digiSal.com Forums

Just curious...

Things are hectic here, gearing up for the holidays and all.

Hope you are awesome or working on awesome!

Sweeet!

My situation is quite a bit different since we last, ehhh, conversed. Most of my hacking has been biological - still at the helm of the Water and Wastewater department of the company I work for and everything there, although it gets challenging at times, is running well. Other than that, my personal life sideways'ed a bit - I am now divorced and working through the last few details and then will be able to move on. Looking forward to getting it through.

I have been enjoying playing guitar. Haven't made any more videos of late, but was in a band for awhile, and it was fun.

Glad to hear you are doing well, sir. Congrats to you, the Missus, and Fred.

Any of the old crowd drop by? If you do - post a hello and let me know you are alive!

I am fine, but am itching to get my geek on again. The biggest geeking I have done as of late is to use a cell booster and a usb cell modem and a cradlepoint routerand a bread tie to get iffy spotty slow internet throughout my living situation.

;D

Hope you are all doing fine, weather you reply or not.

Cool - still going through much in my personal life, but moving towards happy. About all I can say about it at this point.

Good to see you still kicking, Sal. Hope you and yours are still doing awesome.

Haven't been doing much geeking lately - but strumming the guitar good and hard.

8)

If the old crowd is still alive.

Howdy.   ;D

Thinking about using DynDNS and the old laptop to host a site. Anyone up on servers and the like that can be fairly secure and run under VisTA?

Did a bios update and it solved the overheating problem. It did zorch my XP install, so I retried the original Vista disks - they would hang on disk 2 of 9. And I made it all the way through. Windows update still in progress, but I am glad that this worked out. I needed a bit more arse to do some things than my netbook could provide.

A friend kept talking about NetFlix and their streams - and I tried it out on the netbook. Very good video, the quality surprised me. So... I started looking into ways of getting NetFlix to my 19 inch lcd in the mancave. There's Roku and then various ways of hooking your laptop/desktop to the tv ~ OR ~~ many Blueray players now have networking and the like built in, and ways to tap into various online video services.

SWEET!

I nailed a Sony Blueray player for ~ $150 and activated the services. From there, you load things into your Watch Instantly Queue, they show up in your Netflix deal on the Blueray player, and then you have MUCH stuff to watch. The Netflix does a free trial, but when that ends for me I will have a way to watch much commercial free stuff for only $8.99 a month. Liking it, so far.

Vinyl - I remember it well. A friend had a HUGE library of mostly clarseic rock. There was a process. Album selection - side selection - pulling it out carefully by the edges, spray and wipe with the disk cleaner thing - zap with the static zorching gun...

The album side was a THING - just long enough to get a flavor of an artist, and then switch gears and let the next party patron choose (unless they totally hit a mood killer).

Slashdot has a really great thread running about the increasing popularity of Hamming:

slashdot - Ham Radio still growing in the iStuff Age

Although my setup is just a SW radio, I like to listen. I must say that it makes it kinda hard to get excited about listening when you can usually get the feed off the internet. Kinda reminds me of the story of everyone crashing the computer at MIT for the challenge. The finally just implemented a "kill" command, made it mundane, and everyone stopped crashing the system.

There is a utility call the Super Hybrid Engine that over and underclocks this netbook to balance battery life and performance. I can't get it to auto-start (tried dragging a shortcut to it to the Start Menu) as it seems to need permission to run (UAC - you gotta love it). I ran a utility called CPUZ and just running through the modes I get a 800 mhz low power mode, a 1 ghz High performance mode, and a 1.7 ghz Super performance mode, and an Auto that runs through them automatically depending on what you are up to.

Now that is cool!

I still have simple phones - although my latest has a qwerty keyboard and a 3 meg camera (does ok if the light is good). I wanted an iPhone bad this last go around, but we are on Verizon (at the moment).

Since I am settled into the Netbook I took the desktop I was using and cleaned her up and put it out for the wife to use. That retired a 5 year old slow XP desktop. She wants a Mac for Christmas, and I am kinda looking forward to playing with a Mac some.

Still loving the netbook, though. Haven't hooked a mouse to it yet, but I probably will soon because I want to photoshop up a bunch of pics of me and famous people - like in Forrest Gump - to hang up in my office. Why not decorate with faux style...

I always hated upgrading - I was a doofus and when I had my YaBB I hard coded things - such as using text links instead of graphic buttons because I was still on dialup and I wanted the board to be fast. All my coding would pop and I'd have to do it again. I finally installed a stock board at one point and I think I zorched previous posts.

I always looked for a thread based system that would just maintain 500 or 1000 threads and then self-zorch the oldest from there. My forums are dead - I used robots.txt to keep search engines out so that I could keep the membership to word of mouth. Except when Jason Scott showed up (from textfiles.com) - a celebrity!

BTW - his video series on BBS's from back in the day, and it was really interesting.

I remember a iPhone/Touch app that did the scanner thing. I inherited one awhile back that had some chew spit dumped into it - I got it going (somehow), but it stank, so it had to go. Was fun listening to the drive through at McD's and the like.