You all need to read this ASAP. Not just read, but buy. This comic is amazing. It’s all online for free, but I swear to you that I will buy it to have as a coffee table book. Because oh my fucking Christ, is it brilliant. Go read Jesus Christ – In the Name of the Gun right now.
Nothing says ass-kicking like Jesus fighting a werewolf Hitler alongside a time-travelling Ernest Hemmingway. It’s sacrelicious!
For work, I’m going to be using this schematic to build two VGA-to-RGB-component cables using CAT5 cabling. The goal is to connect two large component-capable TVs to a Windows computer with a dual-head VGA card, to display propaganda corporate information. I’m actually pretty excited about this, as simple a schematic as it is, because it’ll be my first real dabbling with custom wire-building since I built my parallel-port SNES controller adapter back in university. Ah, I remember playing Firepro Wrestling X on my SNES emulator, two players, for the first time, and loving every moment of it.
The drawbacks as I see them are that, as I don’t have any shielded CAT5e at my disposal, I’ll be limited in how I can transport the cord from point A to point B — it will need to avoid the fluorescent lighting as much as possible, lest it picks up ghosting and ruins the image; and one of the two TVs is probably about 70 feet away once you account for all the light-avoidance I’ll have to do to get it there.
Additionally, I’m reformatting another Vista laptop for a friend’s girlfriend, who has pretty good reason to believe her ex-boyfriend left behind a little piece of himself on her computer with which to spy on her. Well, if that’s the case, and something IS being used to keystroke-log or password-hack her computer, even if it was a rootkit, it’ll be gone by the time I’m done zeroing the drive, reinstalling, and putting password locks on the BIOS and encrypting the hard drive. Curious thing about this case is the fact that the processor is a 64 bit one, yet the OS that shipped with it is Vista Home Premium 32-bit. I’d give it an upgrade, but the license on the sticker wouldn’t work with the 64 bit media (why, Microsoft? WHY?), and anyway, I don’t have the appropriate media to begin with.
So what geeky projects do you folks have on the go? I need inspiration for something geeky for home.
Update: Well fuck. Doesn’t work. Apparently the video card has to be capable of outputting in composite video mode, which apparently some NVidia cards can do with a special dongle that I can’t find anywhere, and some ATI cards can do by default, but I can’t find any of those cards either. There goes a half day of work.
As someone who grew up thinking Spider-Man, the Ninja Turtles, and X-Men were as milquetoast as their Saturday-morning cartoon counterparts, this video is all too plausible. We can only thank our lucky stars that the Watchmen wasn’t bastardized this way back in the 80’s/90’s.
(Fixed the video. This one shouldn’t get taken down.)
Such a consumerist I am. Something bright and shiny comes along, and I can’t help but lust after it. But really, when it comes to gadgetry, I’m sure I could make an excellent case for why you’d want this particular piece of geek kit too: it’s called the SheevaPlug, and it’s a 1.2GHz, 512 meg DDR, Linux-based computer with USB 2.0 capabilities and a Gigabit ethernet port, that runs entirely enclosed within a 5-watt power brick. Also, it costs only $99 USD. Want a Linux server but don’t want to have to spend on the power consumption or configuration hassles? Buy one of these suckers and an external USB 2.0 hard drive, and you’ve got yourself an SSH, print, FTP, VPN, website, proxy and/or media server, or whatever else you can think of running on Linux. It also runs multiple distros of your choice — yes, including Ubuntu.
I don’t care that the author of this review considers the lack of video configuration such a big disadvantage, either. If all it had was a command line, I’d be happy, being that I routinely prefer the command line for performing very simple or very complex operations in Linux, but then again I’m not exactly the average computer hobbyist. In fairness, I don’t think anyone who has seriously considered implementing RFC 2324, AND has most of the parts you’d likely need to do it (if you omit most of the mechanisms for delivering ingredients to the appliance, making my potential implementation an admittedly incomplete one), could consider themselves “average” any more.
Check this out, Unix / Linux / Mac users. You know how Unix time is measured as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, Coordinated Universal Time? Throw this in a terminal to see what Unix time 1234567890 equates to… it’s today. For you Windows users, ignore this post. It’s not only too geeky for your likes, you can’t do this anyway since Windows doesn’t measure its time in the “standard” manner.
perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"n";'
This should be scheduled to post at the exact time, in fact, give or take a few seconds, depending on how my web host syncs their time.
Happy 1234567890!
(Hat tip to Phil Plait for the Perl code, saving me the effort of writing it myself. Wow… And I thought I might scoop HIM on something for once. Very sad. Shoddy, Jason, shoddy.)
Over the weekend, while I wasn’t working on splicing together and editing a video for work (how I got roped into doing that, I’ll never know), I dug my Nintendo Wii out of the box I had so foolishly packed it in — why I thought it would stay in there for long, I don’t know — and proceeded to install a new channel on it, the Homebrew Channel. This is a third-party channel that lets you play homebrew games, emulators, and other applications (e.g. Linux, media players, etc.) on your Wii. Yes, you can play a lot of older games without installing this hack and the emulators by buying them on the Virtual Console, but if you already own them, why pay for them again, especially if they aren’t even available on the shop (e.g. the entire Mega Man original series)? Below the fold, the nitty gritty of the hack, and a video of it in action.
