News

I have mad a change to the css for the site and have used a fixed position menu. That way if you have scrolled down to read some thing then the menu is still accessible on the left with out scrolling any more.

Its the dawn of a new era. The era of supreme commander 2. The first one was such fun but suffered from major slowdowns on every machine. I have played the supreme commander 2 demo and have high hopes that this will not be an issue. If so there will be massive battles the likes of which no game has seen before. I have pre-ordered supreme commander 2 and can not wait to play the first skirmish with the highest unit cap and four other AI opponents.

Just did some shoveling and man there is a lot of snow out there. Some places it is up to my knees. Good thing I came home early Friday.

One of the brand new seagate drives I bought tanked in my raid5 array. Normally not a big deal but for some reason it freaked linux out and linux could only see one of four drives on the system. Not knowing how to deal with this I ended up doing unrecoverable damage to the raid set. What I should have done was reboot the computer with the bad hard drive removed. Then tried to run mdadm -Asv /dev/md0. If that failed I should have then ran this command.

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --verbose --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc missing

The key here is the word missing. What mdadm will try to do is recognize that this used to be a four device raid5 setup and will just think that one drive is... you guessed it missing. As far as I know if your raid schema supports multiple failed drives you can use more than one missing clause in the command. The key to using the --create option successfully is making sure you specify --raid-devices with the exact number of disks the array had when you set it up and not the current number of active drives of the raid array.

So ubuntu 9.10 is just a big ball of crap on this hardware. I switched the server over to fedora 12 and I think every thing is up and running. I am going to restart one last time to make sure every thing auto loads and mounts like it should.

I think I still need to configure samba (pain in the ass) and a cron job to update dynamic dns for the domain.

Wow is the only thing to say. Even after seeing this movie two times it is still amazing. If you want to read just a bit more read the Avatar Review.

I just wanted to wish every one who visits the site a happy holiday and I hope you got every thing you wanted.

Read the new review of the RF Wireless Handheld Keyboard and Touchpad.

I have updated the Replug Review with some new info about issues resulting from leaving it in the cold.

There is a good chance of the site being down tomorrow as I move the server over to modern hardware. Out with the Pentium 2's and in with the Athlon X2.

So I was bord and used jquery to replace all <p> tags with <p><blink> that way all text in a <p> tag blinks at you.

Blink Bookmarklet

Just finished replacing my mixer motor in my van. Now I wont have to freeze this winter driving back and forth to work. For any one with a Windstar mini-van that is having this issue with the heater making a clicking noise or banging noise check out the link. Only took about an hour and I found the part at advanced auto for $50 with tax. One tip I would suggest is to remove just the radio and the bezel around it and you can get at all three screws to replace the motor.

Looks like a tech blog linked over to the site in there 15 DIY Guns That Will Blow Your Mind artical. I really need to find some thing good to follow up the nerf sniper riffle with.

Turns out my super mario wallpaper has been featured in a collection of "Baddass Super Mario desktop wallpapers". Glad people are enjoying the desktop artwork.

I have been in touch with some one who has kindly offered to send me some computer hardware to do a review on. The only hint I am going to give is that it would be great for HTPC's.

After having used linux from work for several months and being able to do most every thing with it. I am considering switching over to linux as my primary os at home. I already have one linux box running this website and doing some network routing. With my desktop though I need to be able to do more than that box ever does.

I think I am going to go with Ubuntu 9.10 and Compiz as the window decorations as that's what I have at work. The only down side to Compiz is that a lot of the features are buggy and I seam to always lose my desktop icons when using it. I also need to find a way to work with my cameras raw format files. The canon software works great I just need to figure out if it will run in wine or if I would have to use a virtual machine for it.

I will still keep my windows install to run games and such with. Soon though with virtual box supporting 3d acceleration I may just be able to fire up a virtual machine and run the games I have in that.

I am also planing on combining my web server/router and my file server into one. The new setup is going to end up having five drives. Four of which will be in a software raid 5 for security. The other will be dedicated to the os.

I have found a few things very frustrating when dealing with mac machines. Issue one came up Friday and that issue is the fact that there are four different display adaptors for the various macs (laptops and imacs). What is even better is the fact that they are not labeled in any way shape or form. If your going to use some thing non-standard please for the love of god label it so people can find the correct adaptor.

Issue two is the fact that you can not just create empty files in finder. Being a programmer, I do this all the time with my linux box and love to be able to do so. There are other small issues like managing the open windows and stuff like that but we wont get into it. I just wanted to let every one know these issues were out there and yes they are annoying.

I just found an article on md5 and sha1 description. The article says it failed on some but I ran those failed ones threw the tool and it decoded them fine. This is a very good example of why md5 and sha1 should not be used to has passwords. sha256 using the hash function in php seems like a very good option as I can not find any information on decoding it.

Just got a generic 9v adapter for my Boss Metal Zone guitar pedal. Had to make a quick little adapter because the pedal has a positive sleeve on the power  plug. The 9v adapter is a positive center pin so a quick adapter to reverse the polarity was in order. Lucky for me I had the spare parts laying around.

I have started working on a new electronics project. This one is going to be complicated and I hope I can figure it out. I am going to be trying to make a couple sensor modules that include wireless transceiver. Each one will report its findings back to a central location that is equipped with another transceiver. The central location will display that data to the user.

Think of a security system made with microcontrollers and you will have the basic idea. I am going to try and keep the cost of each sensor module to about $20 or under. The system that the sensors will report to will be very cheap, some thing like $10.

fter at least three hours of fighting with the nvidia card I bought (8400) I have found out how to get the RCA out working on it. I was using a cheap little S-Video to RCA adapter but that was the problem. I tried a dongle I had gotten from an older video card. The kind that breaks it out to the YPrPb connection. Now the thing nvidia never tells you is that if you plug a normal RCA into the Blue channel of the dongle then the card will go ahead and output RCA there. Well I hope I can save some one else some time with there media center setup.

I am a little late posting this to the news section but the cowon o2 review is live for every one to read.

I need to get some reviews up so every one has some thing new to check out. I have an PMP review coming up here soon so look for that some time this week.

1. don't re-size my browser window EVER!
2. don't have stupid flash videos of people walking around
3. do not try and redesign the user interface. It has been this way for a long time for a reason
4. do not open pop up ads
5. do not break your content up. I would much rather read a whole lot of it on one page than click next 100 times
6. pictures count as much as text content, maybe more so
7. live chat should not be started by one of your sales people
8. teach me some thing
9. do not just post content from other sites. Link to it an explain why YOU think its cool
10. stop supporting IE6

I am trying to get a couple press passes to go to origins gaming convention here in columbus. I am sure there are more than a few readers who like games like Magic The Gathering.