brainwagon

Well, it’s one o’clock in the morning on Monday. If everything was right with the world, I probably would be at the Oakland Airport awaiting the arrival of my wife and son on their scheduled America West flight. After all, I checked the flight information before I left for the airport, and all seemed well. […]

Well, the wife is off to San Antonio this weekend (miss ya honey!) so I decided to go catch a movie. After mulling the choices at my local omniplex, I chose Constantine starring Keanu Reeves. Reeves plays John Constantine, a man who has literally been to hell and back. Having glimpsed his fate, he now […]

You know, the thing I really like about Chinese calligraphy isn’t that I have an abiding interest in China, or in learning the Chinese language, or even in trying to become more comfortable with a brush and ink. It really is just that for the couple of hours that our classes tend to last, I […]

Damnit, when I was living in Oregon, I could put up with this crappy weather, but I live in California now. Can’t we just call it quits on the rain and have a couple of hundred days of consecutive sunshine? I’m tired of puddles damnit, I think my webbed toes are coming back. And what’s […]

I installed Damn Small Linux onto one of those 64 megabyte USB dongle thingies, and walked it around to various machines to see if I could get it to boot. Results: My old Shuttle SV24: no dice, didn’t boot. My laptop: sadly no, doesn’t boot. My HP desktop machine: yep, boots and works fine. It’s […]

I’ve been playing with various Linux distributions. I usually keep a Knoppix CD in my laptop bag so that I can use computers in a particular computer lab I frequent (normally running Win2k, and password protected, but they are still able to boot from a CD 🙂 ). The problem with Knoppix is simply that […]

Well, this is a very short episode tonight. It was my intention to release a review of the Academy Awards tonight, and to shake things up a bit, I’ve engaged my wife to aid in this production. If you’ve enjoyed the keen commentary of Michael Geohagen’s Reel Reviews, well, toss all those high expectations out […]

I bought Grand Tourismo 4 the other day for my son (hey, it’s cheaper than buying him a real car) and I must admit, it’s awfully pretty looking. One of the cuter features is a Photo Travel Mode, where you can take your car (a charcoal gray Honda Civic in this case, don’t laugh) and […]

Well, I am now closing in on a working MythTV installation (I hope), although a few problems remain. The quality of video coming from this old Brooktree 878 card is terrible, and as yet I haven’t been able to get sound working reliably. Besides prebuffering incorrectly, something having to do with the mixer is wonky: […]

Underneath my relentless attention, I believe I’ve figured out one of the problems with my SV24 computer that I complained about earlier. I complained that something appeared to be shorting out. Closer thought told me that it sounded like the same sound the computer makes when the reset button is pushed. Worth checking out, think […]

What do you do when you have the flu? Well, I sit down and try to debug a computer system which has become unreliable. In particular, the little gem is the gadget pictured on the right, my old SV24 with an 850Mhz Celeron Processor in it. I’ve thought about turning it into a MythTV box, […]

Those smart gents over at PVRblog have a great article which spells out why it might make sense for Apple to acquire Tivo.

Sorry about the lack of updates yesterday, I took the wife off to a whirlwind 1-day Reno vacation. Got a spa suite at the Silver Legacy, caught Bill Cosby in a show, ate too much, and then a long drive home that involved passing lightning, rain, and a couple of tornados outside Sacremento. Had a […]

Well, there is some support for enclosures right out of the box in the new release of WordPress, but it could still handle a bit of help. The way I hacked this into the old version was to insert two special custom fields and then wire the templates to scan for these and output the […]

Not all things which are new should be construed as progress. WPVI.com: If It Ain’t Broke…. The “reimagined” Bugs Bunny is going to be renamed “Buzz” and star in a new series called “Loonatics.” The series will be set in the future and will feature a tough-talking rabbit with laser eyes and who is a […]