Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Wandering the net I stumbled onto a story about raising the Tricolor from the English Channel on Critical Section The Tricolor was a huge car carrier ship that sunk last December loaded with expensive European cars.
The way they are solving it is pretty damn cool.
Be sure to check out the whole Critical Section site. It’s a pretty cool weblog.

I finished my most recent book a few days ago and am ready to start a new one. On my nightstand is Illium, the new book by Dan Simmons. It’s a big book around 600 pages that will take me a while to read. I’m not sure I feel like a reading another long novel right now.
I am looking forward to the Tivo Hacks book, but it’s not out yet. I’ve looked over the table of contents and it appears to be chock full of cool stuff for me to play with. There’s another two books coming out, Hacking the Tivo and Hacking Tivo, but neither of them are out yet either.
I guess I could pick up the Google Hacks book, it’s out. But the Windows XP Hacks book, is you guessed it, not out yet.
Maybe it’s time to go off the normal path and finally read Guns, Germs, and Steel, supposedly a great book on history.
What to do, what to do? Perhaps a trip to the library is in order.
Any suggestions?

I stumbled onto this at BBSpot. It’s amazingly funny.
That’s all for now. Back to surfing the web aimlessly for you.

I finished one of my birthday books today.
Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan
This novel is mix of old style detective novels and cyberpunk. In the future the technology exists to move a person’s consciousness from body to body. Death is avoidable for a price and bodies are regularly sold as ‘sleeves’.
Takeshi Kovacs is a specially trained warrior/diplomat known as an Envoy that is pulled out of storage work on a case for a weathly man from Earth. The story launches into a firestorm of action and plot twists.
The author doesn’t let the technology get in the way of what is really a detective novel. Piece after piece is laid as you discover what is going on along with the protaganist from his point of view rather than seeing everything from the omniscient POV that is common in many Sci-Fi novels.
If you like crime and detective novels, this book is for you. It’s a quick read, and the pace is good for reading a chapter at a time.
Tivo
Over at PVR Blog, Matt was talking about video extraction. He mainly talks about the difficuly of doing it on the Series 2 boxes. I decided to make up a page about how you do the extraction on a Series 1.
You can read it here: Video Extraction from a Tivo
As usually, I put in some highly detailed graphics….

Friday I took the new Gold Line to work. I got on at the Mission station and rode it to Union Station, where I switched to the Red Line. From the Red Line station at Universal City I took bus 96 to the office. $3 for the fares. I had plenty of time to read my book and I didn’t have to worry about anything.
I was quite pleased. I only wish LA had an even more extensive rail system.
That night I took the train back to Hollywood & Vine to meet up with Michele to have dinner and see a movie. The girls were with our great, new babysitter. After dinner we saw the movie Buffalo Soldiers. The story takes place in Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. A few people are worked up that the story shows the US soliders in a bad light surrounded by drugs and crime. Unfortunately, there is much truth in the portrayal of that era. I had several friends that joined the Army after college and were stationed in Germany. They told me stories about the rampant drug use and the low morale.
The actors in the film did a good job, but the director couldn’t seem to make up his mind about what the story was. A romance? a crime story? the fall of an anti-hero/ You don’t really feel for any of the characters and don’t care a tremendous amount about what happens. The action switches direction in someplaces for no reason, and there is no follow-up the what happens to several of the characters.
It’s worth a DVD rental, but it wasn’t worth a a pair of $14 Arclight tickets.
On Saturday I took the train up to Arcadia and did some shopping. I actually got to the shopping place faster on the train than if I would have taken the car. I’m getting hooked on the train.
Today I went down to my parent’s house with the girls. I introduced them to Model Rocketry. Last week I picked up a set of Micro Maxx mini rockets. The only pack 200 milli-newton/seconds of thrust so they only go up 50-75 feet. The quiet street my parent’s live was perfect.
The girls loved the rockets and wanted more. I only had three mortors, so I have to order more. Good times.

Yesterday I was confronted with a weird technical problem. I’m going to talk about it here so that any other poor bastard faced with the same thing might find it in google.
Martin was having trouble connecting his laptop via wireless to our hub. He has an HP Ze4430 with the W450 54g 802.11g wireless chip built in to the computer. The computer could see the access point and attach, but no traffic would flow.
I tried all kinds of things to get it to work to no avail. I remembered that the day before I had flashed the firmware of the access point and changed the SSID and the channel. Other laptops had no problem connecting afterwards, and with an external card, Martin’s laptop connected fine.
I switched the channel back from 11 to 7 and amzingly, the connection worked fine. The 802.11g chip doesn’t like channel 11 for some reason. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s the solution. 802.11g just ain’t ready for primetime.
Daredevil
I watched Daredevil tonight on DVD. The movie was good, but lacked that connection that made you feel for the characters. The relationships weren’t that believable. As many can attest, I don’t demand alot from a movie and are generally forgiving, but Daredevil didn’t give me a lot of great things to help overlook the bad things.

Thanks to Technorati’s search capability, I found a few more places where the strange email I mentioned below popped up.
Sledgeblog
DOHIYI MIR
sam o’rama
And Lindqvist has been following this for some time.
I wish I was near Woburn, MA, so I could go check out what that location is. Anyone nearby able to help?
I’m sure it’s probably just a address check for bounces by some spammer, but you never know what kind of story lies behind this spam.

Today I turn 36. Woot!
I would like to take this time to say thanks to all the loyal cruft readers for your comments and email throughout the year. If there was no one reading this page, it wouldn’t be much fun. Thanks for visiting!
Time to head off to work now. I’m a bit worn out from yesterday’s party, but that’s nothing a cup of coffee won’t fix. 🙂

Yesterday I got this email:

Hello,
I’m a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, prefereably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display.
I will take whatever model you have in stock, as long as its received certification for being safe on carbon based life forms.
In terms of payment:
I dont have any Galactic Credits left. Payment can be made in platinum gold or 2003 currency upon safe delivery of unit. Please transport unit in either a brown paper bag or box to below coordinates on Sunday July 27th at (exactly 3:00pm) Eastern Stand Time. If you miss this timeframe please email me.
42.4845467 & Longitude -71.1576157 and the ground is 101.3′ above sea level.
Although those coordinates are a secure guarded area, these channels through email are never secure. Unfortunately it is the only form of communication I have right now. There is a good chance that sombody will try to redirect the signal. The unit must be teleported directly in a way that nobody will be able to interfere with the transference.
After unit has been sent please email me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com
with payment instructions. Do not reply directly back to this email.
Thank You
uncertainty
g bab iert ayottsn bfnh

Huh? The lat/long mentioned is Woburn, Massachusetts
Is this just another form of email harvester? Anyone else got this particular spam?

It’s late on Sunday night and I have a few minutes.
On Saturday, the grils and I took the new Gold Line train to Pasadena. It was opening weekend and the train was super crowded. After the train ride, we drove to Toluca Lake and saw Rapunzel at the Falcon Theater. The 5 actors did a great job and the girls loved it. We’ll be back.
Today, Michele had a party for my birthday and friends and family came over. As usual, it was a good time. The highlight had to be 300+ lb. Martin doing a cartwell on the front lawn. Pictures below.

The girls waiting for the train ride.

The train approaches from Pasadena.

Martin doing a cartwheel on the front lawn.

Zoe and Casey after eating blue candy.

I’m tired. Time for sleep.