Hah, I forgot Luisa can post to my blog!
Posted by rae in Reid
at 9:37 am on Tuesday, 28 September 2004
Thanks Hon. at 9:37 am on Tuesday, 28 September 2004
Happy Birthday
Posted by dwjoyes in Reid
at 9:00 am on Tuesday, 28 September 2004
H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y , R E I D ! ! ! ! !
at 9:00 am on Tuesday, 28 September 2004
iChalk — doodle over the ‘Net
Posted by rae in software
at 1:16 pm on Thursday, 23 September 2004
Anyone with a Mac want to try
iChalk
with me?
at 1:16 pm on Thursday, 23 September 2004
Of Smallville and Rogers Digital static
Posted by rae in entertainment
at 11:30 am on Thursday, 23 September 2004
at 11:30 am on Thursday, 23 September 2004
Yesterday I was very happy when I realized that digital channel 213 on
Rogers Cable was
WNYO,
which is a
WB channnel.
This meant that we could watch the season premiere of
Smallville
a week before it was shown on
CITY TV.
Woo hoo!
So I set up the VCR to tape ch 213 from 8 to 9 and looked forward to watching it.
Well, when 8pm rolled around I … *tried* to watch.. but egad.
It was the worst reception I’ve ever seen (barring pure static).
There were digital glitches galore (my guess is sever packet loss) and even when the picture showed, it was all ghosty and fuzzy.
The worst of both analog and digital worlds!
So, I hopped on the ‘Net and checked with my favorite source for TV shows
torrents,
Suprnova.org.
Unfortunately, Smallville hadn’t shown up yet (I was hoping those west-coasters would be on the ball).
Well, most of the shows I download have “[BT]” in their name, and i was pretty sure it was a reference to the “#BT” on EFNET, so I hopped onto IRC and checked
the #BT channel.
About 2 minutes after I joined (and about 29 minutes into the then-airing episode), a torrent was announced for
Smallville.
It was “only” the VCD version (not the HDTV version from LOL), but it was the only thing available, so I grabbed it and started downloading.
A lot of people were eager to get it, so there were immediately 55 peers.
Even so, it took about 2½ hours to download.
The thing about this is that in the past, if
Rogers
screwed things up like this, there was no recourse except to perhaps phone them up and whine.
Now, I feel empowered to do something about it, which is to get the show another way.
Personally, I feel that a
BitTorrent-like
technology will eventually replace broadcast/cable television completely.
Indeed, your Rogers cable might still be there, but not for broadcasting shows, just for internet bandwidth.
Hm, I wonder how much bandwidth you could get if the cable were 100% devoted to TCP/IP traffic?
Anyone know?
Well, Luisa may be upset to learn that yes, I watched the
Smallville
episode last night after she went to bed.
However, I also downloaded the
nice HDTV-LOL version
overnight, so we can watch that one tonight.
The VCD version had a lot of problems with sound.
The pitch of the background music was wavering a lot, like a badly stretched video tape.
Hm, rats.
Just checked the HDTV-LOL version and it has the same music pitch problems.
Oh well.
Now don’t forget, Sunday Dec 26th 2004 is
World File Share Day.
Get
your copy of BitTorrent
and be ready!
Recovery results
Posted by rae in Reid
at 5:02 pm on Wednesday, 22 September 2004
Well, first a list of everything that was nuked:
I had all of these on the web, so I at least still have small (480×480 max) versions of them available.
For Wetstock, I’ve recovered almost all my pictures. I am missing a lot of Debbie’s hi-res shots, but hopefully I can get copies from her again.
For Starfest I think I have about 2/3 of the shots, and for Hrire’s LAN party, I have none. Alas.
I have now added the following entry to my crontab on my Mac:
at 5:02 pm on Wednesday, 22 September 2004
# every day at 3am update pictures backup on media
0 3 * * * rsync -av --rsh="ssh -l zz" \
~/Pictures/{friends,family,hardware,rae,net,software,desktops} \
zz@media:/var/media/pictures
Accidental file deletion
Posted by rae in Reid
at 5:48 pm on Sunday, 19 September 2004
I was working in my friend/2004 pictures directory when I accidentally typed “at 5:48 pm on Sunday, 19 September 2004
rm -rf *” in the wrong directory. rm is the Unix command to delete a file, and the “-rf” part tells it to delete recursively, and forcefully. I thought I was in a temporary directory one level down, y’see. So, I have managed to delete all the high-resolution pictures of my friends from August of this year onward (I have DVD backups of pictures before then).
So I scanned the net, looking for un-delete tools, and came across
Data Rescue X.
It’s running now, having “content scan”ned about 1/3 of my disk.
I’m not even sure that “content scan” is the right thing to do.
We shall see.
This happened *after* I had scanned (in 3 pieces) and cleaned up the article on Sara in today’s Star.
The article is on the back page of section “D” (the A&E section).
I would have had a nicely-cleaned up scan of it for you all by now.
I had about 3 different versions of it (pre-flattening, post-flattening, big jpg, small jpg) so hopefully one of them will survive!
More later after the scans and attempted recovery.
At it’s current speed, I think it will be about another 2 or 3 hours before it finishes just scanning (!).
18EU and Steamboy
Posted by rae in entertainment
at 1:24 pm on Thursday, 16 September 2004
at 1:24 pm on Thursday, 16 September 2004
Last night i went to Mark’s place to finally finish our game of “18EU”.
18EU is a game where you buy, run and trade shares in various train companies that existed in the mid-1800’s through the 1930’s in Europe.
Overall, the game was a bit too involved with numbers and, well, just too much data.
I know there are people that really like that kind of game, but it makes for a steep learning curve and devoting a lot of time to one game, which isn’t what I’m after right now.
Maybe when I retire..
Tonight I am off to see
Steamboy,
the latest from the creator of
Akira.
I’m going with Craig, so expect to see him write it up on
his filmfest site.
You can view a trailer (in Japanese)
at Apple’s trailers site.
I’m experimenting with the filmfest site, actually.
Check out
the beta site
if you’re curious.
Oh, and I’ve put up a much better scan (that I did) of
Craig’s
picture from the Star.
Craig’s filmfest site
Posted by rae in friends
at 10:24 am on Monday, 13 September 2004
Craig and I now have a good workflow, where he posts the plain-text film reviews to
his FilmFest site,
and then I go over them and add links, etc.
Now I am thinking we should add some sort of index, so you can search the films he’s reviewed, either by date or by title, actor, director, etc.
Sounds like a job for PHP/MySQL.
Really, it would be nice if the
Internet Movie Database
had some sort of XML-RPC or SOAP interface for this kind of thing.
at 10:24 am on Monday, 13 September 2004
Craig featured in the Toronto Star paper
Posted by rae in friends
at 6:34 pm on Thursday, 9 September 2004
at 6:34 pm on Thursday, 9 September 2004
If you get today’s (Thursday) Toronto Star, take a look at the front page of the Arts and Entertainment section.
There is a big writeup on Craig’s FilmFest fascination, mentioning
his FilmFest website
(which I host on tnir).
I’ll put up a scan later so you can see what it looks like.
Hopefully the content will be put online by
the Star
so we can link to it..
Monday Update:
This link
may take you to the right page.
Cross your fingers!
(It might only for for a week or so..)
Here’s a
bigger copy of the picture.
There ain’t no flies on us!
Posted by rae in family
at 1:20 pm on Tuesday, 7 September 2004
at 1:20 pm on Tuesday, 7 September 2004
Well okay, maybe we do have a few flies on our garage..
Each one of those whitish blobs is a fly, and they were all moving around..
He’s a big sucker, ain’t he?