Triple boot adventures

When I got my last hard drive, weighing in at 200 GB, I thought I'd never be able to fill it up. But then, that's what I thought about the 20 GB one I had before that. But of course dual booting and GTA IV and various BitTorrent downloads conspired to keep the drive full most of the time.

Now I've got a 1.5 TB drive (actually 1.36 TiB). Surely I'll never fill that up! Not for the next few weeks, anyway.

With the new drive I'm finally upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala (or as I like to think of it, Karmic Khameleon). The advantage of doing this on a new drive is that I can keep my old 9.04 installation in case anything goes wrong with Karmic. Luckily it's working flawlessly. Ubuntu really is amazing - every (free, half-yearly) release is easier and better than the last.

I'm also taking the opportunity to try some other new stuff. For a couple of months I've been curious to try running OS X on my computer. Now that it's gotten to the point where it's easy to install OSx86 with a release like iATKOS or Kalyway without any screwing around with the BIOS, I figured I might as well try it. As much as I don't like the way Apple uses DRM and vendor lock-in to keep its users on a short leash, it's probably useful to know how to use all the most popular operating systems. Plus I hear iMovie is pretty good, and I've been looking for a decent video editor.

Also I'm waving goodbye to Windows XP, which I've kept kicking around on my system primarily for games, and things like Flash. I managed to avoid Vista entirely, but I think it's time to bite the bullet and get rid of the eight year old XP in favour of Windows 7.

The first step of setting up the system was partitioning the new drive. I gave 100 GB to OS X, 200 GB to Windows 7 and the rest to Ubuntu.

I installed OS X first. Unlike Windows 7 I couldn't test OS X in a virtual machine first, so I didn't know how it would go. The OS X disc I used was iATKOS v7, and it seems pretty solid. Installation was mostly straightforward, although it took me a while to figure out that I needed to open a program separate from the installer to format the install partition to HFS+. Another problem was that I didn't know I had to tell it to install a kernel extension (kext) to make my PS/2 keyboard work, so I ended up having to reinstall it. It has a few graphical issues but apart from that it seems to be working fine now.

Next was Windows 7. Also pretty easy, though the DVD takes forever to load the installer. I thought the XP install disc was slow to start at a few minutes, but the Win7 installer takes about 20 minutes to start! The installation itself took a while too, but that's to be expected. I installed a few games I've been playing like GTA IV and Half-Life and transferred over my savegames. They all seem to be running fine.

Installing Ubuntu was a breeze, as usual. I installed it last so that it would install the GRUB bootloader without it being overwritten. The new version of GRUB is pretty cool, it managed to automatically add entries for not just the three new operating systems, but the two on the old drive as well.

Now all I have to do is make sure I've transferred everything important from the old drive to the new one, and then I can reformat the old drive and use it for backup. In the meantime, just look at this awesome GRUB screen:

Just look at it.

Newsflash: DVRs rule

It's been a while since I blorged, so I'm going to blawg about DVRs. Basically, getting a DVR is the greatest thing a modern TV viewer can do.

The reason I'm pointing out this highly obvious fact is that a couple of years ago I got a DVR, and it ruled. Then about a year later, it somehow developed some fault, which rendered both the composite video and S-video outputs broken. It still had a functioning component output, but my TV doesn't have a component input, only composite and S-video.

So you see my problem.

Component video has three leads - one for luminance, which is basically a black and white signal, and two for colour information. The crappy solution I came up with was to plug a composite lead into the luminance channel of the component output, and watch things in black and white.

Watching stuff in black and white was all well and good in the 50's, and there are some great films which do not suffer for being monochrome, but it's no way to watch the Simpsons. So it was back to good old-fashioned VHS if I wanted to record anything and be able to watch it later in colour.

So convenient is the DVR that I still used it a fair bit, and put up with the black and white. I have it set up to automatically record most of the stuff I watch each week, in case I miss something I wanted to see. One of the things I've been watching from the DVR a lot in the last few months is the hilarious Canadian sitcom Corner Gas. I've seen so many episodes of Corner Gas in black and white from the DVR, I've started to think of it as a black and white show.

It occurred to me before long that it was probably possible to buy a device that converts component video into composite. I scoured eBay and Google trying to find one with no success. A couple of weeks ago, I finally realised that DealExtreme, that Mecca of all things cheap and nasty, might have such a device. And they did! Having bought other highly useful items from DealExtreme in the past, I confidently bought the video converter. It arrived today, it works, and at long last I can go back to using the DVR without having to pretend I'm some guy in the 50's, waiting two minutes for my huge TV with the tiny rounded screen to turn on so I can watch vaudevillian variety shows. While smoking a pipe.

Postie bike adventures

Now that I have my postie bike and my motorbike license, I've been riding around a lot. I'm lucky enough to live in a pretty quiet suburb, so there's plenty of streets around my house without much traffic where I can hoon around. There's one particular street which is pretty wide, with a dead-end, and a big hill I can do speed runs down. I've got the bike to about 85 km/h, which is about as fast as I particularly want to go.

I already posted some phone-camera photos, but they really don't do this beautiful machine justice. Here are some better photos of the bike in all its glory (click for bigger):








Here you can see the bad-ass heat cover that goes over the exhaust pipe and stops you from burning your leg. The heat cover is one of the reasons postie bikes look so awesome.



Before I got the bike I spent a few weeks trying to think of a way I could get the bike into the backyard so I wouldn't have to always park outside and leave the bike prone to weather damage and vandalism. There are two gates, but only one of them has a clear path into the yard. Unfortunately it has a tendency to get jammed when it rains, but I'm only really going to ride the bike when it's dry anyway. Also to get into the main part of the yard there's a large step to navigate, which isn't very bike-friendly. What I ended up doing was building a ramp from pavers, which works well enough.



It's a little tricky to get the bike up it though. The postie bike is pretty light for a motorbike, but it's still 90-odd kilos which is a little too heavy to push up the ramp, so I have to keep the engine running as I manoeuvre the bike through the gate, then ride it up. At first I tried to ride it up slowly and carefully, but what I found was that if I have to accelerate when the back wheel is on the ramp it tears the ramp apart, leaving a mess of bricks like this:



And then I have to put it back together. The trick is to aim the bike at the ramp, and then ride up in one swift movement. I've only done it a couple of times and it can be a little hairy but I guess I'll get used to it.

I rode the bike to uni today, the first time I've actually gone somewhere on it rather than ridden around aimlessly. It went pretty well, and being able to park on campus for free is a huge bonus. One thing I noticed while riding to uni and back is that the postie bike is a real head-turner. Maybe it's just because the engine sounds different to a car, but I think it's because people just like to see postie bikes. They're a pretty common sight all over Australia since they're a pretty major part of the postal system, but people just can't help looking. Everyone loves a postie bike.

I got a postie bike!

A couple of weeks ago I finally did something I've been wanting to do for years: I got a motorbike. Not just any motorbike, but the mighty Honda CT110, a.k.a. postie bike.




I've only ridden it once, briefly, but it was pretty fun. I'm getting my bike learner license in a couple of weeks. It will be pretty awesome.

Laptop dismantling

Last year my laptop died due to a motherboard fault that would have cost more to fix than the cost of a new laptop. It sat around taking up space until the other day when I decided to pull it apart. The difficult process of disassembling the laptop yielded an array of interesting hardware, some of which I might find a use for, and most of which will probably sit in a shoebox in my room taking up space for years to come.

I was hoping I might be able to convert the screen into a monitor for whatever purposes might require one, but some Googling revealed that to be virtually impossible. I did however find out that it's pretty easy to reuse the touchpad just by soldering a PS/2 cable to the right place on the touchpad circuit board. Touchpads are mostly made by the same company, Synaptics, who are pretty open about their hardware interfacing. I found an old crappy mouse, removed the cord and soldered it up, and to my surprise it works perfectly (with the correct drivers, at least).



In other news: What is the deal with this? A diagonal stalagmite in my ice cubes.

And if someone tells you about this great recipe - don't do it, it's a trap. It sucks.

EDIT: Actually maybe that's because the flour I used expired in 2006.

Piercing adventures

For the last month or two I've been thinking about getting a helix piercing. It's not the sort of thing I would usually do, but I think they're pretty cool. Lobe piercing has been done to death, and some piercings I won't mention here are just weird, but helix piercings are in the good position of being not too common but not as hard to look after as, say, a lip piercing (which I also briefly considered).

When I had exams on I decided to go do it after I'd finished all my exams. I ended up not doing it for a while because I couldn't really spare the money, but a couple of days ago I finally decided to just do it, and yesterday I went and got it done. I went to Polymorph in Newtown, and in a stoke of good timing I checked their website the night before and they had a voucher on the site for $10 piercings. So that saved a bit of money.

The whole thing was pretty quick and simple. I was in and out in about twenty minutes. The needle hurt a bit going in but no more than the needle they stick in your arm when you give blood. I was kind of expecting it to hurt for a while afterward but by the time I left it didn't even feel like anything.

Here's a photo. It's a bit blurry but I guess that's the best my laptop's webcam can do.



In other news: My new cartoon is coming along. There's still a lot to do, so it'll be at least another couple of weeks if not more. Hang in there.

Bumper stickers

In case you are utterly unaware of this fact, I have an awesome meta-bumper sticker on my car. In an act of hilarious irony I placed it not on my bumper but in the corner of my rear window. Anyway, the other day I was driving home from some wacky adventure or something, when I noticed that the car in front of me had the very same sticker. This is a pretty unlikely occurrence since you can only get these stickers from the Wondermark store, so it was pretty cool. I wanted to overtake the other guy so he would see that I had the same sticker so his mind would be equally blown but then I had to turn off the road and he kept going. Oh well, his loss.

What else has been going on in the endless sequence of zany events I call my life? The other day I decided I should get my hands on some Altoids, and then yesterday I did. It was good times. Also I bought a DVD of The Plank. Some day I'm going to make a quantum physics-based slapstick comedy and call it The Planck.

Holidaze

The holidays rule. There's so much stuff I've been meaning to do that I haven't had time to do because of uni, and now I'm doing it all. I finally read Ender's Game, which is really just incredibly good. Go read it immediately. Also I've been sinking my teeth into some webcomics I've been meaning to read. I came across a useful Greasemonkey script which lets you use the left/right keys to see the next/previous strip on webcomic sites.

Also I've been experimenting with a cool game engine called LÖVE. I made a game with some Garfield sprites, which I put up on a new games page.

Finito

It's all over. Woo!

So the last exam went OK I think. My table was too high, so that was kind of lame, but I still managed alright. At first I went through it as fast as I could, skipping whatever looked too hard. I finished that in about two hours, and then went back through, doing the harder stuff. It's a strategy that has served me well so far. All in all I think I did pretty well. After the exam I went to the pub with my elec. eng. droogs, and we ended up at Paddy Maguire's. We sat at the bar having some celebratory drinks (not the first of the night - I was getting kind of not sober at this point). A band started setting up behind us and then they finished setting up and started playing. After I finished my Guinness, the band finished the song they were playing. The singer started talking to me.

Singer "Hey, how about you get another beer? And while you're at it get one for me."
Me "Hehe, yeah right."
The cute American bartender girl comes over.
Bartender girl "You having another beer?"
Me "Nah I'll be right for now."

Later she came over again. It was my round.

Bartender girl "More drinks?"
Me "Yeah two more of the same."
Bartender girl "What are you having?"
Me "A schooner and a Becks."
Bartender girl (looking confused) "What was it?"
Fuck, did I just refer to a Guinness as a schooner? What the hell?
Me "A Guinness, I mean." (I laugh)

A bit later the band finished a song.

Singer "Thanks, we're the Mile High Club."
Me (getting more drunk) "HEY ARE YOU GUYS ACTUALLY IN THE MILE HIGH CLUB."
Singer "Yeah..."
Me "NICE."
Bass player "Hey, where are you guys from?"
Me "I'M FROM THE COUNTRY."
Bass player "The country? It's a big place..."
Me "THE WHOLE THING." (making a wide motion with my hands)

The next song they played had a pretty awesome slide solo.

Bass player "That country enough for you?"
Me "YEAH. ONLY JUST."

Not long after we finished our beers and left. All in all, a good night.

Calm before the storm

The battle lines are drawn. All's quiet on the front line, as the soldiers prepare for the big push on the morrow that will see many an innocent man perish ere the sun reaches its peak. A heavy fog permeates the crisp night air, as soldiers drink contraband whisky from their standard issue metal cups and write letters, possibly their last, to loved ones back home.

My last exam is tomorrow.

It seems every semester ends with a huge dash to cram into my brain all the things I let slip by in the last couple of months. But right now I feel like it's never hit me as hard as this time around. I had an exam on Friday, but it was an easy one. I hardly needed to prepare at all. So really it has been 12 days since my last hard exam, and I've pretty much been spending all that time studying for tomorrow's exam. I am kind of burnt out. But in a mere 20 hours I'll be drinking in celebration of the completion of 50% of an electrical engineering degree!

Two out of three ain't bad

I had my second exam today, for Embedded Systems Design. Like Beatrix Kiddo in the scene in Kill Bill where she gets buried alive and then punches through the coffin and claws her way out of the ground, I'm almost through this ordeal.

I'm really not trying with these analogies any more.

So anyway that's one less thing to worry about. But really this was a pretty easy exam. It was merely a small hurdle as I lead up to the boss fight: Analogue Electronics. The subject is a huge pain in the arse and apparently has a 20% fail rate, and yet for some reason they don't see fit to have tutes more than once every two weeks. Meanwhile there are tutes every week for the incredibly easy Embedded Systems Design. Go figure.

Or don't. Whatever.

Computer stuff no-one will care about

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 today. I started the upgrade last night just before I went to bed, and it spent about nine hours downloading all the new stuff (more than a gigabyte). I think it averaged about 35 KiB/s, which is slow even for my connection. I guess Canonical's servers are being hammered right now. Anyway it all went well, except when the upgrade finished and I rebooted I found myself staring at a blank background. I eventually discovered that my terminal hot-key still worked (good thing I set up a terminal hot-key, eh?) which provided the means to fix everything. I somehow correctly guessed that GNOME had been removed for some reason, so I used the terminal to open up Synaptic and reinstall it. From there everything was, and is, fine.

I don't know why I'm always so excited about Ubuntu upgrades. I guess it's just because they're only twice a year, so it's like a half-Christmas where the only presents you get are some (mostly back-end) changes that don't really affect you much, and maybe a few new apps you could have installed separately anyway.

Another computer thing no-one will care about: I finally installed the firmware on my Creative Zen Touch MP3 player that lets it interface with Rhythmbox. Ironically the new firmware was developed so people could use their Zens with Windows Media Player, and I needed it to interface it with a Linux audio player. Whatever.

Also I finally learned about piping stuff in the terminal. It's one of those things I should probably have learned when I was starting out with Linux like a year and a half ago, and somehow didn't. So many things make sense now. I love it when that happens, you learn some vital piece of information and suddenly all sorts of other things that were a mystery just fall into place.

Exams, Twitter, and a smiley pen

I'm deep into exam territory now, hacking through the dense foliage of revision with the machete of discipline and constant music pouring out of my computer speakers. The idea is that I study while listening to music and then when I'm in an exam and it's all quiet I'm suddenly able to hyperfocus because of the unusual silence. Like altitude training.

I had my maths exam on Wednesday and it went as well as could be expected. It's nice to know that I'll not have to do any more pure maths for uni, not that I won't still have to use a lot of maths in other subjects. Try to find an electrical engineer who doesn't use maths. It's like trying to find a trucker who doesn't use pep pills.

Join me next week as I report on my next exam with more absurd metaphors about jungles and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I have decided to relinquish yet another piece of my soul to the Internet and join Twitter. Now you can follow my trials and tribulations in unnecessary detail. I can even tweet over SMS, which is a good way to use up the $20+ of phone credit I don't use every two months before it expires (damn Optus).

Of all the things in the world that are mildly annoying, shoddy promotional merchandise that seems cool and then falls apart is one of them. I had a pen promoting something called Polident. The pen had a clear section containing three solid yellow smiley faces that rolled up and down the tube through some kind of viscous liquid when you tilted the pen. That top part eventually separated from the bottom part (the bit that had the ink for the pen). It seems the two parts were held together by some kind of glue which came undone, which is kind of ironic since adhesives are among Polident's product range. Anyway, I decided to break open the tube and extract the smiley faces. You can never have too many smiley faces. I broke the end off the tube which created a hole big enough to pour out the foul-smelling oil, but not big enough to get the smiley faces out. I could have tried cutting the tube open with a hack saw, but come on. They're just small plastic balls with smiley faces on them. I have better things to do.

Supposedly.

The gathering storm

Once again I slide inexorably towards exams. The first one's next week, and I've got one each of the two weeks after that. To top it off, this week I've got four assignments, one quiz and one lab that needs to be marked. So that's lame. But like Indiana Jones, I shall deftly avoid the snakes of laziness and the poison-tipped arrows of distraction, and reach the golden idol of Summer holidays. I have to make sure I put the right amount of the sand of knowledge onto the pedestal, lest it unleash the rolling boulder of exam failure. But I know I can do it with my whip of study and fedora of metaphor.

In more literal news: There have been a bunch of ants raiding my kitchen for the last few weeks. They infested the bag of brown sugar I didn't even know was there, but luckily left the Canadian maple syrup alone. I guess it was well sealed. Anyway I got some Ant Rid, and that stuff is insane. Within hours there were hundreds of dead ants gathered around the pools of Ant Rid I had left for them. I couldn't believe how much it ruled. They consumed an entire blob of Ant Rid, and were seemingly hungry for more, so I dumped some right on top of them. A few more dabs here and there, and I haven't seen a live ant in days. (Although I still haven't gotten around to cleaning up most of the dead ones.) Apparently the ones that don't die straight away are supposed to carry it back to the nest and it poisons the queen. I guess I can cross regicide off my life list.

Mid-semester break

Not a moment too soon, I've got a week off from uni. There's plenty of stuff to catch up on but before getting onto that boring stuff I decided to head down to Kiama for a couple of days. Pretty much the usual, but a few things are worth blogging.

I went to the blowhole on Sunday for nothing much else to do. It wasn't doing much despite the wind. As I was coming back to my car there were a couple of seagulls flying near my car, but because the wind was blowing so hard they were stationary in the air, which was pretty funny. I remember once in primary school I was hanging out with a friend of mine at lunch or whatever and we saw a pigeon flying sideways because of the wind and we pissed ourselves laughing. While one of these seagulls was hovering above the car next to mine I snapped a few photos.

I wandered into the bookshop a bit later and checked out what was around. With exams looming darkly on the horizon I don't have much time for reading, but I bought a copy of Ender's Game anyway. I've heard good things about it and I've not been reading much recently (well not in dead tree format anyway - I've been reading a few good books by email). Hopefully I'll finally be able to appreciate this xkcd strip, continuing in my tradition of learning enough to understand xkcd strips long after I first read them.

I saw WALL-E too, but I'll put that in a separate post.

Full license

I got my full driver's license yesterday. It felt pretty good taking the P-plates off my car and throwing them in the bin. Just in time, too, because I'm going up to Armidale on Tuesday and now I can legally keep up with everyone else on the freeway.

After I got home from the RTA, I was minding my own business working on some papercraft when a telemarketer rudely decided to call. It was for some charity, but I refuse to support any company or charity that uses telemarketing so I decided to have a bit of fun. I pretended I was looking for my dad, then asked the telemarketer if I could put her on hold. I placed the phone down in front of my computer speakers and put on a Midnight Juggernauts song. While that was playing I cued up a couple more songs: "Code Blue" by TSOL, and "Ass 'n' Titties" by DJ Assault. By the time Ass 'n' Titties finished she had hung up. I'm not sure when she hung up, but it was probably somewhere between hearing "I wanna fuck, I wanna fuck the dead" and "Stankin'-ass bitches that need to wash up, don't get mad when I don't wanna fuck".

I hate telemarketers.

Exam trouble again

This time last year when I was doing uni exams, the unthinkable happened: my car broke down on the way to my first exam. If I was a silly person I would think there was some kind of curse, because this morning, the morning of my first exam for this semester... I slept in. I had set my alarm for 6:30 so I could get going early in case of any more car-related SNAFUs, and I guess in my half-asleep haze I hit the "alarm off" button and fell asleep again. I woke up at about 8:10, with the doors opening for the exam at 8:45. I leapt out of bed, threw on some clothes, grabbed my wallet, keys and some pens and ran out to the car. I even forgot to close the garage door after I got the car out.

In the end I got there during reading time, and the exam was pretty easy. So it all worked out OK. But now I have three more exams to study for. Lame.

Geohashing!

So I went geohashing on Sunday. For those who don't know what that is (i.e. everyone), here's the original comic from xkcd which thrust this idea into the world:



My adventure is briefly chronicled on the Geohashing wiki, so I won't repeat it here. Suffice it to say it was a pretty cool thing to do since I'll now go down in history as the first person in Sydney to go geohashing.

In other news! I bought a lab coat and some safety goggles on Monday. Well, not so much "bought" as "cashed in a $25 voucher I wasn't going to use for anything else". At any rate, now I can wear it around and be at the heighth of fashion and everyone will be all, "hey look he must be some kind of science dude, look he's eating some chips, i bet he's secretly doing science to them".

Free shit week 05/08

Council clean-up again. I spend about an hour on Saturday doing a preliminary patrol of the suburb, and then about 3 hours doing a comprehensive sweep, looking for discarded computers and other goodies. There's barely a street in the suburb I didn't walk down.

At one point I was walking along and I saw an old bike among some rubbish. I was getting a bit sick of walking so I hopped on and started riding it along the footpath. The back tyre was flat and the front one wasn't much better, the seat was too high and I wasn't game to test the gear change mechanism, so it was a pretty bumpy and dangerous ride but I rode it a few blocks and had a bit of fun, nearly ran into a parked car and then discarded it outside someone's house.

Sadly I didn't find much in the way of computers, except for two that had already been mostly pillaged. I did extract a graphics card (which was what I wanted, but sadly it doesn't seem to work) and a network card (which does work). I also found a scanner which had some water in it but who knows, maybe it'll work.

There was a fair few people out and about looking for stuff, so I guess all the cool stuff was taken. But bugger it, it's an excuse for a nice walk. It's more fun than studying.

Stereophonics

I saw Stereophonics play in Newcastle last night with McLeff. It was awesome. I hadn't really heard much of their stuff before but I'll definitely check out some of their albums once my hearing returns.

Actually my hearing's more or less fine now but last night after the gig, and this morning a bit too, everything sounded muffled in my left ear. We were pretty close to the stage off to the left so the speakers were just to our left.

Loud.

21st party

Tonight was my 21st party. I am so drunk right now. I had to correct like 20 spelling mistakes so far. I even do that when I am really drunk. I made an awesome speech though. Here's the draft, to which my delivered speech was, surprisingly, fairly close:

Friends! People of Sydney! [pause for cries of "He's amazing, who is he?" and "Is he Christ?"] You are the chosen ones! You have been brought here for one purpose, and one purpose only: to bask in the glory of my birthday, and party like you've never partied before!

To be honest, it didn't really occur to me that I'd have to do a speech until today, so this will be mostly a hodge podge of quotes like that.

Thank you all for coming. If nobody had come it would have been quite shit, but at least there'd be more beer for me. I like it better this way.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

Which, for the confused, is a compliment.

We're here to celebrate the fact that I haven't died for the last 21 years. Which is always a good thing. There's been a few close calls though:

The time I blew up my hand with a homemade explosive. I escaped with only first degree burns.

Or the time I drank about three quarters of a bottle of homemade vodka at Beff's place. That was good times, until it wasn't.

I was born at a very early age, nude, helpless and unable to provide for myself. Eventually I overcame these handicaps to become the dynamic, successful individual I pretend to be today.

But I couldn't have done it without my family and friends, who have helped and guided me along the road of life... by the way, if I make another "road of life" cliché, please shoot me.

My Mum, who was always there for me even after I moved out.

My Dad, who always encouraged me to pursue my interests.

My sister, who being three years older than me always gave me helpful advice on things she'd done three years before me.

All my friends from primary school, high school and now uni, who put up with my weirdness.

And everyone else who doesn't fit into these categories.

So to them and to all the rest of you I say thank you, and here's to many more years of partying and good times!

The turd that wouldn't flush is finally gone

He's gone! Having lived just over half my life with John Howard as the prime minister it sure is hard to get my head around the idea that his reign of terror is over. I just hope he loses his seat as well. Last time I checked Maxine McKew was ahead by about 0.8% so the postal votes could still swing it, but I don't think they will. So now Rudd's the PM, which is fine by me. He may be a bit boring and not exactly going to revolutionise the country, but any politician who got kicked out of a strip club is a good bloke as far as I'm concerned.

Things have been pretty good in the last few days. I finished my exams on Thursday, which went pretty well for the most part. I'll probably get mostly passes but I reckon I'll get the old high distinction for Computing 1. For all the assignments I got full marks, including two bonus marks for the one that had two bonus marks available. The exams gave me no troubles, except that I forgot I'd brought my bag to the exam and went home without it. There wasn't anything valuable inside so I wasn't too worried but I didn't want to have to buy a new bag. But I got it back in the end, from the exam lost property place.

It's awesome to finally have time to do stuff. My to-do list is long and mostly computer-related, and now I am happily ploughing my way through it. First on the agenda was to sink my teeth into the new Matthew Reilly book. Going well so far. Next was to buy and read the new Scott Pilgrim book. Done.

I'll pause my recount of to-do list adventures to tell you about the magic that is the Scott Pilgrim series. This is basically the series that got me into print comics. I remember Ryan North linking to a scan of a short Scott Pilgrim tale that was done for Free Comic Book Day last year. I loved how the author (Bryan Lee O'Malley) mixed real life and video game logic, so I got the first three books on Amazon and zoomed through them in about a day. I re-read them recently, knowing that the fourth was due, and it was just as good as the first time. My expectations for the new volume were high, and it effortlessly lived up to them. Among the many reasons why this series is great is the art style. Some have called it amateurish, but I find it really effective for setting the right mood and I don't care what anyone says, it looks good. I find I can connect with a comic more if the art isn't too overtly skilful anyway. The characters are great, especially Scott. I see a lot of myself in Scott Pilgrim. I just hope they do the movie right. The signs aren't good to be honest: they're packing all six volumes (two of which have yet to be written) into a single movie, and also it's live action. They're going to need a miracle to find the right actors.

Anyway, back to out scheduled programming. Next on my list was to sort out how to connect my computer and Dad's computer to the interwebs at the same time. I've been meaning to sort this out for a while, not really knowing what to do. Finally discovering that all I needed was a $40 Ethernet switch. So that was very easy, which is rare when it comes to Problems.

Next task: to sort out my laptop which has been crying out for a reformat for ages. Something has recently gone seriously wrong with the Windows installation, making it all but unusable, so I decided to install Ubuntu on it. Using Ubuntu on my desktop has been a pure pleasure so far, so endowing my laptop with this king of operating systems seems the obvious route for my mental wellbeing. But before doing that I set up a dual-boot system on my desktop so that I would have Windows available on the off chance I needed it for something. I tried installing Windows on the hard drive I got the other day but that didn't work for some reason, so I set up an NTFS partition on my main hard drive and it all went smoothly from there. I guess I'll just use the other drive for storage. Not that I'll really need it.

Next I'm going to clean my keyboard.

Free Shit Day!

It's council clean-up time 'round these parts, so today I figured I might as well go for a wander around the neighbourhood and see if there was anything cool anyone had thrown out. My main target was computer stuff, since people often throw out computers that they think are useless even though they actually have useful components still in them. I was also vainly hoping I could spot a Model M around somewhere. (One is not enough!)

I started wandering around, going up and down the streets inspecting each pile of junk. I didn't find much and eventually I got sick of walking and went back to get my car. I drove around looking for cool stuff for a while, more to see where there was lots of stuff than to spot specific things. I noticed one street with heaps of stuff so I drove back home to proceed on foot. It turned out there wasn't anything good there, but eventually after lots more walking I found a monitor with a decent power cable, which I pinched. Eventually I started to head back home and on the way I found a computer a guy was chucking out. He told me some of the hardware was still good, including a DVD drive, a 256 MB SD-RAM stick and, best of all, an 80 GB hard drive. There's a few other odds and ends including a WiFi card which might be handy. I also found a small subwoofer which I'm going to hook up to my computer speakers if I can get it to work.

I haven't tested all the hardware yet but I did hook up the hard drive. Turns out the guy didn't format it so it has heaps of cool stuff on it: MP3s, episodes of shows (mainly Futurama and South Park but a bit of Monty Python, the Simpsons, Red Dwarf and others) and movies (some cool ones like Mallrats, Spaceballs, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail). There's also some personal stuff like photos and bank statements. People really should learn to format their hard drives.

Maths exam and a keyboard

I had my maths exam today. I'm pretty sure I won. I aced most of the algebra questions, in fact I pwned them in the face. They didn't know what hit them. There was one question I didn't know how to do at first, where I had to prove that a set of mutually perpendicular vectors was linearly independent. I left it for later, and then when I came back to it I thought about it for a bit and then realised what I needed to do. I busted out some algebra-fu and laid the smack down with a vector cross-multiplication. It was like that fighting game where the voice says "FINISH HIM" and then you bust out a finishing move, or just keep pressing the punch button so your opponent never had a chance to fight back and then he dies. Was that Tekken? I think it was Tekken.

Calculus gave me more trouble, but I figured most of it out. I never quite figured out Maclaurin series or second-order differential equations, but apart from that it wasn't too bad.

Anyway, exams come and go, but a Model M keyboard lasts forever. And that's what I bought on eBay last week. It arrived yesterday, and already I don't think I could ever go back to the spongy piece of shit I was using before. I feel cheated that I have used inferior keyboards for so long. This thing is so nice to type on. All I want to do now is type.

Here's a photo:



It's true what they say: these things are built like brick shithouses. It just feels so damn solid, like you could cut down a tree with it and then use it to type your doctoral thesis on the use of computer hardware as logging equipment. (Web logging, that is.) It weighs a ton and is made of some kind of plastic that gives an aura of quality and indestructibility. And, most importantly, it sounds great.

All is not perfect however. The eBay seller unscrupulously neglected to mention that the N key cap is missing. (EDIT: It turned out it just fell off when he was taking a photo of the keyboard. He sent me the keycap after he realised.) I was going to buy a replacement from www.clickykeyboards.com, but the postage for one single key cap is about US$22, which is more than I'm willing to pay to solve a problem that is really only cosmetic. Also the thing's pretty dirty (it probably hasn't been washed once in its 17 years), so I'll have to give it a good clean some time. Another problem is that it takes up more desktop real estate than my old one so I've had to push back the phone book my monitor sits on and have the base of the big-ass CRT monitor hanging over the keyboard slightly. But I don't care. For I now possess the One True Keyboard.

Radar gun

My latest acquisition:


It's a radar gun.


The ball is stationary.

I don't know what I'm actually going to do with this, but it was only $12 on eBay, so I figured I might as well grab it. At the very least I can take it apart and do interesting things with its insides.

Switching to Linux

Well, after years of putting up with Windows I've finally taken the plunge and switched over to Linux! I'm now using Ubuntu 7.04 on my desktop with not a shred of Microsoft presence.

It all started yesterday when I remembered an article I came across some months ago about dual-booting Windows and Linux. The instructions seemed pretty simple so I didn't bother backing much of my stuff up, just a few LaTeX files I considered important.

I booted Ubuntu from the LiveCD and hit "install". Everything went well until I got to partitioning the hard drive. The partitioning options were totally different to the instructions and I couldn't find anything to resize the NTFS partition Windows was using. Then I tried to resize it using a partitioning program that was on the LiveCD, which I think worked, and then I created a new partition using the freed up space and installed Ubuntu. This seemed fine, until the Grub bootloader didn't work and I had no idea how to fix it. I forget what I did after that, but long story short, everything got ruined.

(Of course, in retrospect, not backing up my important stuff was an amazingly stupid thing to do and I really should have known better. Luckily, it's only been a couple of months since I last reformatted, so nearly all my stuff is backed up elsewhere. This morning I freaked out big time because I thought I had lost the full-resolution .psd file for my Mod Rocker picture, but luckily it was still on my laptop.)

After this traumatic episode, I gave up on dual booting and partitioned the whole drive for Linux. Now I have Ubuntu installed and so far it's going pretty well. After stumbling through installing a few things manually, including the driver for my graphics card, I discovered that I could have done it with a fraction of the effort using Synaptic Package Manager. Things are looking pretty good, but one thing's for sure: I've got a hell of a lot of learning to do.

In Rainbows

Woo! The new Radiohead album is out! I'm listening to it now. It is looking good. Sounding good anyway.

My day

So pretty much here's what happened to me today: First I got up at 6 am (no, that's not a typo) to get to uni by 8 am for a thing where I made a photovoltaic cell on the roof of the electrical engineering building. It's for one of my subjects, Sustainable Energy. This week is Engineering Week, where basically first year engineering students do random stuff like that instead of having classes. It's cool, except when you spend over three hours on a roof in the unseasonably hot sun doing something that is only just interesting enough to justify the early start and profuse sweating. (It was compulsory.)

Next I had nothing to do for two hours so I went to the Unibar and had a stein of New. There's a promotion for the Oktoberfest thing that's happening at the Roundhouse, where you pay eight bucks and get a stein (which you can keep) filled with half a litre of Tooheys New. Which would be awesome, if New was any good (Tooheys Old is of course far superior). As I was finishing the beer they started doing bingo in the Unibar (obviously mistaking the uni for an old people's home) so I left, went to a computer lab and, out of boredom, started experimenting with the random() function in C. Remember, kids: You need to include the stdlib.h library.

Then I went to another Engineering Week thing, an elec-eng presentation where they demonstrated how GPS works and then we got to ride a Segway. I've ridden a Segway before, but I reckon you'd have to ride one for several hundred hours before the novelty wore off - it is just awesome. If you've never ridden a Segway, go to your nearest Segway dealership and test drive one. (I don't know if there are actually any Segway dealerships. If not, write to your local MP and demand one - not that he could likely do anything about it, but it would be hilarious if politicians started getting bombarded with emails about this.)

So then on the drive home, I noticed a dashboard light had come on which said "RR DEF". I started getting anxious about it because for all I knew it was some serious problem with the car, and having car troubles is the pits (no pun intended), so after I got home I showed it to the mechanic who works two doors down from my house. He looked at it and told me it meant the rear de-mister was on. It was the best news I'd heard in weeks.

Then I get home, and guess what? It turns out the periodic comet Encke has had its tail knocked off by a Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun! Sucked in Encke, you had it coming.

Back to uni

I'm back at uni now. I got my results back from last semester - two distinctions, one credit and one pass. So I'm pretty happy about that. I'm still doing physics and maths this semester, and now I'm doing computing and renewable energy. Renewable energy seems like it'll be a bit of a bludge, which is fine by me. The first tute was just a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, which was ironically quite convenient for me because I already saw it a couple of weeks ago so I could skip it and have pretty much the whole day off.

In computing we're learning C which is cool. It's good to be programming again. I used to be into Qbasic but Qbasic is pretty lame so it's nice to bee learning something a bit cooler. Speaking of computers, I got a new monitor the other day. It's CRT, but it's bigger and higher-resolution than my old one. On the negative side of things, my new RAM still hasn't showed up so my computer's running about as smoothly as the Challenger Shuttle. Once the RAM shows up it'll be a beast but until then I'm rapidly going insane. I've taken to just using my laptop whenever I want to use more than about three Firefox tabs.

Being back at uni's cool though. Unlike last semester, I've got no classes on Tuesday at one o'clock so I can go to trivia which is a bit of fun. Not that I'm any good at it. When I was at the Unibar for trivia there was a Tooheys promotion where if you buy a Tooheys you get a scratch card to win a "Tooheys cube" and I won on the first go.



I also went to a filmsoc screening on Tuesday, where they were showing American Graffiti. It's pretty weird seeing something like that and knowing it was made by George Lucas. How did he go from making cool movies like that to the train wrecks that he passes of as Star Wars prequels?

Then there was a party on Thursday and I totally forgot to go! So that sucked. There's another one this Thursday but it probably won't be as good. Then again, maybe it will. The lucky thing is that I only have one class on Fridays this semester so I can just crash at a friend's place after uni parties (which always seem to be on Thursdays) and then I can just rock up the the physics lab the next day.

Oh yeah, I saw the Simpsons Movie today. It was awesome. I was worried that it would be disappointing but they really nailed it. Funny all the way through. It's also kind of sad in some parts but it all turns out OK in the end (of course).

Check this out. I thought it was some kind of horrible rash, but it turned out to be a picture of the galaxy Centaurus A.

Dale trip and new computer

I've just been to Armidale for about a week and a half to see my old droogs. It was McLeff's birthday so I made this T-shirt design as a present. People thought it was pretty cool.

I'd forgotten just how much winter in Armidale sucks. I had to wear my chunky jacket pretty much the whole time. But that's made up for by the fact that I got me a new computer with a 2.8GHz P4 processor, which sure beats my old 1.5GHz processor. I got all the good stuff from my old rig (DVD burner, 200GB HD, video card, etc.) and put it in the new one along with a new USB expansion card (the mobo only has 2 USB ports) and spent pretty much a whole day installing Windows and software and drivers. All I need now is some more RAM. I was going to use the 512MB DIMM from the old one but it turns out that the new one uses DDR and the old one used SDR so the RAM's totally incompatible and I'll have to fork out for some more. I'll try to get a gig or two on eBay.

Here's a pic:

Vroom!

My car's been at the mechanics for about a week and a half, due to its apparent desire to break down every time I'm going somewhere important like a maths exam. And today I finally got it back! Turns out the coil was on the blink, with the contacts all corroded. So now that's been fixed and the mighty blue demon is working properly again.

In other news! My sister went to Europe for a couple of weeks and brought me back a genuine Swiss Army T-shirt which used to belong to my cousin who was in the Swiss army for a while. Here's a pic:

Ouija won!

Woo! I won the competition for the Ouija board, OuijaNet t-shirt and mousepad! Thanks Jeffrey and co!

Losing power in two ways

Today's been a prick of a day.

My first uni exam was this morning, the final maths exam, which I spent the last week studying intensely for. So I'm driving to uni half an hour before the exam starts, and what happens? The fucking engine stops and won't start again. So then I'm stuck in the middle of the road calling the NRMA with people overtaking me, and some stooge overtakes too close while I'm standing next to my car and he hits me with his side mirror. Eventually a guy from the NRMA arrived and looked at the engine but couldn't find anything wrong, so I tried starting it and it worked fine.

In the end I got to the exam ten minutes late, which on top of the stress of the whole ordeal probably lost me a few marks. But I think I did OK.

Then in the evening there was a black out. So, having no light by which to study for my next exam, I was forced to do other things for a couple of hours, like play the guitar and eat dinner by torch light. All during valuable study time. Oh, the pain.

Exterminated!

So I've been doing this project for uni where I'm in a group with seven other people and we build a Dalek, which has to detect an infra-red or audio signal from the "enemy". And there's 12 teams building them. And then at the end the Daleks are all tested and one reigns supreme. Well, the FINAL SHOWDOWN was last Thursday, and my team won! We built the Best Dalek. A pretty common claim to fame, I know, but still.

Photoez:


The guts of it.


The final product. The pencil case on the back is there for balance; the entire weight of the thing is supported by the drive shaft by which it rotates, and the whole damn thing started to bend so it ended up a bit... wobbly.


Only these five Daleks (of the 12 built) actually worked, so we put them in THE ARENA OF DEATH (or rather, extermination) in a gladiatorial battle royale. You'll notice that only two have the requisite toilet plunger (as required by the design objectives). The rest are failures. Ours pwned their silver arses. Note: The dude in the photo isn't in the middle of standing up or anything. He just looks like that.


Here is the record of our conquest of the Daleks. (We are Group 10.)

Our lecturer who was running the testing brought a CD player and played the Dr. Who theme song every now and then. It was pretty cool.

So... what else is new...

There was a Kellogg's promotion a while ago, where 1 in 3 boxes of Nutri-Grain had an "MP3 speaker" in it. If the TV ads were to be believed, you could plug it into you personal media player and suddenly your kitchen would be transformed into a deafening rave. Like a bull at a gate I stampeded towards the supermarket eager to get my hands on this instant party of a device, picked out a box of Nutri-Grain (using my patented "shake the box to see if the prize is in there" technique) and hurried home, eager with anticipation of a virtual Led Zeppelin concert in my very own home. I plugged it into my MP3 player, hands a-shake with excitement, and queued up some Zeppelin. But to my utter shock, I could barely hear it! I broke down in tears, wondering how Kellogg's could live with themselves for such unconscionable deceit and betrayal of my trust.

Well, no. I knew perfectly well it would be barely more audible than a pair of headphones lying on a table, because I'm not an idiot. The thing doesn't even have any amplification. So why did I get it? Well, I needed cereal anyway, for one. The other, more important reason, is the possibility of making something like this:


I basically made this because building it seemed like more fun than studying multi-variable calculus. It's basically just a microphone, amp and speaker, using a couple of left-over op-amps from the Dalek, and four 1.2V rechargeable AA batteries. Not exactly hi-fi. In fact, it sounds appalling. I might add a 6.5mm phono input and use it as a travel guitar amp (with "built in" distortion). That might be kind of cool.

Also: I was watching this cool video of a dude soldering on the International Space Station (with interesting results), and found this hilarious exchange in the comments:

konxpyro (1 year ago)
can you give instructions on how to do this?
and you should prob wear a mask right?

wackyvorlon (10 months ago)
Kind of requires special equipment. Like a space ship.