Saturday, January 26, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Bethesda you've never looked so good.
gorgeous.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Incredible weekend
I had an incredible weekend. Friday I had a great day at work and decided to start on my plan to bring my 2 mac towers back up and get them online. The first step for that was going to be setting up a wireless ethernet bridge that they could plug into. I had been thinking about getting a Linksys WET11 since I was familiar with it already, but being so excited to get started I decided to stop at the Apple store on the way home and pick up an Airport Extreme.
I got the Airport Extreme home Friday night and couldn't configure it to act as a wireless bridge after 4hrs. I returned it promptly Saturday morning and headed out to Best Buy for a VGA cable and ethernet cable. On the way out of the house I noticed a Linksys WRT54GS sitting on the table downstairs, it had been there for months and was replaced by the Comcast branded Linksys router that serves us now, and I started wondering if I could configure it to be the wireless bridge since the Linksys product that is specifically called a wireless bridge is the WET54G. On the way to the metro and while at Best Buy I was researching this on my phone and got enough indications that it was possible that I didn't buy a wireless bridge while I was in the store. I would have had to get a brand I wasn't familiar with anyway so I sort of didn't want to.
The instructions I had found online called for the WRT54GS to have the DD-WRT v23 SP1 firmware loaded onto it, not something I really wanted to do but OK, I was willing to figure out how to do that. Well imagine my delight when I started up the router and found that it already had the firmware on it! Providence!
So I followed the instructions and the router began functioning as a wireless bridge perfectly.
Next I had to see if the Mac tower would start up and output to the TV. It would start up and display the apple logo but go black when it was fully booted, so I started searching online. I found out how to start it in Safe Mode and this gave me the desktop on the TV. I started to look at what Safe Mode bypasses so I could start experimenting and figure out what was causing the problem, but then it occurred to me that in Safe Mode it was in 800x600 screen resolution and I knew it was set for a much higher resolution a couple years ago. So I installed a VNC Server and started it up like normal and installed a VNC client on my laptop and right away I was able to change the screen resolution down to 800x600 and I had a desktop on the TV.
So now the Mac tower was connected to the network and booting like normal. Then I just did system updates and called it a night.
Sunday morning I went back to Best Buy and bought 2 Western Digital 500GB Home Edition external drives and plugged in the first one and started moving everything off of the towers hard drives.
So now that tower is functioning the way I always wanted it to when I was planning my move into the new space. I can watch movies from the tower on tv and it's speaker is usually perfectly adequate but for some quieter movies I can plug in a set of speakers. I may do that anyway, I haven't decided.
What is left to do is investigate the other Mac tower, find out if it will boot, and ultimately transfer it's drives contents to the other 500GB external drive. If it doesn't boot I may mess with it and see if I can fix it, otherwise I'll just take the drives out of it and put them in the other tower and move them that way, then address the booting situation at leisure.
OH! I forgot that I was going to buy shoes this weekend too. As I was thinking about that I wondered if there was some advice they might be able to give me for the pair of shoes I got for Xmas that are great shoes but rub my pinky toe raw. I went to the shoe store and they didn't have the shoe I wanted but did say they could stretch my shoes there in the store. I went home and dropped off the 2 hard drives and had brunch and then headed back out to get groceries with my shoes in tow. The lady at the store stretched my shoes in about 5 minutes and they feel great now! I also took the shoe product number that I wanted and gave it to them to look up in case they could order the shoe for me, then their store would get the sale. Unfortunately they don't carry that shoe anymore and can't order it.
So I'll just buy the shoe I want online but I had wanted to give them the sale because they were so incredible about helping me with my other pair of shoes.
OH! So, another reason I'm thrilled with what I got done this weekend is because it all came in at way under the pricing I was thinking about. The Airport Extreme was $180 but I returned that. The found WRT54GS was FREE, so I'm really only out the cost of the VGA and ethernet cables to get the tower connected to the network and outputting to the TV. The cost of the hard drives was a constant in my plan, the flexible part was the wireless bridge and whether I'd need to buy a copy of Mac OS 10.4 to bring the tower back to life.
I got the Airport Extreme home Friday night and couldn't configure it to act as a wireless bridge after 4hrs. I returned it promptly Saturday morning and headed out to Best Buy for a VGA cable and ethernet cable. On the way out of the house I noticed a Linksys WRT54GS sitting on the table downstairs, it had been there for months and was replaced by the Comcast branded Linksys router that serves us now, and I started wondering if I could configure it to be the wireless bridge since the Linksys product that is specifically called a wireless bridge is the WET54G. On the way to the metro and while at Best Buy I was researching this on my phone and got enough indications that it was possible that I didn't buy a wireless bridge while I was in the store. I would have had to get a brand I wasn't familiar with anyway so I sort of didn't want to.
The instructions I had found online called for the WRT54GS to have the DD-WRT v23 SP1 firmware loaded onto it, not something I really wanted to do but OK, I was willing to figure out how to do that. Well imagine my delight when I started up the router and found that it already had the firmware on it! Providence!
So I followed the instructions and the router began functioning as a wireless bridge perfectly.
Next I had to see if the Mac tower would start up and output to the TV. It would start up and display the apple logo but go black when it was fully booted, so I started searching online. I found out how to start it in Safe Mode and this gave me the desktop on the TV. I started to look at what Safe Mode bypasses so I could start experimenting and figure out what was causing the problem, but then it occurred to me that in Safe Mode it was in 800x600 screen resolution and I knew it was set for a much higher resolution a couple years ago. So I installed a VNC Server and started it up like normal and installed a VNC client on my laptop and right away I was able to change the screen resolution down to 800x600 and I had a desktop on the TV.
So now the Mac tower was connected to the network and booting like normal. Then I just did system updates and called it a night.
Sunday morning I went back to Best Buy and bought 2 Western Digital 500GB Home Edition external drives and plugged in the first one and started moving everything off of the towers hard drives.
So now that tower is functioning the way I always wanted it to when I was planning my move into the new space. I can watch movies from the tower on tv and it's speaker is usually perfectly adequate but for some quieter movies I can plug in a set of speakers. I may do that anyway, I haven't decided.
What is left to do is investigate the other Mac tower, find out if it will boot, and ultimately transfer it's drives contents to the other 500GB external drive. If it doesn't boot I may mess with it and see if I can fix it, otherwise I'll just take the drives out of it and put them in the other tower and move them that way, then address the booting situation at leisure.
OH! I forgot that I was going to buy shoes this weekend too. As I was thinking about that I wondered if there was some advice they might be able to give me for the pair of shoes I got for Xmas that are great shoes but rub my pinky toe raw. I went to the shoe store and they didn't have the shoe I wanted but did say they could stretch my shoes there in the store. I went home and dropped off the 2 hard drives and had brunch and then headed back out to get groceries with my shoes in tow. The lady at the store stretched my shoes in about 5 minutes and they feel great now! I also took the shoe product number that I wanted and gave it to them to look up in case they could order the shoe for me, then their store would get the sale. Unfortunately they don't carry that shoe anymore and can't order it.
So I'll just buy the shoe I want online but I had wanted to give them the sale because they were so incredible about helping me with my other pair of shoes.
OH! So, another reason I'm thrilled with what I got done this weekend is because it all came in at way under the pricing I was thinking about. The Airport Extreme was $180 but I returned that. The found WRT54GS was FREE, so I'm really only out the cost of the VGA and ethernet cables to get the tower connected to the network and outputting to the TV. The cost of the hard drives was a constant in my plan, the flexible part was the wireless bridge and whether I'd need to buy a copy of Mac OS 10.4 to bring the tower back to life.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Croque Monsiuer and Ceasar side salad
you should go.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Roomba 560
years and wanting one for the past few months. This is the Roomba 560
from iRobot, it was shipped from Indiana, through Kentucky, and into
Virginia.
These are unboxing photos obviously. I've run roomba twice now and it
is amazing. I love that it will run everyday when I'm not home and my
whole apartment, bathroom included, will be clean.
There has been a lot of plaster dust recently in my apartment because of
drywall/plaster/painting work going on in the house and I know its been
settling on my furniture, which I have to dust, and into the carpet.
When I emptied Roomba both times it ran tonight it was more than half
full, and half full the second time, of large debris and dust. (2
seperate areas in the debris bin)
I've set Roomba's schedule like this for no particular reason:
Monday 11am
Tuesday 12pm
Wednesday 1pm
Thursday 2pm
Friday 3pm
Saturday 3pm
Sunday 11am
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
beginning 2008
Something I haven't bought at the start of 2008:
BatterBlaster
and something I have bought:
Roomba
The 560 model.
'Just point, blast, and cook!'
i'll remember that.
BatterBlaster
and something I have bought:
Roomba
The 560 model.
'Just point, blast, and cook!'
i'll remember that.
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