Finger info for luap@icculus.org...


[25/10/2002]
Linux print services are a f'n mess.
Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'intrate!

There's a whole lot of things I don't like about windows, but you have
to give some credit, installing and using printers under windows is a breeze.
I've been workign on it for about a week on and off with linux, and feel
that I've neither learnt nor acheived much.

Viewing webpages with phrases like "UNIX printing is so damn hard! Oh well..
Sorry!" doesn't exactly inspire me.

[23/10/2002]
kernel: lp0 on fire.

[22/10/2002]
TV still broken. Replaced MOSFET, replaced fuse, powered up. Fuse became a very
bright lightbulb for a few milliseconds.

Replaced power supply 'clever IC' (pwm controller for switch-mode stuff),
checked MOSFET just in case it had been damaged by previous attempt, still
fine. Replaced fuse. Power up. Repeat of fuse/lightbulb effect.

puzzled.

Unsoldered the rediculously big transistor with 2mm of plastic all around it.
You know, the one that switches the few kilovolts that exist in tv sets.
It was ok. I am now lost for ideas.

Looking at new tv's... I've already got gucci(adjective) Sony gear that gives
me a nice Dolby digital effect on 5 speakers when I'm watching DVD's, and
does curious 'virtualisation' of dolby stereo (from TV reception) onto
5 speakers. I use a VCR as my tuner, and my sony AV gear switches video
and audio for me. So, in summary all my tv needs to do is to take a
composite video signal and display it. I don't need *any* audio out of it,
and I don't need any channel selection.

So why is it that if I want a nice hunk of glass to do that (read BIG hunk
of glass, flat screen, maybe 100Hz field rate) that I have to buy a TV that
incorporates Dolby surround (which is incidentally not as good as my Dolby
digital gear), and all manner of other things that I don't want.

I think its logical to assume that someone who wants to part with more than
a couple of hundreds of pounds for a nice piece of glass is going to be
entirely dissatisfied with the feeble little speakers that someone decided
to cram in somewhere around the CRT, and will have gone off and done their
own sound thing, probably with at least two nice speakers which together are
about the same size as the TV.

Still, should give me an opportunity to rip some salesmen apart.

Don't try to sell me things unless you know more about those things than I do.
;-)
 
[16/10/2002]
Broken TV. Blown internal fuse. Look at power supply, find big heatsink.
Unsolder MOSFET from big heatsink. Test with multimeter (connect gate and
source to ground, apply a positive bias to drain, monitor current). It is
no longer a transistor, rather a piece of silicon which has melted, flowed,
and hardened again. Electrically it appears to be a three terminal resisitor.
Which is nice.

[09/10/2002]
Two synths locked up, and wlan card is squerbling at 2.4GHz, and not a laptop
in sight. With these Microcontrollers I shall take over the world!

Slight web page overhaul today. Prettied up the "how my php works", put
descriptions instead of filenames in the sidebar. Probably still ought to sort
out colours / contrast and stuff. I don't think red on green is good.

Anyhow, ought to do some work, I've done not a lot today.

[mon 07/10/2002]
Grr. It doesn't work... job satisfaction is minimal at present.
Family crisis ongoing too. Still, my car's nice. I went for a drive at about
midnight last night, when the roads were nice and quiet. So long as you know
how to drive it, my car moves fairly well. Its just a pity that some of the
other island residents think that there's a blanket 40mph speed limit for the
whole island.

[wed 18/09/2002]
I'm confusing the purpose of system() with backticks(``)


[tuesday 10/09/2002]
Aren't I getting good at regular writing?
have to sort out an achive soon... just like Chunky.

Well, updated ~luap/cisco/ shows what's under the shields on the wlan cards.

php is fairly trivial so far, framework for my new site is at ~luap/main.php
I ought to make a cgi or something that lets you see what the code is.
Anyhow, that there is a template for including a standard header, sidebar,
and footer into my pages. At the mo the header is echoing a variable called
$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] which is useful, since with that, having identified
which page the header is about to be included in, I can do conditional stuff
there, or in the sidebar or whatever. Like a 'you are here ->' kind of thing.

[monday 09/09/2002]
late for work today. Slept in. Good plan, Batman.
Started looking at php, I think I've got what I need...
I've mirrored (I love wget) my old NTLWorld pages into ~luap
(that's right, not webbily available atm), then I can crucnh through them
make them do php, be up to date, have a bit of a facelift, and stuff.

I built a bit of furniture on Saturday. I had some shelves left over
from a modular shelving system thing I got from ikea. I decided to make
something useful from them. Something realy satisfying about woodwork.
I've always liked it. P'raps I ought to be a joiner.

[thu 05/09/2002]
Created http://www.icculus.org/~luap/cisco/
A little bit of info on the insides of the cisco aironet 340.

[wed 04/09/2002]
Updated the Scan/hard drive rant at http://www.icculus.org/~luap/scan/
included a link to Seagate's proper handling pages. I got a seagate
drive recently btw, mighty well packaged, I'm impressed.

work: I've got a PIC interfaced to a wlan BBP now, updating and reading
back the control registers. Next step is the TX and RX serial links,
which I'm probably going to simplify by using shift registers outside
the PIC. That means an FPGA design at some point... or maybe a PLD, I
never could remember the difference.

home: couldn't sleep last night. Got up again at 2am, and listened to
Sisters of Mercy far too loud over headphones while drinking gin and
lemonade till about 3.30. Got up at about 7.30 for work, and felt
remarkably perky considering.

[wed 28/08/2002]
supposed to be working...
Just uploaded one of the first batch of pictures taken through Kathryn's
telescope with my digital camera.
See it at http://www.icculus.org/~luap/
For those who are interested, it was taken with a fuji finepix 4900,
through a 3.5" refractor (see the chromatic abberation?). 400mm focal
length, 2x Barlow and 25mm eyepiece gives 32x magnification...I think.

On an unrelated note, I saw Sum of all Fears at the cinema... the book
was way better, not least because it was long enough to include much more
detail. The other thing of course was that the book was a bit chilling,
and made you wonder about a lot of things: the american system of
government, the politics within intelligence agencies, and just how easy
it is to make a nuke. But Hollywood couldn't do that could they... so
they butchered the story, and left all the americans with a nice warm
fuzzy feeling at the end of the film.

Here endeth the rant.

[tues 20/08/2002]
6pm still at work. I'm not sure why.
Now fiddling with microcontrollers that have priorities associated with
interrupts. Me like.

 
[monday morning]
allworkandnoplaymakesjackadullboy
ho-hum.
Had a look at Mars through the telescope I bought for Kathryn on Saturday.
It was kind of like the moon, but looked smaller, and was reddish.
I'll take some piccies once I get some way of attaching one of my cameras
to the tescilope.
Elsethings... need to find my old 10mps hub that does bnc->utp conversion...
either that or find a reliable bnc network card, and stick it in a pc.
My webpages in shtml form are all on my HP PA-risc workstation, which is
good enough that it has on-board network, but old enough that its a choice
of AUI or BNC

When this .plan was written: 2002-10-25 08:54:00
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