Life – Page 6 – ChipLog

Productivity Shattered!

I was given an invite to Orkut yesterday. For those of you who don’t know what Orkut is, get out from under your rock 🙂 It’s a rather interesting waste of time, and it’s delayed a lot of my development. I think I’ll be getting back to that in a few minutes though. Just.. just five more minutes.. then I’ll code.. Promise.

My copy of Dream Theater – Change of Seasons and Metropolis 2000: Scenes From New York came yesterday, and I spent the better part of today watching/listening to them. Excellent stuff.

While on the topic of that, it’d be nice to see some kind of CD ripper integration in Nautilus. Right-click an audio CD and get a Rip To Music entry or something, which brings up a dialog allowing ripping to wav, mp3, ogg, flac, etc. Maybe multiple ones at once? I wouldn’t mind flac and ogg copies. For now though, Grip is my friend.

Yay Toys

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I discovered last night that if you register serial numbers for both Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, and Super Mario Kart: Double Dash, Nintendo will send a GameCube CD containing the original Zelda and Zelda II, as well as the N64 Zelda games. Neat. It just so happens that I have those games, so I registered them. They claim it’ll take about two weeks for them to send it out. That should be fun.

My file server was running out of space (only about 800MB left for websites/cvs/e-mail and 570MB for shared files), so I went out and bought a 120GB harddrive. It’s working well so far, but I think it’s time to get a server that has more than 2 PCI slots and 4 power cables available.

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Shiny New Battery Back-Up

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For Christmas, my parents gave me a CyberPower Battery Back-Up system. It’s a 410 watt unit, claiming to last 25-50 minutes. I really only need 5-10, since these systems are only off when the power flickers or PG&E screws up somehow. So today I finally installed it, as my main desktop locked up. I figured it was now or never.

What can I say? It works. It’s fun to pull the plug out of the wall while the computer is running (I only did it once!)

This doesn’t even compare to my friend John’s setup. He needed something for one of the businesses he’s a computer consultant for. It had to last 2 hours, so what was his solution? Why, building his own out of 4 car batteries, of course! It generates a bit of heat, but it works, and has worked for some time. I want him to build me one, but then, I only need that 5-10 minutes.

Food For Geeks

Life, Misc Computers and Tech

I’ve been discussing a small site I plan to setup with some people. The site is called Food for Geeks, and is essentially a food donation system for Linux hackers. It works like other monetary donation systems, but instead of specifying an amount to send the person, you’re presented with their favorite foods. You don’t actually donate the food. Rather, you donate the money for a type of food, and it goes into the person’s PayPal account.

Really, it’s a wrapper for PayPal, but more geared toward rewarding food. I feel this would be more personal and fun, and gives the donator some idea as to what the person will be buying with the money.

The system itself will be easy to setup. I have the space and bandwidth, and developing the backend won’t be a problem. It’ll allow users to setup accounts with their portfolio, list of projects, and their favorite foods, along with the prices. They can then place a little button on their site, which other people may click. They’ll be presented with the food the donatee listed. Clicking a link will open up probably a PayPal Donation page with the price for the food and all the relevant information.

It might be crazy, but it’s not like it hurts to try. I just need some good graphics made, and I can do the rest. Failing that, I’ll do some mediocre graphics 😉