Jo

Dude, I'm getting a Dell (not really)

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:21:45 GMT

For some reason, Windows now refuses to boot on my PC. It's not a software/virus problem; the Windows 7 install disc also hangs (black screen with a working pointer, but nothing ever happens after that). It's not peripherals; I've tried unplugging disc drives, removing PCI cards and swapping out the graphics card. Reverting the BIOS settings made no difference. Linux still boots fine and dmesg shows nothing scary. I am perplexed, but forced to conclude something on the motherboard is flaky in some way Windows doesn't like. (Especially since I'd noticed it'd had problems resuming from sleep mode in the last few weeks - USB stuff needing to be replugged to work).

Oh well. I've had this motherboard a while now. It's probably about time to upgrade to the latest hotness. I'm still v. annoyed.

The smell of cooking fills the air

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:14:59 GMT

Dinner today is Cornish pasties (some cheese/onion/potato, some steak/onion/potato), chips (fried in imitation beef drippings, i.e. lard with some instant beef bouillon powder), and baked beans. I wonder if it's possible to have a carb overdose.

Bah

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:38:53 GMT

I'm playing Eve, getting ready for my first real fleet fight in months, and the server goes down because of 'database issues'. Been down for about 40 minutes so far and counting.

Cat 1, GM 0

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:40:55 GMT

Issie was crawling all over me as I tried to run my D&D game tonight, as is her wont. Unfortunately, I startled her while trying to get her off me and she clawed the hell out of my left arm - I look like a werewolf pounced on me. I'd have taken a photo, except my camera has apparently just run out of juice.

Owie.

Pet peeves

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:13:05 GMT

I hate when beer companies sell me beer in bottles that look superficially like the 12 ounce US standard size, but aren't. I first noticed this with the Guinness Draught bottles which are 11.2 fl.oz (as opposed to standard Guinness which is the usual size). I now have in front of me a bottle of North Peak Brewing Company's 'Diabolical IPA' which is 11.5 fl.oz/340ml.

This shit pisses me off. Especially when a microbrewery is charging me a premium for the beer. I'm happy to pay more for good beer; I'm not happy for them to nickle-and-dime me on the amount they give me and hope I don't notice. Not buying any more of their stuff.

Taking precautions

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:29:59 GMT

A new expansion is coming out for Eve in a couple of weeks that is likely to be followed by an enemy invasion of our space (especially by the people who used to be in Band of Brothers; they've now reformed as IT Alliance with a scary-clown theme). My corporation's current home system could well be the first one they hit; it's on the edge of our space and for technical reasons will be easy to conquer under the new expansion's sovereignty rules.

Therefore, I just ferried most of my ships and assets to somewhere marginally safer a few jumps away, just leaving a couple of combat ships at the corp home. This is pretty tedious since I've accumulated quite a few (stockpiling for when the war starts), and I have to fly each one over there individually and then fly back in my pod to pick up the next one. It's also slightly risky, especially the trip in my (slow, vulnerable) hauler loaded up with all my minerals and spare modules, but fortunately it seems to have gone without incident.

Technically I could use MY SHINY NEW CARRIER to do it more quickly, but my carrier pilot is stuck in another system (which also means I can't move his stuff yet - two fleet battleships, an industrial, a Vagabond and a Harbinger). I also just imported all the official Capswarm fittings for it so I should be able to actually put the carrier to PVP use soon.

Bah

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:30:17 GMT

Feeling pretty tired of my life today.

Moving up to the big leagues

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:09:05 GMT

I just bought myself this in Eve - a carrier, specifically an Archon. It's a capital ship, worth about a billion isk fully fitted (in other words maybe 5 times what the battleships I usually fly cost) - even in 0.0 alliances like Goonswarm most players never get to fly one because of the months it takes to train for them and the amount they cost. Alliances can lose battleships in fleet fights til the cows come home, but a few battles where they lose lots of capital ships can lose a war. They're pretty much the lowest-level markers of strategic success or failure.

Carriers in particular are used for repairing spacecastles and other capital ships, and can also use fighters that are lethal against enemy battleships. They can also transport other ships around in their holds, which will be useful for me personally when war starts up again with the sovereignty patch next month and I'm producing Stabbers for our newbies and moving them to the front.

In a few days I'll have finished training the carrier skill to level 4 and will be able to apply to join Capswarm, Goonswarm's capital-ships subgroup, where all the super-sekrit information on how to fit, move around and use these things is kept. I've come a long way since I was a newbie in a Merlin.

Stupid lungs

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:48:32 GMT

I've had a nasty cough for a couple of days, and now a blocked up nose, but no other plague symptoms. Either I've got a slow-burning cold or an allergy to something (and if so, given recent events, chances are it's cat wee). Either way it can go away now kthxbye. There seem to be a lot of different agues going around in general right now, though.

I think I'm going to fight it tonight with the molten-lava curry of the Gods.

Muahahahaha, it's aliiiiive!

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:24:51 GMT

After some fiddling, and thanks to the kind people of the Ypsi/Ann Arbor robot club who taught me how to solder, I now have my RC tank chassis under USB control and can control it manually from my desktop.

The cats love it.

It's surprisingly zippy - in that video it's software throttled down to about 2/3rds maximum speed.

Next, I need to figure out a better mounting system for the USB hub and motor controllers, then stick the netbook on it.

Err...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:26:40 GMT

I'm making myself some grog for the comforting health-giving win. On googling for the recipe, I came across this for 'Navy grog' -

Navy Grog
1/2 oz Bacardi® light rum
1/2 oz Bacardi® gold rum
1/2 oz Bacardi® dark rum
1/2 oz Grand Marnier® orange liqueur
1 oz grapefruit juice
1 oz orange juice
1 oz pineapple juice
Pour liquors into an ice-filled collins glass. Add juices, shake, and garnish with an orange wedge and pineapple chunk.

Grand Marnier? Collins glass? Garnished with fruit? Really? Maybe in the US. Not in the RN, I think, its historical predilection for sodomy and the lash not withstanding.

Brown garments are brown

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:35:31 GMT

Preparations made for Firefly Halloween party. Should be fun :)

Floomph

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:45:17 GMT

In Toronto after 7 hour drive. TomTom is made of evil and doom; epi_lj is not.

How life changes over time

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:14:44 GMT

Going to Toronto tomorrow to visit epi_lj. It's been a long while since the last time, when I went to see Sarah, and my life has changed immeasurably in the interim. I wonder if they still have bangers.

Long day are long

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:10:54 GMT

It can be hometime now please.

Electronics nargery

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:59:11 GMT

So, I have one of these -

http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1392

which came with two of these -

http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/830

I can't figure out how the hell I'm supposed to attach them. The pins are very narrow so they don't naturally fit the rings on the board; I can sort of get things to work by angling the blocks such that the ring and ping connects but the connection breaks if I so much as breathe on it. Time to learn to solder - and if so, is the idea just to position them so the pins touch a point on the ring and solder that join - or is there an easier solution? It seems odd somehow that the terminal blocks aren't designed with a larger round peg on the bottom to just plug into the ring.

I did it for science

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:40:59 GMT

Behold, a triumph of British culinary engineering, the Full English Breakfast pizza. Well, ok, I skipped the egg. It's baked beans, bacon and sausage on French bread covered with mozzarella.

I am now going to feast on this and watch Mad Men with a Manhattan and a bottle of HP sauce at hand.

Work grumpy

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:00:46 GMT

My monitor died on Friday. It has been replaced with a horrible old clunker that runs at a lower resolution and has an indelibly grubby screen.

No IM program I have available can connect to Yahoo Messenger any more.

Also, for some reason, Firefox has decided it's forgotten who I am (I think there's some kind of Samba authentication problem going on) - so I have no bookmarks, I'm no longer logged into anything, and the back button doesn't seem to work. Very strange.

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:44:07 GMT

I'm trying to move from using a Lego chassis for my robot to a cheap R/C tank that I bought, but this is proving way more annoying than I'd hoped. In order to control the tank, I need to learn Real Electronics, about which I know nothing. I'm happy to learn it - it'll even come in handy at work, seeing as I'm an embedded software guy - but I feel like a pimply kid writing his first line of Basic.

I've identified the control wires for the tank motors, cut them, and verified I can drive them directly from a battery. I've gotten one of these -

http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1110

and managed to hook it up on a breadboard, such that (when, for some reason, I press the circuitboard down a bit) it gets power and goes into 'demo mode', which is supposed to drive the motors autonomously a bit so you can verify that your hardware's working. But it doesn't. It says it's doing demo mode, but the motor doesn't spin and I see 0 volts with a multimeter on the relevant pins. Argh.

Of course, even if I figure out that problem, it turns out I don't have all the bits I need anyway. In order to do useful work with it I need to connect it to a USB port on the netbook. I've got a USB-to-serial converter and a serial socket, but apparently serial as in RS232 and serial as in what little microcontrollers understand (TTL) is different; I need to lower the voltages and invert the signal (RS232 is active-high, TTL is active-low). I don't know enough electronics to make that circuit myself and I don't have a doohickey to hand to do it for me.

Argh. No motor control for me this weekend. Fortunately I've still got lots I can mess around with in software; I've got two webcams hooked up to the robot now so I'm trying to give it proper human-style stereoscopic vision. The camera also seems to be about two seconds behind events in the real world, which makes it rather hard to drive the robot; I'd like to figure out some solution for that.

Nerdy hobbies, the update

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 21:53:30 GMT

I've spent the last few days working on this.

Side view.

It's a netbook mounted on a Lego NXT-controlled tank chassis, with a webcam. I've written a little Linux server program which can drive it around and transmit the video output over Wifi to a client GUI running on a Linux desktop (or Windows for that matter; it's Qt and cross-platform). The GUI displays the webcam output and gives a simple numpad-based interface for driving.

This means I can drive it around from wherever I am in the house. I just took it for a spin around the downstairs without too much trouble other than one of the gears coming unseated.

The next step is to give it some on-board intelligence. Make it chase the cats, perhaps; they're already fascinated and a little unnerved by it.

The future is now

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:13:23 GMT

Ahaha, the second-hand Eee PC I bought for robotics purposes has arrived. This thing is tiny (it's one of the very small ones that only run Linux - about 9" by 6"). Should be fun to play with. It's bloody hard to type on though.

There are now four laptops in the house, five counting the ancient Sparc in the basement. Craziness. I remember when even one was a pretty large extravagance. Any minute now we'll be getting flying cars.

Retro

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:23:49 GMT

Manhattens are a guy's best friend.

Bah

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:54:58 GMT

Apparently I can't even make soup right these days. I had an accident with my jar of red pepper flakes and instead of a light sprinkling the whole thing went in. I scooped most of it off, but the result is still lavatastic.

*sighs*

The world can go fuck itself.

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:29:24 GMT

I want off.

More robot-y stuff

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:33:26 GMT

I continue to distract myself from the unhappy aspects of life with robot-y things. I've decided the best way forward is to use a laptop or netbook as the main 'brain', seeing as I can't get my iPaq to do Bluetooth and also given that the laptop has USB ports that are useful for all sorts of things - particularly webcams. Bluetooth/wireless webcams exist, but cost lotsofmoney, whereas I have several wired ones lying around the house.

So, I hied myself to Toys'R'Us, and got myself an RC vehicle large enough to strap a laptop to.

Bitsy wanted to drive it

I then attached my laptop, redneck-style.

And figured out a way to control it from a computer.

Now, there are problems with this. My motor control method makes my eyes bleed and if ever discovered will lead to my immediate expulsion from the Société Internationale des Génies Mechantes. There has to be a better way, probably involving hardware skills I don't yet have. I certainly don't feel too comfortable using the current method outside or anything since I could see it breaking and the car being locked into moving forward, driving off into the far distance while I chase along behind.

Also, while I have several webcams, only one of them works with Linux (the crappiest of them all, naturally). And my viewing method right now is running xawtv over a remote X session to my desktop over wifi, meaning it lags several seconds behind what's actually happening.