I got so used to the clack clack clack of my dying power supply that the office sounds eerily quiet now

More on this later. For now:

My first attempt with the pen had me getting used to pressure controlling thickness:

I got a little better the second time around:

I had two reasons for starting this project:

1. my wife and I like to collect Disney movies from our youth.  These movies are most likely to be watched by kids and kids are likely to damage DVDs.  I’ve heard lots of anecdotes on the net from parents who are on their fourth purchase of the same movie.  That’s just silly!  Also, Disney’s always putting their movies “back in the vault” so if your kid messes up one of THOSE movies, you could be SOL for up to a decade
2. Let me tell you a story of how ridiculous things have gotten in my house thanks to Netflix Instant.  My wife owns all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD.  However, she does not watch these DVDs.  She watches it on Netflix Instant.  Why?  Because it’s easier for her to go on Netflix and find the episode she wants than to try and remember what season has what episode and go get that, take it out of its case, and put it in the DVD player.

If I can go off on a quick tangent - the movie studios might read #2 wrongfully conclude (as I’ve seen WB do before) that this means they should keep their stuff off of Netflix instant.  No, what it means is that people want the convenience of Netflix Instant with the movies they buy.  We would NEVER go look for a CD to play music anymore.  It’s all on our computers in Amarok or iTunes or Rhythmbox and we can easily search for an artist or a song and not have to worry about what CD it’s on.  This is what people want in their homes!  Yet the movie studios have killed every company that’s tried to do it.  Well, no wonder people are using Netflix vs buying movies nowadays!  Sheesh!  OK, rant over.

A few years ago I heard about the Fit-PC. It was a computer that was the size of a stack of two or three CD jewel cases running Ubuntu. This was pretty cool, but, most importantly, it only used 15 watts of electricity when under highest load. At first I entertained using it to replace Danielle’s computer to save space in the crowded office we had in the apartment. But the fact that the computer couldn’t easily be upgraded put the kabosh on that. Eventually I turned my attention to replacing our file and print server with one of these. There was just one problem, they cost somewhere in the $300 range so they don’t really pay themselves off quickly enough in electricity saved.

14 Sept Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it.  My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go.  Later experience with my Emachine and the inability to tack on a DVD-writer (because they had blocked the slot with a metal mesh) confirmed this was the case.  Just under five years ago I was finally able to do this and built my [first computer](/2006/01/03/new-computer-built/ /2006/01/07/building-the-computer/).   I can’t believe it took me four hours to put that first one together.  Nowadays, if things go well, it takes about an hour.  In the time since then I’ve built 8 other computers.  Of course, those weren’t all for me.  I also built Dan and Dave’s newest computers, my father-in-law’s computer, his sister’s computer, and a bunch of others.

Windows Antivirus product Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 is blocking access to Google.com.  What’s so insidious about google?  Do they know something we don’t?  I discovered this problem when my wife wanted to get on Google.  I then spent the next 15 or so minutes trying to figure out what was going on.  Found someone in Britain with a similar problem, but no solutions yet.  Hopefully this is fixed very soon or they’ll have a ton of angry former customers.

Penguin Pete has started a very interesting view of what drives people to use certain operating systems. You may find part one a little heavy, especially if you don’t know the history behind it. Basically, Pete has been slammed quite a few times for his blasphemous viewpoint that Ubuntu is a watered down version of Linux that doesn’t always show users the true spirit of Linux. Part two is a witty, well written historical (and fanciful) acount of how we arrived at the current situation. The fractionalization of the three main OSes is the subject of Part Three.

When I first started playing with Linux I had a very crappy old computer; I think it was a 286. It was painful to try and do anything in Gnome or KDE, but it ended up making a pretty good server as it was the server that ran this site until late 2005 or early 2006 (I can’t remember). Then I moved onto another machine which was slightly better, a Pentium II 400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM computer. That computer ran a little better in Gnome or KDE, but I became a huge fan of Fluxbox as it ran best and I was able to use it as my almost-primary computer. It is now Luigi, my file/print server.

I expected this to be an awesome triumph because I spent a good deal of the weekend trying to get blender installed on bulletbill. It finally got installed, but it doesn’t work. I had to do some editing here and there to try and get it to work and I think that’s part of the problem. I’m not sure exactly how to redo this in freeBSD, but it’ll probably be another month before I dedicate the time needed to it. That said…..

Ok, so adding in the laptop really improved the render time on the farm. It went from 405 seconds to 260 seconds! So it went from 6.75 minutes to 4.3 minutes!! Now THAT is a dramatic improvement! It basically cut the rendering time in half. So, with this setup, it should take roughly 12 hours to render “Jose’s Dinner”. Not bad compared to 25 hours! I wanted to have one other comptuer participate, but my master died so I had to have that other computer replace the master’s job. I hope it’s just a bad network card. Wed I’m going to open her up and see if I can clean it and reseat the card and see if it will work correctly.