MyVogonPoetry

New office – theme?

Brian — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:48:42 +0000

With our new home, I’m getting my own office. I really want to theme it, and I’m trying to decide what to go with. Note that there will be 3 arcade games in the office: Star Wars, Tron, and Discs of Tron. Some options:

Space: I have some beautiful space-themed canvas prints for the walls (Thanks, sister!) which would make a good start to the theme, and the Star Wars arcade game fits in.
Robots: I want to have a place to display my robot collection and this could be cool, especially with some robot-themed art work
Portal: I saw a cool Portal-themed office recently that really made me want to try. Do the wall, have some Portal knick-knacks around, and some Portal art on the walls. Could be cool.
Star Wars: I have a few Star Wars collectibles to display plus the Star Wars arcade game. Could be good if not overdone. I saw an office once (and have a picture somewhere) that looked like the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon – that would be cool.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: I have a framed and signed poster from Douglas Adams, a 42 towel, a C64 HHGTTG game, etc. This would be subtle but classy and my robots could fit in as long as I have a Marvin in there.
Tron: I’m leaning towards NOT doing Tron. The only way to do it right is glowing blue on black and that’s not the look I want.

Ideas? Leave a comment!

Spelling help for elementary students

Brian — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:01:31 +0000

Found a great use for the iphone app Orchestra. Its main purpose is to help you make todo lists by speaking them and it converts it to text. But… I found a cool trick… my daughter frequently needs help spelling longer words she hasn’t learned yet for papers and reports, etc. It would take her a while to look up the word online or in a dictionary and it really added up when she had a long paper to write and had to look up the spelling of lots of words. Now, I let her use Orchestra – she just says the word and it shows her how to spell it almost instantly. For every individual word she has tried it (so far) has been 100% correct.

iphone app Orchestra

Upgrading Perl in Linux Mint

Brian — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:22:49 +0000

WARNING: don’t do this – it could hose your system like it did mine… details to follow once i figure out how to undo it.

Figured I’d share this since it was a PITA to figure out. Linux Mint 11 ships with Perl 5.10. I was trying to install icinga and it needs Perl 5.12.4 or greater.

To make it happen I had to:

add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy main
install/upgrade with this: apt-get install gcc perl -o APT::Immediate-Configure=0 (from linux mint forums)

and Bob’s your uncle.

AND…. to put 5.10 back in place…

remove the entry you put in /etc/apt/sources.list and replace it with deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian squeeze main
sudo apt-get install perl=5.10.1-17ubuntu4 perl-base=5.10.1-17ubuntu4 perl-modules=5.10.1-17ubuntu4

upgrading to 5.12 caused lots of problems – Pidgin wouldn’t work and most importantly, my VPN stopped working – it would disconnect after about 30 seconds.

French press coffee – attempt #1

Brian — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:50:05 +0000

I couldn’t handle not having coffee any more and the coffee at work is horrible so I bought a French press from Amazon and it arrived yesterday. This morning was my first attempt at making French press coffee. It looked weak and it is a bit on the weak side, but it’s still pretty darn good. I’ll tweak the steps a bit for tomorrow – I think within a week I will have the recipe/ratios/steps figured out.

Blog you should be reading: The Surfing Pizza

Brian — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 01:36:13 +0000

If you are not reading http://thesurfingpizza.com you should be. The first time I found the site, I read maybe 12 articles and laughed so hard I was crying. Unfortunately, I didn’t make note of the ones that made me LOL, so here are a few that are entertaining (but the PEZ story *did* make me LOL multiple times):

Much of his writing is LOL funny, but today he wrote this brilliant piece about being good at something (anything). Check it out.

http://thesurfingpizza.com

How to stream local video content on the ipad – 8Player

Brian — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:22:05 +0000

I setup FreeNAS and it has a builtin UPnP server so I was looking for a way to view the videos (AVI/DIVX/XVID/MPG/etc) on my ipad. I finally found 8Player. Costs $5 but it streams all music, videos and pictures like a champ. Well worth the $5. I tried almost every other one I could find that did UPnP and this one was the best.

English lesson: Word

Brian — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:13:37 +0000

For some reason, teaching my Indian co-workers 80s rap lingo is hilarious to me.

Today:
(04:46:59 PM) COWORKER: Hey Brian (04:47:07 PM) ME: word (04:47:17 PM) COWORKER: ? (04:47:47 PM) ME: heh (04:48:01 PM) ME: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=word 1) well said 2) said in a agreement 3) can be used as a greeting, hey whats up (04:48:10 PM) COWORKER: :) (04:48:12 PM) COWORKER: ok.. (04:48:12 PM) ME: means "hey what's up" in 80s rap lingo :) (04:48:16 PM) ME: word (04:48:23 PM) COWORKER: cool..

and this was a month ago:
(02:38:52 PM) COWORKER: Hi Brian (02:38:56 PM) ME: word (02:40:10 PM) what's word ? (02:40:42 PM) ME: word - an 80s rap greeting - also synonymous with yes (02:40:57 PM) COWORKER: ok (02:41:23 PM) ME: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=word (02:41:31 PM) ME: 1) well said 2)said in a agreement 3) can be used as a greeting, hey whats up (02:42:01 PM) ME: I expect you to greet me with "word" next time I see you (02:42:21 PM) COWORKER: word

Installed FreeNAS

Brian — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:17:39 +0000

Over the weekend I installed FreeNAS 7 (not the latest – 8) on a mini PC I was looking to sell. Nobody wanted to buy it and I had read recently on Lifehacker about FreeNAS. I’ve been wanting a central file server for a while now that could house MP3s and movies, etc and stream it to various devices (iphone, ipad, Xbox 360, XBMX, etc) and this sounded perfect. I got it all setup finally despite it being somewhat involved and non-intuitive. I wanted to plug in my 500GB USB HD into it but it says not to use NTFS with it so if I want to do that I’m going to have to copy all the data off of it (not sure I have ~300GB of extra space anywhere), format it for FreeNAS, then copy the stuff back. Maybe I’ll just get an internal drive for it instead and start fresh.

Audiobook Review – Pathfinder by Orson Scott Card

Brian — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 02:08:19 +0000

Following right on the heels of The Lost Gate, also by Orson Scott Card, I went straight into another OSC book, Pathfinder. I liked Pathfinder much more than The Lost Gate. I got this one, too via the local libraries digital checkout (via Overdrive).

Pathfinder has two interwoven storylines – one is a sci-fi storyline and one is a medieval storyline. For the first half of the book I had no idea what they had to do with each other and the sci-fi storyline actually started irking me because the other was so much more interesting. Eventually, it made sense once all was revealed. This is a book that can easily be spoiled by the wrong summary of it so I won’t go into any detail about the plot (and don’t go reading summaries elsewhere). Here’s a hint… time travel. Confusing time travel.

The narration was excellently done by numerous voices. Each chapter/story was done in a different voice then at times new chapters that focused on a different character had a new narrator. It was a bit odd at first since I got used to (and liked) the first narrator but I got over it.

I really enjoyed the characters and the storylines in this book and heartily recommend it to anyone who likes sci-fi/fantasy. OSC leaves the door wide open for the sequels and a good litmus test for me is would I read/listen to the next one in the series? For Pathfinder, I would.

Wiredtree Sucks

Brian — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:43:07 +0000

I’ll explain in more detail later.