brainwagon

Well, everyone in the universe seems to be having fun with Skype, so I thought I would join the fun and open my very own: Brainwagon Comment Line! If you have some comments or questions about the show, feel free to call the Skype user brainwagon and leave a message and I’ll try to use […]

CNET News.com reports: With Baby Bell local phone providers making inroads with cheaper but slower DSL service, Comcast and other cable companies hope to fight on speed rather than price. Comcast’s faster service, added at no extra cost to customers, will begin rolling out this quarter, the company announced on Sunday. As previously reported, the […]

I had intended to go catch Elektra, the latest of the many Marvel epics, last night after Wil Wheaton’s booksigning, but by the time we got out of that it was after 10 and we really weren’t up to it. So, instead we waited till this morning and caught as a matinee. On the way […]

Where your host forgoes his usual activities at Chabot Observatory and instead accompanies his wife to Wil Wheaton’s booksigning at the Border’s in Union Square. As is true of many things, it was actually my wife who took notice of his blogging activities. I’ve read his blog off and on for quite some time, and […]

I was just going to post a link to the Battlestar Galactica Blog, where Ron Moore answers some behind the scene questions, when I realized that I’m going to miss the season premiere of BattleStar Galactica because I’m going to San Francisco for Wil Wheaton‘s booksigning. Luckily, TiVo will pick up the episode, so I […]

pydot is an interface to the GraphViz suite of programs for drawing abstract graphs and networks. Nifty. I’ve had need of such a thing quite a few times, and it only took me about two minutes to convert a part of my home directory hierarchy into the picture on the right. Fun stuff. Not that […]

I must admit it, I’m pretty empty today. I have a couple of topics that I could talk about in today’s podcast, but they seem of limited interest to anyone but myself. So, I’m throwing the topics out to my listeners and readers: Is their some topic that you’d like to hear covered by the […]

What can I say, Steve is a master. Short list of stuff so far: Tiger improvements include: Spotlight Desktop Search Dashboard Quicktime 7, with H.264 iLife ’05, with new versions of all major apps More later. iWork, with Keynote 2 and Pages, a new wordprocessing app The Mac Mini, $499 or $599, very small, very […]

Over at evilgeniuschronicles, Dave Slusher has dug out yet another Internet pundit who proclaims that the idea of allowing every individual to have their own radio show is somehow a bad thing. I promised that I wouldn’t rant, and it may seem like I’m piling on, but here’s my take. If you don’t want to […]

The mystery deepens. I had a couple of mysterious crashes while using Fedora Core 3, and when I installed FreeBSD 5.3, tried a kernel recompile which resulted in mysterious and unreproduceable segmentation faults in the compile. Usually such things indicate poor hardware, but both systems used a version of gcc that I don’t completely trust, […]

I’m mostly satisfied with running Fedora Core 3, but I’m having some difficulty getting rid of the crackly, popping sound that you heard in my last podcast. I’ve tried disabling apm, acpi, added no-hlt to the boot, disabled dma on the hard drive, and still the crackling badness remains. If anyone has any information which […]

Wherein your host describes his pique with Windows XP and describes his installation of Fedora Core 3 onto his laptop, followed by his recording of a podcast using the new software setup. Links from the show: I chose Fedora Core for my Linux variant. It works rather well, and has the most polished installation of […]

I have finally decided to take the plunge: my laptop is now running Linux instead of Windows XP. I got tired of trying to debug the mysteriously long boot times, purchasing yet another update to Norton’s Anti Virus, and generally just being mystified at how slow a 2 ghz laptop could act. This morning (in […]

After an 11 hour drive from Portland back home, I’ve got the laptop in front of me, the Tivo playing all the shows I missed, the quilt my mom made for me on the couch, and it’s time to relax. Expect more blogging tomorrow.

My wife got the new Sidekick II as her present to herself this year. I must admit: it’s nice. It’s got a nicer keyboard, nicer controls and a decent camera. It also includes support for Yahoo! Messenger as well as AOL Instant Messenger right out of the box. If you like to leverage things open […]