reesesWeb

My Vex robotics[1] kit arrived yesterday. I'm still debating whether it was a good idea, or if I should sell it immediately so it doesn't consume 95% of my time and irritate my wife when she comes home.

I'm also wrestling with Drupal and the whole notion of "public" and "private" blogs. I've integrated four blogs (and two wikis) into this one content management system, from Blogger, phpWiki, another heavily-hacked phpWiki to make it "suitable" for blogging, Wordpress, and swiki. The initial import more or less went OK (other than the import of posts from the time before Blogger thought titles on posts were a good idea), but I do keep forgetting to hit the "private" channel on posts.

This didn't matter until I vented some work-related stuff that, were it to find its way back to the old office would cause a few people to get a little annoyed (highly unlikely, since I know no one there reads it except when I point something out to them, such as the infamous bad hair incident) and accidentally left it public. Of course, I didn't notice until a friend IM'd me with,"Uhh, did you realise that post was public?"

Oops!

At least it's easily remedied. It's not as if it's hyper-private, but there are some things I'd rather random browsers not stumble over, so I just make sure people are logged in to view them. I wouldn't want to, say, be talking about my dangly bits here and have my mom read it.

Trying to cram as much into this as possible so I can leave the computer alone for the rest of the day, I tried connecting the newer PowerBook up to the plasma directly, using the DVI to HDMI cable, and it worked this time. I don't know if it was the hardware or the OS that prevented it from working with my old laptop a couple years ago, but I wanted a preliminary test to see if it would be worth buying another Mac Mini as an home theater PC, without disentangling all the Mini's FireWire drives, network card, speakers, and USB junk, and carrying it down the stairs. If nothing else, it'll be a much better dvd upscaler than the LGDVB418.

It synched at an abusive 1080i which really looked like crap at first. So much so that I felt as if my eyes were being pulled out the front of my head. I tried 720i, and the interlace problem seemed to go away. Although, now that I think about it, there's no point in sticking to hd resolutions since the native resolution of the display is different anyway. I should stick to that, tweak the aspect ratio, and let the computer do all the resampling. Or not. Regardless, I'd like to get it to 720p or something close, rather than an interlaced display. I know there are utilities that allow one to do this, so I'll have to download one and try.

Now I have to decide if it's better to buy the cheap, Core Solo, 512M RAM Mini, since people have proven the chip is upgradable, or go right for the same Duo, 2GB RAM, etc., as my current Mini. It has to be fast enough to play h.264 and upscale it to HD, so I guess I should take some demo .movs to the Apple store and try them out.

I almost wish the PowerBook were fast enough, because it would be a trivial matter to have it act as the "remote", next to the couch, but that strikes me as entirely too dorky.

OK, I'm off to cause damage. First task will be to make a battlebot that can beat up the Roomba.

[1] I have to say that it kind of chafes that this redirects to Radio Shack. And who names anything that will inevitably be frustrating "Vex"?

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