Category: Weblog

Tie Tuesday

I read in today’s LA Times about the backlash toward casual attire at the workplace.
When I started at work a little over ten years ago, ties were common and I wore one on mosy days. Now, it seems that even socks are optional and anyone wearing a tie must be asked “Gotta big job interview?”
I like the idea of a Tie Tuesday where people are encouraged to wear a tie to work, one day a week. I’ve got a bunch of expensive silk in my closet that needs to get out more.

The $300 PC

A few months ago, I found myself in the position to buy a new computer for the girls. Over the years, I’ve built our PCs from scratch, slowly upgrading them as needed. I thought for sure, the cheapest way to get a new computer was to buy the components and put it together myself.
I was quite surprised when I found this wasn’t true.
I went to Newegg, one of the best online shopping sites for computer gear and started pricing everything out. I easily started getting the total over $450. I even looked at a Mac Mini to run Windows on, but at $599, even it was expensive in compairision. I looked at the Walmart computers, and they were cheap but fairly low power.
I checked the Dell site, and was surprised to see the Dell Dimension B110 for $299. It’s got to be bad, I thought. Not true. For a web surfing computer, the specs are impressive. 2.5 GHz Celeron processor, 80 GB hard drive, DVD-ROM player, and 256 MB RAM. That price includes Windows XP and even a monitor. It’s a full system for $299. With an online coupon, you can even get free shipping.


Sure it’s not much to look at, but for the price, you can buy a lot of stickers.

Inside is pretty sparse, but the slots and ports are there to expand if you want. If the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 video doesn’t cut it, you can slap in a video card into the PCI slot. I added a 512MB memory stick (bought via Newegg) to bump the total of 768MB of RAM. XP runs pretty damn smooth with that much RAM.
I did have to spend about an hour deinstalling all the crapware that Dell installed and loading Grisoft AVG and Firefox. For an extra $10 I got an actual WinXP install disc and for another $14 a copy of Webroot Spysweeper. Not getting a monitor pretty much covered those costs.
The girls are happy and I’ve had absolutely no problems with the computer so far. It’s quiet and stable.

One more surprise I found on the Dell site was the $78 laser printer. When buying it with a computer, the 1110 laser printer is only $78. Hard to believe these things used to go for thousands. Again I was surprised at the good quality of the output and the printer itself. There are a couple drawback though, as it doesn’t come with a USB cable (Dell wants $25 for one!!) and the toner cartridge goes for $68 . But with the minimal amount we print, this cost is actually in line with comparable printers that go for twice as much.
I still intend to build our performance computers from scratch, but if I need to buy a beginner system, I’m going to look at buying rather than build.

The cap trick for Mentos/Soda experiments

Always curious Mister P. asked how I made the Mentos drop in to the soda bottles. I promised that I woudl draw him a picture. A day late, but here’s how I did it.
The trick is to keep the mentos above the soda until you want it to explode. First you drill a hole in the cap of the soda cap. The larger the whole the bigger the stream that comes out, the small the whole, the longer the stream lasts.


Then drill a hole through the center of each mentos wide enough to fit a paper clip through. Feed the paper clip through the cap, then the mentos. Next, bend the end of the paper clip slightly to prevent the mentos from slipping off, but not too much that you can’t pull it out.

Carefully screw on the cap/mentos to the full soda bottle and you are ready for action.
Once you pull the paper clip out, move out of the way.
I didn’t invent this method. I read about it somewhere, but I don’t remember where.

Protecting an iPod

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about polishing the screen on an iPod.
Today I put the screen protector and skin on the iPod. I had bought some protection from Gelaskins. The Gelaskin people have put together a ton of cool art for use as the cover for your iPod.


First I placed the transparent screen cover on the iPod. Not hard to do, but the Gelascreen doesn’t exactly match the screen area of the iPod and I had to fiddle with it a bit. Once it was on, it looked great.

Next, I put on the Gelaskin cover for the rest of the iPod. The Gelaskin covers the front and back. You have the option to cover the clickwheel as well to get more of the artwork. I found it a little difficult to line up, but in the end it looked good.

Good Day

Today is a good day.
In addition to today being my birthday, today I received my new business cards.


Not bad for a guy that had a 2.3 GPA in college.
Thanks to my Dad for buying that Atari 800 back in 1981 and launching my ascent into geekhood.

Only in LA: a free over-the-air Anime TV Channel 24/7

Thanks to a tip from Art at the office, Cruft Manor is now a viewer of Funimation Channel, a free 24 hour a day anime channel.


Here you see a typical anime scene with a father, ready for work in tie and sunglasses, talking to his daughter in bed while the kimono-wearing mother drives by in a mini-car.
Anime has become quite popular with young Zoe and this is viewed as a huge step forward in increasing the amount of TV watched.
With the transition to digital television, many new channels are enabled. The Funimation Channel is channel 18.3 with a digital tuner if you live in Los Angeles.
Don’t know about digital TV? The government’s explanation ain’t exactly clear.
Here’s the basics:
Our beloved FCC decided to move us all to digital over the air television. What that means is that local TV stations are given a new, digital channel to use to prepare for the turn off on analog TV in 2009.

Right now, a TV broadcast uses up 6MHz of bandwidth, what you think of as a channel, to distribute the signal. We don’t use adjacent channels to help avoid interference. That’s why there is usually (but not always) a gap between channel numbers on the dial.

With digital TV, a station gets the same 6MHz of bandwidth, but due to digital magic, 19.3 Mb/s of data can be transmitted. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly the same as 10 broadband DSL lines at the same time.
The TV station can break up that bandwidth any way they want with different channels. Here in LA, KSCI puts their main Asian TV broadcast on 18.1 and the Funimation Channel on 18.3. Other stations do similar things. In Los Angeles, KABC puts their High Defintion (HD) broadcast on 7.1, a news feed called ABC News Now on 7.2, and a 24/7 weather radar map on 7.3.

What most people don’t realize is that you don’t need a HDTV to get digital television.
All you need is an ATSC digital tuner to receive the new digital TV signals. They are much cheaper now, going for under $100 for a set-top type or for the computer saavy, an ATSC tuner for your computer.
Makes sense?

The problem with movie critics

In today’s New York Times, A. O. Scott writes about why critics often conflict with the public on whether a movie is good or not. After lamenting the success of Pirates and the Davinci Code, A.O. wonders why critics don’t line up withe the public.
A.O. gets it fundamentally wrong here, “That, however, is the job of the Hollywood studios, in particular of their marketing and publicity departments, and it is the professional duty of critics to be out of touch with — to be independent of — their concerns.”
Taking the ‘objective approach’ to reviewing films is exactly the problem. People go to a film because they want to like it. People do not randomly select films. People enjoy watching trailers because they help create expectations about what the film is about. To ignore the hype is to intentionally avoid being interested in the film’s premise.
Critics should be fans of what they review or at least go into the movie viewing it from a fan’s vantage. Not everyone likes horror films, in fact some people abhor them. If you don’t like horror films, then they are all crap no matter how much a true horror fan loves them.
This is the place where most film critics fail. There are certain genres of films they love and others they hate. They won’t tell you this, but you know it’s true. No one you know likes all film genres. Critics that say they do are lying. Critics needs to stick to the genres they enjoy and review from a fan’s point of view, not an objective point of view.
Action movies fans value aspects of a film that comedy fans hate. Critics try to rate a film on how both will like it. This is a fool’s errand that can never succeed.