X-Geek

Extreme geekiness

There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 52 of 70).

Time Warner Cable raising rates

To get a head start in losing customers before the February DTV changeover, Time Warner Cable is raising its basic cable rates 20% next month. The cost of doing business continues to increase, according to a spokesperson.

Uh-huh. What about the cost of losing business? I am so glad I’ve got our TVs ready for digital broadcast TV, and that we use Earthlink’s high-speed cable modem service rather than Time Warner RoadRunner.

If in the future I decide we need premium channels, I’ll be giving the Dish Network a call, but Time Warner won’t get a penny more from me if I can help it. Cable service has never been more irrelevant than it is today.

In fact, I should become more aggressive in setting up my neighborhood wireless Internet service. Let’s see how Time Warner’s rate increases look when compared to free (or close to it).

Power surge

I picked up a donated motherboard/CPU from a fellow TriLUGer and popped it into my Myth box last night to see if it would fire up. Fire might be an apt word, as the motherboard did exactly nothing while I had it powered.

After I checked connections and powered it up again, I gave up on it and put the power supply back on my existing motherboard. When I plugged it back in, I got a huge power surge that nearly tripped my UPS. My power supply clearly didn’t like being tethered to that questionable motherboard.

The good news is my power supply is still okay. After its surge, it booted my Myth box fine. Now I need to find a new donated motherboard/CPU for my project. Hey, it was worth a try!

A penguin roosts in the Mac Mini

For over a year I’ve had my Mac Mini’s tiny 40 GB drive partitioned to dual-boot Linux one day. Yesterday was that day. While this may be nothing to those Intel Mac Mini users, to get my PowerPC running the latest Ubuntu was a bit of a challenge. There is no official Ubuntu release for the PowerPC: instead its a port. Also, each time I tried installing Ubuntu on this machine using our HDTV as a monitor, the HDTV would refuse to display anything from the Mini. Apparently, the video modes the Mini pushes while in Linux’s framebuffer mode were out of the range of my Toshiba flat-screen. So, a few days ago I tracked down the port of Ubuntu 8.10 for the PowerPC and borrowed my desktop’s monitor to see what was going on.

I also ran into a bug where the Mini’s ATAPI cdrom drive – the most common CDROM drive in the PC world – was not recognized. The solution is to switch to another virtual console (CTRL-F2, for instance) during the install and run modprobe ide-scsi.
Continue reading →

Putting XMMS back in Ubuntu

I was upset that the XMMS music player stopped shipping with recent versions of Ubuntu. I’ve used the new standard Rhythmbox Music Player and hate the way it (and iTunes, for that matter) reorganize my already-organized music collection. I don’t need a bloated, database-backed organizer – I just want to listen to some music!

Seems I’m not the only Ubuntu user who missed XMMS, because Knut Auvor Grythe built a repository of XMMS Ubuntu packages where Ubuntu users can once again have their XMMS.

Clever Craigslist job posting

I was about to flag this job posting on Craigslist when instead I gave it a second look. A puzzle! Can you figure it out?

01101100 00110011 [&&] M3Q= [&&] 103 108 111 [&&] 62 61
Reply to: job-928714601@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-11-21, 3:52PM EST

Ideal candidate for job will determine how to apply for the position.

* Compensation: TBD, as you might guess from the above!
* Telecommuting is ok.
* This is a contract job.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

PostingID: 928714601

Hint: it is in the “Software Jobs” category (duh). And, no, I haven’t a clue what it says!

Update: Here’s some chitchat on LinkedIn from folks who’ve given it a try. Apparently a few have cracked the code, too.

(Judging by the LinkedIn post, the Craigslist ad has a typo in it.)

Desktop space heater

Since my laptop went on the blink I’d been using the Mac Mini that was our MythTV frontend as my primary computer. Making out the text from the couch wasn’t all that easy (or convenient, as odd as it might sound). I decided to revive my old desktop PC so I could work from upstairs.

Problem was, the desktop PC had a bum power supply. I picked up another one yesterday from Intrex and popped it into the desktop. I was quite pleased to hear the fans start whirring and the hard drive spin up after almost a year of silence.Unfortunately, that was all I got from it. It never got to the POST stage.

I’ll clean it off and reseat all of the components as some may have jiggled loose during our March move. Its doubtful I’ll sink much work into it, though, with twice-as-fast barebones systems being sold by TigerDirect for $150 (yeah, I say that as if that’s a bargain for a PC – and it normally would be if one has a job!).

For now, the Mac Mini has become my primary computer, which is fine for now as MythTV isn’t quite healthy yet, either.

Trifecta complete

As Chris so helpfully pointed out (or was he cursing me?), trouble comes in threes. If so, I can now breathe easier because this afternoon as I prepared to resume job hunting I discovered my laptop will no longer power up its hard drive. Its not that the hard drive is broken – its just that my Thinkpad isn’t powering the drive at all.

I think its an internal power supply problem rather than the drive itself, which is good news and bad news. The good news is that I don’t have to fear losing any of my data. The bad news is that there wasn’t valuable data on it anyway and I can change a hard drive in my sleep, its so easy. Vague power supply problems, not so much.

I am so buying a lottery ticket tomorrow.

Mobile phones

I got a mailer the other day from Sprint, begging me to back as a mobile customer. I expected to see some sort of deal being offered. Instead, I was shocked at what they considered a bargain for mobile phone service: a hundred bucks a month?

Have I been so spoiled with my Net10 pay-per-use phone that what everyone else considers reasonable strikes me as highway robbery? What are y’all paying for mobile service?

HDTV vs. cable

So not only did I establish that my HDTV picture is far better than cable, I found out that Time Warner’s basic cable doesn’t carry WTVD2 (11.2), the secondary channel of Raleigh’s ABC affiliate. I’m a little ticked that if it weren’t for me checking out the non-cable offerings I would’ve never found this channel.

Thus we get more channels without basic cable than we do with basic cable. Yet another reason to jettison cable service in favor of pure HDTV.