Its that time of year again! No, not that time, its Halloween! That of course means pumpkin carving. After last year’s marathon session on October 30th, we decided to get an earlier start this year. Got them on last weekend’s shopping trip and planned our Sunday around carving the unsuspecting cucurbita pepos. We must be getting better at it. We started at about 5:30pm and were both finished by 8:00pm. We even took a couple of breaks.
Continue ReadingThat last post about Gothic II, model trains and Al Lowe’s new game I started back in May. It took me almost 5 months to get back to it. Talk about being in a long term time warp.
There have been a lot of things happening at my company, most of which I can’t talk about publicly because of trade secrets and such, but suffice to say I’ve been working even more than I normally did since early this summer. By the time I get home from work each day, I don’t really feel like spending too much time on the computer at home, so not a lot of posts here. Its good though, there are many exciting projects that I’m working on right now and with good people. The office has gone from three of us to ten of us since July. We’ve brought in racks of new servers for these projects and will be launching new services hopefully in November. Once we launch some of them, I’ll be able to talk a bit more about them.
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Well, a few days ago Jessica started having problems with it. The box started locking up. Took a bit of effort to get it back online again (since its headless), three or four reboots before everything came back in. Not happy.
My first guess is that it is heat related. The only fan in the unit is the CPU fan. The inside of the case is quite warm. I haven’t put a thermometer into it yet, so I can’t say exactly how warm. It first locked up when she was using it “locally” with MPD playing. This does require a bit more CPU power than streaming which is what she has been doing mostly since I gave it to her. In fact, it GMediaServer had been streaming to the HomePod for just about 12 hours a day for the prior two weeks. Simple disk reads and sending packets over the network, very little CPU power. This all started happening on the 22nd or 23rd.
Continue ReadingIts been a busy few weeks since my last posting. I spent a couple Sundays working on the web interface and the streaming interface. It still needs quite a bit of work, but it is very usable now. I “released” it for Jessica to use about a week and a half ago.
Continue ReadingSo, I’ve been working on the MP3 player project quite a bit over the last few weeks. Christmas is a month away, so with the limited time I’ve got to work on it, I’d rather do that than post.
The remote control that comes with the Allwell box doesn’t work. Well, it does, but they tried to be clever and map it to the PS/2 mouse/keyboard port. It would probably work fine if their documentation matched and if they didn’t use the null character for the play button. Thats very difficult to match since many devices and programs use 0 to terminate arrays and strings and such.
Continue ReadingSo, yesterday afternoon Jessica and I went out to get pumpkins to carve. Its become a bit of a tradition for us over the last several years that we both really enjoy. Since we went out on the day before Halloween, pickings were a bit slim, but we managed to find a couple good ones.
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