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!

The latest firestorm to hit the so-called “blogosphere” is the Movable Type 3.0 licensing debacle. I have the good fortune to enjoy considerable distance from the fray: The only MT site I run is the anime site. (By the way, has anybody come up with a better name for that thing? Anyone?) Sure, it has two authors, but unless some major security fix comes down the wire that necessitates an upgrade, I can leave it right where it is. The only two other MT-based sites I’m involved with (by way of hosting) are single-author, single-blog rigs, thus falling under the “personal use” heading. And that’s even if they wanted to upgrade to 3.0, which isn’t exactly what you’d call a certainty.

Have I pointed out that the Monaural Jerk v0.5 alpha releases have been an absolute joy to work with? Heh. (Oh, I should also mention that the roomie swears by WordPress and its “five minutes from tarball to working site” slickness.)

Recently I heard the somewhat sad, somewhat frustrating story of juvenile misconduct during a convention. This is not that story. This is part of the commentary after the story.

Several levels of crisis were described in acronym form, being from least to worst:

SNAFU – Situation Normal, All F***ed Up

Sure, everyone’s heard of that one.

TARFU – Things Are Really F***ed Up

New to me, but okay…

FUBAR – F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition (or, alternately, Repair)

A ubiquitous piece of work, that. And then the one that really got me laughing…

BOHICA – Bend Over, Here It Comes Again

Hah! It’s so much fun to say! I can so see that entering the common lexicon in my particular circle of friends…

As part of my overall push to become the premier hostmaster for Monaural Jerk-based blogs, I finally managed to upgrade Wendi’s site today. The only hitch in the process was on account of a category name change at some point in the history of her site. The rest was fairly straightforward, and the results are rather spiffy if I do say so myself.

Ball and Chain

I just spent about half an hour upgrading this site from Monaural Jerk v0.5a3 to v0.5a4 without once disrupting service. How slick is that, eh? The only visible changes are the “Powered by” indicator and the updated RSS/RDF links. Everything else is just administrative geekery.

Now that I’ve updated this site, it’s time to seriously think about getting one or two others upgraded…

Monaural Jerk

So I went out to dinner with Lil’ last night. That was a lot of fun, as it always is, but that’s not what this post is about. See, when she arrived at the office to pick me up she sent my phone a text message to let me know she was “Here.”

I’ve been getting a repeat of that “Here” message every hour since. Apparently, Verizon’s SMS delivery system has gone utterly insane and thinks I haven’t “picked up” my message, or something. Argh.

And when I say every hour, I mean every single hour, all night long. So my phone beeped to let me know a message had arrived, then gave me the nagging “c’mon, pick up yer damned message” beep every couple of minutes after. This woke me up all damned night. Maybe I’m overtrained, but usually when I get an SMS in the middle of the night it means one of my servers has gone wonky at the office, so I can’t just ignore it. Besides… the beeps are annoying. Every hour I rolled out of bed, grabbed my phone, turned on the backlight so I could see the message, grunted in disgust, deleted the message, turned off the backlight, put down the phone and rolled back into bed.

So here I am, not yet having had a decent night’s sleep. Today should be fun fun fun, eh?