Turns out I wasn’t quite done shopping for the trip. I started trying to fit all the electronics into the camera bag, and discovered that the camera bag did not formerly belong to Mary Poppins and actually could not hold an infinite amount of stuff… While shopping for shoes, I came across a Ritz camera, and decided to poke my head in and look at their bags. I talked to the sales person, and she found a rather nice bag that was larger than the existing bag I was using. I asked if I could load it up before purchasing to make sure it held everything I needed it to. She agreed, and as we were walking to the counter I glanced over and spied a funny looking bag on the floor. My geek eyes were immediately drawn to the top of the bag, that resembled a series of solar panels. I was intrigued, and grabbed the bag as we walked by. The clerk excused herself to assist another customer and left me holding the bags. (Ok, I had to say that) I began putting things into the bag she had chosen, all the while staring at the magical bag I had found. I noticed the writing on the side that stated “Eclipse Solar Gear”. Hmm… “No way” I thought… At that the sales person returned. “Ok, tell me… Is this really actually a solar panel?”

“Sure is! It’s really cool!”
“…and it actually works…”, I said fumbling for my 12V charger, assuming the bag was 12V…
“Yeah, believe it or not, we charged one of our iPods on it the other day”
“Ok… this I have to see”
“You will need…”
I dangle my 12V batter charger in front of her interrupting her.
“… exactly! come on!”, and she excitedly headed for the front door of the store.
By the time we reached the parking lot,she had already attached my charger,and battery to the bag.
“Take a look!” and she pointed out the status indicator lights on my charger.
“Holy cats!!! Thats Awesome!!!!!”
I stood there playing with the panel watching how much needed to see light to get a charge going…
We then returned inside the store, where… after loading in all of my equipment, and noticing there was plenty of room for everything else I needed to put in it, I bought it.

Oh, did I mention it was on sale… $50! HA! MSRP $139.95

As you may or may not know I will be travelling with Boundin Main to germany In just under two weeks. My job on the trip will be to video performances, and other silly moments, as well as to take stills of the trip. To do this I had acquired a video camera and was all ready to go. Last Friday I tried to use the camera and found it no longer worked. The person who gave it to me had warned me this ocassionally occurred and gave me a solution that worked for them. Sadly it didn’t work for me. Being a geek I disnantled the camera and hoped to find the problem. Well I found the effect but not the cause. Strangly when I reassembled it the camera began working fine again.
This is an important trip and I do not want to be sitting in Germany with a broken camera. So I am now the proud owner of a new canon hv30 and a few accessories for it. Wow what I’ve seen so far is great!

This is a test post sent from my iPod via the wordpress app for iPod/iPhone

Ok, so it turns out there was no permanent physical damage to the keyboard. On closer inspection the dead bug had just shorted out a few circuit traces. I took a pencil eraser to the traces, and cleaned them up. I then re-assembled the keyboard, and it is as good as new.

Geek

Today I had to replace a dead keyboard at work. Now this particular brand of keyboard has always been rock solid, and i have never had any trouble with them. I was curious, so I took the keyboard apart to see if the person had spilled something in the keyboard causing it to die. I turns out, I had a literal computer bug… (check the etymology, not to be confused with entomology) Apparently some little insect decided the keyboard was a nice place to live, and had burrowed into the contact trace that connects the membrane that makes up the key switches, to the controller board. Thus killing the keyboard.
I’m slightly impressed to tell the truth…

Ok, this is probably going to sound bizzare, but I swear when I’m feeling under the weather, or in a weird mental state, technology just goes wonky around me. Yesterday the email sync server at work, that is responsible for syncing my email to my phone, decided to start forwarding my work email to Chris Maka’s phone… It did it again today… I talked to the guys at work, and they couldn’t find anything wrong. Then later this morning, I got a phone call from Christopher in I.T. (what’s with the Chris names…) informing me that my work voice mail is forwarding to him. Now, Friday I had voice mail on my phone, so I know it was working correctly then, but what the heck…

I just happened to glance at my keyboard on my laptop, and noticed that some of the most heavily used keys are starting to have some of the lettering wear off. The funniest one is the right shift key. the final t is completely gone, as is the curl on the top of the “f”, leaving me with a “Shit” key…

ugh.. my iPod is still dead… I’ve replaced the battery, and that had nothing to do with its problems. While I had the iPod open i did notice a very disturbing dent on the top cover of the hard drive. The dent comes form the inside out, YIKES! I purchased an adapter (two actually) to allow me to install the iPod drive into a regular computer, and run diagnostics on it. The 2 computers I tried couldn’t even see the drive. I then tried the drive installed in a USB enclosure designed for this style of drive, and still the drive remains invisible to the system. It died good… no chance of recovering anything on it. So, whatever I don’t have backed up.. is gone for good.
For those who are curious, I have attached a photo of the drive, with the dent circled in red.

Ok, I am totally out of touch with current gamer culture I guess. I just noticed the following in the marketing blurb for a high end graphics card.
“…watch your characters sweat with Shader Model 4.0.”

I can honestly say, I have never in my life thought that sweating looked cool. I can honestly say that I have no desire whatsoever to watch a human sweat, let alone a computer generated character.

Ok, this just happened to me… Holy recursive loop batman…

I dial a support number, the auto attendant answers, “Thank you for calling ____ our hours of operation are ___, please dial your party’s extension, or wait on the line for support”
I wait
The phone rings…
The phone rings…
The auto attendant picks up “Extension ….0…. is invalid, please press 0 to speak to an operator.”
ok… I’ll bite… I press 0
The phone rings…
The phone rings…
The auto attendant picks up “Extension ….0…. is invalid, please press 0 to speak to an operator.”

I’m not falling for that one again…

Today, I booted up the laptop, logged in, and it started playing the login music, and returned to the login screen. I tried again, thinking perhaps I had made a weird typo or something… Same result. I then remembered that yesterday a bunch of things were updated. One of the updates must have broken the nvidia drivers. So, I had to download the newest ones and recompile them. Once I did that, and installed them, all was well again.

Wednesday our student worker and I were talking, and we got to wondering if there was anything for MythTV (Her husband setup a myth box for them) to transfer video to the iPod. After I got home, I looked into it, and found the Myth2iPod project. I did some work on getting it installed on my MythTV box, and set it to encode some of my video over night. When I got to work today I tried adding the video to the iPod and it failed. I spent most of tonight looking into this conundrum, and finally came across mention that using the H.264 codec on linux will result in a video that is playable on the ipod, but that will not be able to be copied to the iPod via iTunes…
I switched the default setting in ‘/etc/nuvexportrc’ to mpeg4, and tried encoding another video.
Success!

Now, when I record a program using MythTV it will automatically transcode it into the mpeg4 format, and create a video podcast entry for that program. iTunes should then see the change, download the video, and i can add it to my iPod to watch at will. This certainly makes it easier to keep up on my shows!

I love the new copier at work, not only does it make copies, it makes books, scans, acts as a printer, AND it is a nice tattle tale on late night campus staff.

Tonight, at 11:15 the copier emailed me to tell me it was out of paper. Strange… The library closed at 10:00pm. It then a minute later emailed me to let me know it no longer was out of paper. ??? uh… interesting… 10 minutes later, it was out of paper again… then it once again had paper… uhhh… stranger… a few minutes later, it emailed me to tell me it had a paper jam… At that point I called the campus cadets and asked them to look into who is over there… “I’ll take a walk over there a bit later and take a look”, “Ok.. I replied” 20 minutes later the copier emailed me to tell me someone had removed the duplexer… I freaked, and called the cadet again. “Look, something is going on up there! someone just removed parts form the copier that should not be removed!!” “I’ll head over now!” “Thank you” “Wait.. how do you know this is going on?” “The copier emailed me for help…” “uhh… ok…”

Hopefully the cadet found out who was wrecking our brand new copier… I will be emailing the logs to both the chief, and to the head of maintenance.

Today while on the road, I saw a car in the ditch. I pulled out the cell phone and dialed 911 to report it. The phone rang a few times and and then the voice on the other end said “Hello, Vac – N – Clean”.
I said, “What? What was that?”
“This is Vac-N-Clean”, the voice repeated.
I, shocked, responded “uhhh…. Thats not right, I dialed 911″
The voice on the other end responded: “WHAT!! WOW!! Uhhh good luck in your emergency”, and then hung up.

I dialed 911 again, the phone rang, and rang, and rang, an rang, then the answering machine picked up, “Thank you for calling Vac-N-Clean…”.
I hung up.

I then called 611, and got in touch with a technician. I’ve never seen a support call escalated so quickly, within 10 minutes I was at the highest tier of support, and they were all sounding a little panicked.

Well, I finally got around to getting the NVidia provided, open GL drivers compiled for my new laptop. I hadn’t seen any of the fancy windowing tricks available yet. I’m slightly disturbed by the “Jello” effect windows have when I move them. Although it is kinda funny to watch things bounce and distort as i move them around. I also installed Google Earth today which was actually the instigator for needing the fancy graphics drivers. Sadly now, I can’t remember why I installed google earth in the 1st place, but it is very cool that they have a version for linux.

Today, I got my Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus flatbed scanner working under Ubuntu. It’s funny, I honestly think it works better under linux than it ever did on windows.

As I feared, it was not a simple task, but also not as daunting as the kernel recompile to get wifi working. I used the following steps.

Step 1: Install XSane, and the sane tools and the extra backends. This was simple using the package manager.
Step 2: Download the firmware for this scanner from: http://www.meier-geinitz.de/sane/gt68xx-backend/firmware/sbfw.usb
Step 3: Open a terminal window, and su to root or use sudo. Copy the firmware to: /usr/share/sane/gt68xx
Step 4: Open the file /etc/sane.d/gt68xx.conf in a text editor, I used gedit
Step 5: Find the line “# Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus:” and uncomment the override statement, and add a line for the firmware ‘firmware “sbfw.usb”‘ The resulting section of the file should look like I have below.

##############################################################################
# Autodetect Mustek BearPaw 1200 CU, 2400 CU, Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus,
# Artec Ultima 2000, and several other GT-6801-based scanners
usb 0x05d8 0x4002

# Mustek BearPaw 1200 CU doesn't need any manual override

# Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus:
override "mustek-scanexpress-1200-ub-plus"
firmware "sbfw.usb"


Step 6: From the command line type “scanimage -L” it should report back that you have a “Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus flatbed scanner”, if so you should now be able to scan.


john@Medion-Laptop:~$ scanimage -L
device `gt68xx:libusb:001:010' is a Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus flatbed scanner


Much of this information was taken from:
http://www.usalug.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=95686&sid=e55b9bc74af37869d9194691a687af00

As requested, here is a little more detail on the laptop:
First off, for anyone confused by the last post, the laptop works beautifully out of the box running windows. I personally hate windows Vista, and wanted to try a different operating system. I chose Ubuntu Linux. That had some problems working with its basic install, problems I believe I have fully solved.

The wireless card is fully functional (as far as i can tell, I’m using it right now to post this). To get it to work I needed to use the latest kernel and make sure the new drivers for the rtl8187 wireless driver were installed. This is the driver for the wireless network adapter on this system. Medion used a USB ethernet adapter in the laptop design, rather than the standard pci type cards. This is why the card does not show in lspci.

For more detailed instructions on compiling the new kernel follow the instructions here:
http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_ubuntu

One thing they left out in those directions, that I am not sure is really all that important with this laptop, was to copy the firmware files to to new directory for this kernel. You name may vary, depending on how you compiled the kernel, mine is 2.6.23-custom As root:

mkdir /lib/firmware/2.6.23-custom
cp -R /lib/firmware/2.6.22-14-generic/* /lib/firmware/2.6.23-custom/


You must use at least kernel 2.6.23 to get the correct drivers. And you must make sure to go in and select the driver to get it to compile. Once the new kernel is complied and installed, download the new version of ALSA (1.0.15) and compile and install it.

After rebooting you should have wireless, and sound. So far I have not noticed anything else that doesn’t work that I can’t live with. Graphics performance is pretty slow,but it is using generic graphics drivers, I suppose I could download the nvidia drivers and install them if I was really interested.

So tonight I arrived home from work, after making a slight detour to the hardware store to pick up some things to work on a Halloween prop.  After I started work on the prop, the phone rang… or did it… odd, the phone in the kitchen didn’t ring… the phone in the livingroom didn’t ring…  but I did hear one phone ringing…  After careful examination, I discovered the phones on the newer runs were all dead.  Only the phones on the runs 20+ years old worked.  I was afraid that the doorbell phone system had died and in its death killed the new runs…  Palley had the solution though, “Hey Jerry mowed today, do you suppose he hit a wire?”  OF COURSE!!!  The new runs come in via a different newer cable running in an area that he would have had to trim, while the old lines come in on the porch.  I ran out, and sure enough in the newly trimmed long grass along the side of the house lay the phone cable, ripped from its staples and stripped in a few spots.  So, I grabbed my telecoms tool box, and the box of cat5. (it’s really nice having the tools for different jobs all sorted into separate tool boxes)  Less than an hour later, I had ran a whole new line for both the main number and my old modem number back tot he punch down block in the house and phone service was restored.    The new wire is stapled up much better than the old line (something I had been meaning to fix for years) and the phone quality is crystal clear.

I learned this morning that Mr. Wizard has passed away. I am saddened by this news. I always LOVED his show, and credit him with a lot of my fascination with technology, and science. What an amazing man he was. With the two separate shows he managed to inspire two generations. He will be missed.  DVDs of both shows are available at: http://www.mrwizardstudios.com/
My favorite experiments on “Mr Wizard’s World” had to be:

• The vacuum experiment. This is the one where he sent the kid up a tall building to suck the grape juice up the straw to demonstrate that lungs couldn’t produce enough vacuum to do it. And then he showed that a vacuum pump could also not do it.
• I also loved any of the surface tension experiments. Lycopodium powder was just so cool…

Other memorable experiments:

• The demonstration of the light pen on a computer.
• The amount of water actually present in snow.
• Cleaning silver using aluminum and salt. (I’m pretty sure thats where I learned that trick)
• The mousetrap nuclear fission demonstration
• How pulleys work
• How sprinklers work

Add your favorite experiments to the comments!

I was tipped off to the latest woot-off by Gabi.  I hit it a few times, and saw nothing I was interested in really, then they posted a roomba…

I couldn’t resist anymore…

Now, I just need to clean up my room some and i can let the roomba vaccum for it.  I should prolly pick up the rest of the house to for that matter.

I also discovered theres a bluetooth module available for it that woudl allow me to interface it with the phone or computer to control it.  I could actually interface it right into Mr. House so that the Home Automation controller actually has some say on the roomba’s operation too.  hmmm…

I worry that if i get to crazy with it, it could take over the world…