My PowerMac G4 seems to have stopped working. Luckily, Dad brought a G3 B&W home from our neighbor’s a few months ago, so check it out!:
What with crooked disks and a 300MHz CPU, the chances of this being a lasting solution are somewhat slim; I’m going to replace Trin with a small homebuilt machine (based off a Shuttle box)…
Also… this is running inside a chroot off of the Debian 4.0 install CD, so if it goes down… don’t look at me 
Last last summer, I inherited a set of old IBM PSLs from my physics teacher. In case you don’t keep up with your early-eighties home science labs, it’s a rather large beige box with all sorts of modules that you can plug in, which in turn plug in to sensors (light, temperature, sonar, etc.). It’s got a 25-pin serial interface, so it took a bit of … maneuvering … to get it attached even to my old PowerMac G4, or Robb’s desktop (the machine formerly known as cary3). Crazy, I know!
Way back before last Christmas, I wanted to get the PSL temperature probe, at the very least, working. A little bit of Python later, and it was working! (the manual had sample code for all sorts of things, and also detailed protocol and implementation documentation - try to get that from nVidia!)
I then wrote a little canvas-y viewer script, and left it running, polling the temperature in our room in Cary Hall every minute for approximately two and a half months. The final output is here:
You can pretty clearly tell when Robb and I weren’t at school (especially spring break, the really smooth wavy part near the beginning). It was cool at the time, just a cute little thing… I dunno!
Anyway. I put it back up, here at home.
We had some frozen shrimp in the freezer that needed to be eaten, so Tim and I took that on as our next cooking challenge. We found a recipe for Ancho Shrimp with Smoked Gouda Corncakes that would use up the shrimp, and be something other than chicken, which seems to be all we make. We also baked some chocolate white chip cookies and made a Orange Cream Punch as our drink.
After searching for ancho peppers, ancho chile pepper or some spice that could be a substitute, we struck gold at Shaw’s. We walked into the store, picked up lettuce for salad and basically walked into the pepper section, which just happened to have dried ancho peppers. With that most important ingredient, we set to work.
Continue reading ‘Shrimp & Corncakes and Chocolate White Chip Cookies’
Any Mac users here probably know of Perian - in fact, I’d venture a guess you’ve probably got it installed!
In any case, I’m just writing this to note that if you try to export (transcode) a video file in Quicktime Pro, there’s a chance that, if you have Perian installed, the audio won’t come through - in fact, you’ll find yourself completely unable to extract the audio from the file!
The only solution I’ve found is to use the proper codec for the video (and I’ve not found a solution for situations where said proper codec doesn’t exist, except try to wade through the mencoder {warning: 1.1 MB wall of text} mess…). Perian’s great, but this would be a good bug for them to fix.
I’ve only had this problem with DivX files, which, luckily, have an alternate, ‘official’ codec.
So! Tonight I got all of the Expedite tests running. I haven’t checked that they’re all perfect, and there’s some larger issues with the program (it draws the icon for the currently selected test really large in the upper right corner, sometimes the text disappears, or the menu forgets to disappear - not sure why); it’s nice at least to have all of the tests starting. So! Pictures and notes follow…
Hello again! We made food again tonight, July 11th. I got this crazy idea to make chicken and rice stuffed peppers, which is what we decided to make tonight. In addition, we made buttery lemon spinach, an orange juice/lemonade/iced tea drink known as Tiger Tea and a brownie ice cream sandwich cake dessert.
We started by making the dessert, because it took the longest and had to be frozen a few times. The first step was to make the brownie layers, which were easy to mix and bake. Those had to cool for a while, and then the ice cream center was added. It took a bit of effort to get the brownie out of one of the pans, which made everything a little more difficult. And the ice cream layer, which had to be level, was interesting because we had to slice the ice cream in layers, and had to keep melting it in the oven for a few seconds at a time. In the end, it was alright, the brownie part wasn’t great, and it was really messy.
So! I’ve started working on Expedite, since it really feels like a better test program overall, its what my evaluation is on, and it does more reasonable performance testing (as well as allows me to only run a particular test, if I want!).
I’ve got a run loop issue that I’m going to write up later and see if I can’t get someone else to help me puzzle out… there’s just too much code competing for attention, at the moment!
Anyway… it draws… no events, so it’s useless, and it’s absolutely incredibly hacked up, but I’ll work on getting it to work better and fixing things that don’t work (especially image data access functions, which need to be implemented, badly!)… image after the break!
