Sysadmin Ramblings

I don’t really see the benefit of using adsense anymore. Everyone knows they’re ads, no one clicks. It doesn’t pay my isp bills anymore, so I’m dropping it. They were only annoying anyway.

Ok, I accept a little bit of the blame for this one. I started to import my photos using picasa. The first three pictures that were imported were poor, so I decided to delete them. At that point they were the only pictures in the folder, so Picasa decided to delete the folder, even though an import was going on to that folder. All the rest of the pictures went into the abyss. Pretty lame IMHO. Picasa should probably check that it’s copying the files to a good location before deleting them from the card. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve had this dream for some time of having a display that we can control from our desktops but mounted in the hallway. The idea would be to use the sign in place of post-it notes or some other sort of messageboard arrangement. We’ve tried the Kodak EX811 in the past with limited success, we used mediatomb to control the kodak, but wheneverthe wireless network had problems or the kodak got confused, it would just go to a blank screen, hardly useful. Read the rest of this entry »

I was thinking of making a component cable for myself, but this turned out to be too big a project. Here is the dismantling of the gamecube instead. Read the rest of this entry »

The original Gamecube had two ports on the back, DIGITAL AV OUT and ANALOG AV OUT. It is possible to get Composite and S-Video out of the Analog port. The Digital Port is actually digital, the component cable from Nintendo has a digital to analog converter chip embedded in the plug. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of friends and I decided to try out rifftrax. We decided on the Matrix as our first film. Rifftrax.com is a great idea, finally the MST3k style can be applied to movies too popular or expensive to otherwise make fun of. We eventually enjoyed the riff, but syncing wasn’t as simple as we had hoped. We initally just opened up two vlc windows and manually synced that way. One great line was in the dojo, Morpheus: “You think that’s air you’re breathing?” Riff: “Little baby thinks he’s breathing air little baby air breather” I enclose my crow file, I hope it works for someone. To follow the instructions at www.sharecrow.com/Rifftrax.htm we had to use Title 13 on our DVD, Title 1 would not work. Also, our DVD Start time was 0:00:01.499, the sync timecode from rifftrax was 2.27, so we had to take this into account when doing the initial sync.

matrix.crow

It’s a shame the crows are provided, without them it’s a big pain to keep the dvd in sync. Still, it’s a great idea, I hope to see Xanadu and Lord of the Rings up there soon.

I purchased a Proxima DPP6850 off ebay. Because the projector is a few years old, it doesn’t have any component video capability. It has composite, s-video and two rgbvh (VGA) inputs.

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The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) has many messages that are identified by a “type” field. I use the types to specify what actions to take in my custom iptables config. Read the rest of this entry »

Digital AV Out

To watch Gamecube games in progressive scan, you need to have a gamecube with digital out. Since 2004, Nintendo took the digital port off the gamecube. You can get your gamecube replaced with a model with the port directly from Nintendo.

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10-1   Signal weak                   10-8   In service

10-2   Signal good                   10-9   Repeat

10-3   Stop transmitting             10-10  Negative

10-4   Affirmative                   10-12  Stand by

10-6   Busy                          10-19  Return to station

10-7   Out of service                10-23  Arrived at scene