Author: Michael

The two briskets have just been placed in the smoker. I need to stay awake until the smoke and heat gets rolling before I can grab a little shut eye.
The rub smells great and the briskets are HUGE. Pics to follow.

Thursday is Thanksgiving and I have the task of smoking the turkey and the briskets. I picked up the meat this morning and put it in the fridge.
Smoking the food takes time and I need to plan ahead to make sure it’s ready on time. The meat needs to be done at 2:30 PM on Thursday so we can hit the road and be at my parent’s house around 3:30 PM.
I just so happen to be learning to use Microsoft Project at work and came up with this:

So, it looks like I’ll be up in the wee hours before Thanksgiving to get everything in order. I hope my Mom has the coffee ready when I arrive.

Earlier in the week, one of the fans in my computer started to go bad. The offending fan started to make a noise and pin slowly. I knew I’d have to replace it or the BIOS chip would burn up in short order.
I went to the hellhole known as Fry’s and found a fan that would work, but was not an exact replacement. Close enough till I could pull the original and get a proper replacement.
With the case covers off and a flashlight pointed inside, I saw the usual dust accumulation on the cooling fans. I got a small brush to clean things up. Mira was hovering, as see does any time I puli out tools to work on things. She asked if she could help.
Why the hell not? I gave her the brush and her to clean the dust off.

Mira earning her keep as a tech

Continue reading “Geeking”

Today started quietly as I made an electric smoker out of a trash can. I gave the smoker a quick test before starting out on the other events of the day. When I get a chance, I’ll write up a page about making the smoker.
We got rolling with a trip to the mall to get the girls some shoes. Success was found early with each girls getting two pairs of sneakers. We celebrated with candy and lunch at the mall.
Zoe had her soccer game at 2 PM and then went to go play at a friends house. That left me with time to mix up a dry rub and get a pair of top sirloin steaks smoking. I know that tri-tip is the preferred item to smoke, but the market was out and the butchers recommended this.
I got the meat into the smoker and sat down with a beer to wait it out. While I was sitting outside, supervising the smoke, I finished the Cory Doctorow book, A Place So Foreign.
The book was a good set of short stories. I had already read two of them in other publications, A Place So Foreign in the now defunct SciFi Age magazine, and Ownz0red at Salon.com. The other stories were good, but tantalizingly short. After tasting a full novel of a fully concieved world in Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, all of the stories left me wanting more.
You can check out more about the book at Cory’s site, where you can even download the book for free.
Around 8:30 or so, the meat was finally done and I pulled it out to rest for a 1/2 hour. It was most tasty as Michele & James can attest.
To wrap up the day I watched Samurai Rebellion. I had Tivo’ed it the day before and enjoyed it immensely. Toshirô Mifune plays the lead character and is fantastic as usual. The only bad thing is that the recording ended before the movie was over. I don’t know what happens in the very end! If you know, please tell me what happens after the battle in the field.
Tomorrow I’ll be looking around to find a place to rent the film.
Time for sleep.

Many loyal Cruft readers had questions about the size of Tivo “hours” storage in relation to hard drive size. I have stolen this paragraph directly from the Weaknees site, a place you can buy upgrades to your Tivo.

How are the number of hours calculated on a TiVo?
TiVo standalone units (i.e., TiVos without a built-in DirecTV receiver) have four levels of recording quality. At the best recording quality, the rule of thumb is that the number of hours is equal to 0.35 times the number of gigabytes. At the lowest recording quality (basic), the number of TiVo recording hours is 1.2 times the number of gigabytes. Because drive sizes vary slightly (an 80 gigabyte drive may be 81.9 gigabytes or 80.0 gigabytes, for example), the exact number of hours in any given TiVo cannot be calculated precisely in advance. DirecTiVo units generally get about 0.875 hours per gigabyte of storage space. The hours reported on a DirecTiVo is a maximum amount; the actual number of hours yielded will vary based on the type of shows you record (eg. sports take up more space on a hard drive than do, say, soap operas, due to the amount of motion).

So, let’s do the math here. We’ll do the simple case first.

If Martin has a DirecTivo with a 40 GB drive, he should expect 35 hours (40 GB * 0.875 hr/GB = 35 hours). If Martin was to upgrade to a 120 GB drive, he should expect 105 hours (120 GB * 0.875 hr/GB = 105 hours)

If I have a standalone Tivo with a 30 GB drive that I use in High Quality mode, with a 30 GB hard drive there should be about 18 hours (30 GB * 0.6 hr/GB = 18 hr). If I upgraded to a 120 GB drive I roughly have 72 hours (120 GB * 0.6 hr/GB = 72 hr).

So the rough effect of my upgrade was to take me from 18 hours to 72 hours of recording time.

The actual amount of storage will vary depending on the quality I choose to use for each show. Most of the kids shows record at Medium quality and most of our favorite shows record at Best Quality.

Make sense?

I woke up early and walked into the study to find the drive copy was complete.

I placed the new drive back in the Tivo and carefully reconnected it to the TV system.

Power was applied and happily the Tivo booted up just fine. All my content is intact and everything appears normal. My original Series 1 30GB Tivo now has a 120GB drive in it! The Tivo only thinks it a 30GB drive though.

Tonight I ‘grow’ the drive partition to the full 120 GB size. Hopefully it will go just as smooth.

As I type this, my Tivo drive is being mirrored to a new 120GB hard drive.

If everything goes successfully, tonight I will have the new drive installed and working back in the Tivo.

*knocks on wood*

If you want to try this yourself, go read the Hinsdale How-To on upgrading Tivos.

Well, I can get the audio and video streams, but it’s way to loud to hear anything.

People like my wifi setup and ask questions about it, but I can’t follow much of what’s going on inside the room 15 feet from me.

My kingdom for a set of pc speakers…

I’m having trouble getting my work email at home, so I thought I’d goof off.
Referrers
Like most webloggers, I peruse my stats and look at what pages are linking to my site. These are commonly know as ‘referrers’. I look at these regularly. OK, I check them daily.
Many of the referrers are search engines. As an example, here are the top keyword searches from this month so far including the number of times someone has gotten to my site from a search engine.
Atari 10-in-1 57
how to make a cup of tea 20
important quotes 19
buildabear 15
crawfish boil 13
history of hdtv 12
baseball cap washer 12
cantenna 12
washing baseball caps 9
Clan MacGregor scotch 7
“Pictures of dead people” 7
burger king tacos 6
Dr. Pepper and the imposters 6
Beyond the keyword, it’s always interesting to see the site that point to me.
Here are a few examples…
An eBay auction is pointing at my cantenna page. If he sells it, I wonder if I get a cut.
Adventures into the Well Known has a link to me somewhere. When I read the About page I saw that he must be part of Matt’s circle of DC bloggers. I then read that he grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. Small world. Guess who else grew up in Lawrence, Kansas? Yeppers, Martin and Jennifer!
There’s a link from g2gk.com. I’m not sure what g2gk.com is about, but they like the site.
That’s just an example of what I see in the referrer links. Now I need to see if I can check my work email.