You’ll notice the OfficeCam link that normally lives right below the contact information at the top of the right-side column is gone. This is because I’m changing around the computers in my office, so the machine that normally provides the webcam “service” is unavailable for a while. I’ll get it running again at some point in the next few days, if at all possible.

We apologize for the darkness.

(Update: I’ve got it back. Not only that, but the cam page actually looks like the rest of the site to a certain extent. Whee! I may be having some problems getting it to refresh, though, so if the image never changes for you please let me know. Thanks!)

So this guy, he goes Googling for the name of a song he’s listening to at the time. The song’s called “Ball and Chain.” Turns out the top Google result for that phrase is, well, the ex-wife’s blog.

And then he and his buddy notice something. Namely, that my website domain bears a striking resemblance to, well, his buddy’s own domain.

And then, and boy do I know how to tell a story, he emails me (and his buddy) about it. We’ve been exchanging semi-snarky email for the last few hours, out of which has come the fact that he works for a radio station cluster in a geek-based role. Who’d have thunk it?

So what do you think? Does this mean I have a spiritual twin out there somewhere in the wilds of Minnesota? Or is he my Bizarro-world doppelganger? Or is he just another guy who identifies with colorless waterfowl?

You be the judge! (I’ll be the jury, he can be the executioner!)

I was browsing through recent entries at collision detection, and in a comments thread found The Mini-Mizer.

Then I used it for evil. And by “evil” I mean “geeky fannish purposes.”

(That’s supposed to be Edward Elric of Fullmetal Alchemist. Or, as close an approximation as the Mini-Mizer could provide. Heh.)

Yes, yes, you’re all laughing at me. I’m used to it…

I’ve been working sporadically on a computer project at home, one designed to provide a means of viewing video files (specifically digisubbed anime, but other files as well) on the 32” TV in the living room. Towards that end I’ve been fighting with the proprietary ATI Radeon drivers for Linux. Oh, I’ve sort of made them work, but they’re quirky and forgetful and a major PITA to work with.

This evening I was looking through my boxes for slide rails with which to mount the Livedrive bay unit into the machine in question when I came across an old piece of video hardware: My old Canopus Pure3D II. It’s a 3dfx Voodoo2 accelerator card from back before all video cards did 2D and 3D combined.

It also sports S-Video and composite outputs.

Turns out, it is also natively supported in modern Linux distributions. Well, isn’t that handy?

I dropped that critter into the chassis (along with the Livedrive, since the slide rails I needed were in the same box as the Canopus card) and, after surprisingly little futzing around, managed to generate signal out of the S-Video port. It took a few tries to find a screen resolution and refresh rate that would generate a useful signal, but even that only took up about twenty minutes.

On a side note, I also used apt to perform a massive upgrade on my Fedora Core 1 install. In this instance, the ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ command resulted in almost 150 package downloads. Wow.

Anyway, my next step is to see if I can manage 800×600 out of the S-Video port, and then I get to start setting up software. If all goes well, by this time next week I’ll have a working multimedia computer down in the living room. Excellent!