DAN’S BLOG

I have been digging trenches the past few days in the backyard. I already ran a conduit for electric and 2X cat-5 to the new shed back when it was just a slab. But now we’ve run into a situation. Originally we were going to run power and cat-5 to the shed, then run just electric from the shed to the RV so it could be plugged in. But since mom likes to go in the RV a lot and watch TV, we want to run cable TV to the RV as well. Also the video quality over cat-5 for the shed cam was too poor. So now I am running a new conduit that will bring 2 RG-6 coax cables from the house and split one to the shed and one for the RV. I have also run the electric for the RV as well today.

So it’s all basically done, it just needs wired up on all the ends. Our shed is probably the most wired shed in the city! LOL. Oh and before you ask why I didn’t run Cat-5 to the RV as well… WiFi baby!

Next time, BIGGER CONDUIT! I swear I’m never using this small stuff ever again. It’s not worth the pain and agony! If we’d used much larger conduit in the first place it would have been like greased lightning pulling the initial cables and I could have simply added the 2 coax cables in the same conduit later.

And now some mildly entertaining vintage computing with Dan.

One night I got out my old 486 Laptop. I can’t remember why but I just decided to tinker with it. It is a IBM ThinkPad 701CS. The specs and accessories are:

• 486DX 75MHz
• 24MB RAM
• 720MB HD
• 10.4″ Dual Scan LCD screen
• 1MB Video
• Docking station for all ports on the back
• External floppy drive
• External PCMCIA SCSI 4X CD-ROM drive
• PCMCIA Linksys 10Mbit Ethernet adapter
• Snappy! Video Snapshot (a parallel port video frame grabber)

I got that laptop back in the earliest part of high school. It was my first laptop and also my first computer. Before that we as a family shared a 66MHz 486 desktop. There was much fighting over who’s turn it was and such. So I was very happy when I got my own computer. When I got Snappy I went crazy. I was grabbing video frames from TV shows, and recording timelapse videos like crazy. It was the best thing since sliced bread! At that time there was no such thing as a tuner card. Capturing even a single frame of video on a computer was not even somethign most people thought possible. But there I was putting pictures of myself on all my school projects and printing them out on our old Panasonic 24-pin dot matrix printer with color kit.

The last OS to be installed on it was Windows 95. It still booted and worked ok… for a 486 I guess. I thought it would be fun to see if I could get Windows 98SE installed on this thing. LOL. I just got an 802.11b wifi card from my neighbor. It is broken, missing some surface mount components in the antenna section. But I found that when in the same room as my AP I can get a weak but usable signal still. haha.

I spent all night and then all day the next day working on installing windows 98 and getting all the drivers installed. Getting anything to work on that laptop is like pulling teeth! It’s not as easy as modern computers. I can’t just boot off the CD. I had to make a 98 boot disk and then copy the PCMCIA drivers for the CD drive to the floppy and add some lines to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

In the end I got the wifi card to work and for the first time ever, my IBM ThinkPad had wireless Internet. LOL. Then I turned it all off and packed it back into the briefcase and put it back under my bed to collect more dust. It’s soooo slow that working on that thign for too long makes you sick. It was a good reminder of how things were in the old days. All you noobs out there have no idea how easy it is these days. haha. I thought about putting a light version of Linux on it, but that’ll be a project for next time.

SUCKED!!! This is the second time writing this post because for some reason when I posted it the first time it went straight into the bit bucket! Grr. Anyway. Today we went to see Miami Vice. I have never seen the TV series but the movie looked like just a long TV episode or something. Here’s the Pros and Cons.

Cons:

• Too freaking long @ 2 hours and 30 mins or so. They wasted soooo much time on useless scenes where the characters are on long walks down hallways, having sex, taking showers, driving their cars, flying their planes, having more sex, etc. The movie could have been an hour shorter if they would just cut the crap and get right to the ass kicking.
• No soundtrack. There was basically no music, just some canned music in the background sometimes. Nothing fancy at all.
• Image quality. I could totally tell the whole movie was shot using cheapish 3xCCD cameras. You could almost reach out and feel the grainyness of the gain noise from the CCD in low light shots. Plus add the film scratches from the transfer to film and it’s poop. The first few mins of the film had a big series of scratches in the middle of the film, probably from being played a lot.
• Not enough action. Quite boring. There was a good gun fight scene and maybe a good explosion, but that’s all really.

Pros:

• I got to use my free AMC ticket from my MovieWatchers card! YAY. It nearly expired and I REALLY didn’t want to let it go to waste. Thanks guys for coming to see a movie today. Even if it did turn out to be a bad one.
• We ate burgers at Carl’s Jr. afterwards for dinner. Yumm.

(There I think I prety much recreated the post I lost. )
Conclusion, don’t watch Miami Vice unless you are blind and have a free ticket and nothing better to do.

I have no idea how this one got past me for so long. Probably because they started this with a “soft launch”, no real official notice. For nearly a year now, Patrick Norton and Robert Heron from TSS (The Screen Savers) have been broadcasting an Internet based TV show. They are with the Ziff Davis Media company which is the same company that started ZDTV which became TechTV. As you know, TechTV got owned by G4 and G4 chewed it up, canned nearly all their shows, peed on it, and left TechTV to die. Well now there’s hope. Now we can all tune in to the weekly live webcast of DL.TV by going to, you guessed it, http://dl.tv. You can also download any of their previous episodes, which I think I may browse through to sort of catch up. So far it looks like a really great show and I plan on watching it every week!!!

Today I went with my parents to go pickup the motorhome. They had an awning installed at Camping World. After they demonstrated how to open it, we went to go eat a late lunch at The Old Spaghetti Factory. There used to be one down here but they closed it a few years back. I had the lasagna. MMMMMmmm. Also while we were up there we visited the San Marcos Fry’s Electronics. This particular Fry’s makes our Fry’s down here look like… well… TOTAL POOOP!!! The San Marcos Fry’s has a under the sea sort of theme. They have display tables that look like sculptures of sea serpants holding up stone table tops. They have fish tanks all over the place, various water features, and a really big round fish tannk just inside the enterance. It’s clean and has pleasant music playing. A person even came up to us and asked if we needed any help!!! It’s SOOO hard to find any help in our Fry’s, let alone a person with a brain! Alass, the Cat-5e was still outrageously priced. But at least they had a larger selection of cable. I wish they had their gigantic Jacobbs Ladders running. The front of the building has 2 of them and they are so big they nearly go the height of the building! I’d love to see those suckers in action!

I also did some wardriving with my laptop. I picked up 367 access points 132 of which were not encrypted. Shame on them! I used my inverter to keep my laptop powered. I clamped it directly to the motor home’s house batteries again. That works like a charm… usually. Mom and dad are thinking about buying a beefy inverter. I want it to be something in the 800 to 1K Watts range and be permanantly screwed under a cabinet or something. Oh and of course we hit traffic on the way home. Pictures below.

UK Dave took this shot. Nothing more to say.  lol

Captions anybody?

EXTRA EXTRA!  Giant spider attacks Scranton PA.

…..

Ok so maybe it was just a little spider on the dome of a webcam.  But maybe not!  Who knows.

Yesterday evening / this morning, Mark, Jesse, and I spent a long time running some new network cables at their church to some portable buildings. There were old network cables, but they were not long enough to run where we needed them to go. So we pulled 3 new cables through an underground conduit that once had 2 cables. It seemed like a smallish task but it took a long time. I had to fix a computer in the portable buildings that had corrupt winsock settings probably from an improper removal of old firewall software or some spyware. I got home at 2:30AM. At least it wasn’t 8:00AM like last time. LOL. We had carne asada fries from Lolitas for dinner. mmm.