Month: March 2006

The Fastest I’ve Ever Voided A Warranty

I finally figured it was about time to upgrade to an 802.11g router now that I’m using the wireless on the iBook more and more, but it was with some hesitation. I wanted a nice, stable wireless router, but the impression I had been getting from some of the forums I visit is that none of the various consumer-level brands and models were really all that reliable. Some people had no problems at all, but many others had stories of lockups and other strange behaviours under load.

There was a recommendation that often came up when people had these complaints, though: try a third-party firmware. I managed to find a compatible Linksys model today (not all revisions will work) and immediately loaded DD-WRT onto it fairly painlessly, and now I just have to use it and see how well it works.

Besides the (hopeful) stability, it adds a few other features I’ll use:

– Static DHCP assignment, so I can use fixed IP addresses (which makes port forwarding a lot easier) without having to configure each system.
– Local DNS resolution for those DHCP assignments, so I can refer to each system by its name without having to set up the local ‘hosts’ table on each system.
– QoS features, so time-sensitive game data doesn’t get buried by other traffic.

Curses!

I have a love/hate relationship with my main living room chair. It’s ugly as sin, but it’s really nice and comfy to sit in for long periods of time.

Unfortunately it’s also a black hole, whisking items dropped between the cracks off into a dimension that can only be reached by dismantling the whole chair. As my DS stylus just discovered…

Cleaner. Slightly.

Well, the first phase of spring cleaning is done, and I can once again see the surfaces of my kitchen table and bedroom desk. Huh, I guess it *is* wood…

Although I did throw out a few bags full of junk in the process, most of this was unfortunately accomplished by simple relocation of items. I’ve long since passed the point of having more ‘stuff’ than ‘room for stuff.’ What I still have to do, and this is always the hardest part, is to go through and actually throw items out.

There’s a large dictionary on my bookshelf that consumes a lot of space that could be taken up by other books that I use more often. Who uses paper dictionaries nowadays anyway, when it’s far easier to just plug ‘m-w.com’ into the address bar, or install some browser extension. But…it was given to me by my parents over 20 years ago, and was one of those first early bits of encouragement. How do you throw that away? But damn, it’s big and heavy…

Maybe I Can Get Half A Shed

I really should have bought a house a couple of years ago.

I could have, but every time I thought about setting things in motion, the sheer magnitude of all of the effort required and risks involved overwhelmed me and sent me scurrying back into a “oh it’s not so bad as it is now” frame of mind. Really though, at my age it’s far past time I started facing those kinds of responsibilities.

Of course, now the question is, do I grab something soon and just accept the increased cost, or try and wait it out if it’s a temporary ‘bubble’? Try and do something creative with terms and interest rates? Consider moving somewhere cheaper? Adjust my lifestyle to accommodate a smaller budget?

Dammit, I’m starting to feel overwhelmed again…

Save Me, Superman!

I bought a scanner a while back to help with my mess of papers and documents, and then it collected dust in a corner for a while. One of the other reasons I got it though, was so that I could scan some of my comic collection, for convenience and long-term archival. Unfortunately it’s probably one of those ideas that was better in theory than in practice.

It takes about two or three minutes per page to do the basic scanning, after accounting for proper positioning attempts, previews, the full scan, the slowness of the software and disk processing, and trying to handle things carefully. That just gets me a bunch of extremely large raw images that still need to be postprocessed, though. Stuff like the colour curves and black level adjustment could be skipped if I’m not feeling too picky, but at the very least it has to be cropped, rescaled to a manageable size, compressed, and checked for gross errors or aliasing patterns.

For now I’ll probably only bother doing this on my very favourite and rarer, hard-to-replace issues. For others, I may as well let someone else do all the work and just find some pirate scans online… :-P