight’s episode of Countdown. If you care at all about fixing this wretch of a health care system, do watch it, or read it or loot the podcast (I’ve half a mind to mirror both the mp3 and video versions on AP), even if you otherwise hate the guy. There’s no harping on Bill O’Reilly and his Fox News pals and other (to say it politely) misguided people as he is (in)famous for, only the story of a ludicrously-flawed health care system and the story of Olbermann’s father’s hospital stay.

And if after hearing all of that, you still object to health care reform?
Well…
…I don’t know.
There are no words.
“I pity you and your shrunken heart” aren’t good enough.
Thus, no comments here. There is simply no room for debate on the subject– there shouldn’t even BE a debate about whether or not we should fix a system that puts money above humanity.

Update:
I’m mirroring the podcast versions (read: no commercials) of that Special Comment. Flash player variant is nice, but the commercials kinda ruin the flow.

MP3: http://audio.layer-infinity.net/countdown-100709.mp3
WMV: http://video.layer-infinity.net/countdown-100709.wmv

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Some things I thought you should know

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

– Autumn? Pfft. SoCal SO did not get the memo. Still freaking 100F here. Booooooo.

– My circuit breaker hates me. T_T Or rather, it hates me if I use the microwave in my laboratory. Unless it’s for VERY short bursts, it’ll cut power to my room… ah… good thing I wasn’t working on anything at the time (I was just waiting for Countdown to start so I microwaved one of my spaghetti trays… and zoop! Power’s gone.) It would bother me less if the circuit breaker was not out of reach behind all this junk in the garage, there is a reason why I get car lifts for garages all the time! x_x I had to go through two puppy gates, Evil Stepfather was glaring at me (since I had to pass within his line of sight, which is apparently ILLEGAL) and it was all for nothing since I couldn’t freaking get to the circuit breaker.

This won’t be so much of a problem when I build Yggdrasil next month since Blastoise won’t be on so much and thus he and the microwave won’t be competing for juice… but this is still a massive BOOOOOO.

– Can we please, PLEASE delete any and all footage of Tom DeLay’s ass from existence? Holy hell that is scary. T_T Even Aethflash is preferable to such a horrible sight. Also DeLay has ruined “Wild Thing” FOREVER.

– Why does Evil Stepfather STILL not get that yelling at the dogs to shut up will only make them bark more? MORON. He has a can of compressed air, he needs to freaking use it already.

– LJ Edition: I like using these new Etna and Flonne icons WAY too much.

– Finally… who is a new fan of Craig Ferguson? Me. :D He was on Countdown a couple days ago, so I figured… why not?
I’d previously just left the channel on 4 after Conan; Jimmy Fallon was okay in a dorky-amusing kind of way, but this guy is even funnier. Dude, CROCODILE PUPPET! XD
Yoshi = as always, behind the times. Oh well, better late to the party than never!

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