Other articles


  1. GPS Tagging Photos

    Since I've been hiking a bit more recently I've gotten it into my head that I should be GPS-tagging my photos. Unfortunately, this isn't easy since the camera doesn't have any way of putting the location tags into the photos itself. Pretty much the easiest way to do it is …

    read more
  2. Cowan's Gap Vacation

    My in-laws, Tiff, Brady and I went camping at Cowan's Gap this weekend. Despite being very cold, the campground and facilities were quite good. Brady and I spent the time hiking up to an overlook on one side of the valley one day, then up a "Three Mile Trail" the …

    read more
  3. Initial Samsung SGH-D820 Review

    The phone is working pretty well so far. It's definitely a lot thinner and lighter. The display is extremely clear and bright. The biggest thing I've noticed so far is that some actions require going through menus more than I would like, but I'm starting to find shortcuts through most …

    read more
  4. Ultrasound Complete

    Tiff and I spent the evening showing off the pictures that we got. Unfortunately we didn't get to be on a 4D ultrasound machine, so we just got normal fax-paper quality pictures. Still, the whole experience was great. We got to see the baby moving for the first time, and …

    read more
  5. Fire Company 15/49 Raffle

    Last Saturday there was a raffle held to benefit Fire Companies 15 (West End) and 49 (South Newton). Overall it was a big success, raising a bunch of money for both companies. I was in charge of the registration process - mostly.

    In the beginning (almost a year ago) I thought …

    read more
  6. Laptop Upgrade Choices

    Given that I got my laptop over 3 years ago and it's currently out of warranty, I thought it might be a good time to start looking at upgrades. I still don't have any real gripes about my laptop - it's performing incredibly well for being over 3 years old. The …

    read more
  7. 17 Week Baby Update

    Tiff and I had our 17 week prenatal visit last Thursday. We got to listen to the baby's heartbeat again and the doctor told us it was in the 140-150 BPS range. We also had a pleasant surprise - the Chambersburg Hospital does have some of the newer 4D Ultrasound machines …

    read more
  8. 12 Week Baby Update

    Tiff and I had our 12 week prenatal visit and everything seems to be going well. There is a concern that the pregnancy might have brought out diabetes in her or that she's developing gestational diabetes early since her diabetes screening test came back a little high. I think it's …

    read more
  9. PVR Getting Better

    The best part is that the WAF is still pretty high considering that she thought I broke the TV for awhile (she was watching Fedora text-mode boot and seeing "FAILURE" in big red letters and various errors scrolling past the screen).

    I broke down and purchased a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-500 …

    read more
  10. Eventful Evening of Life and Hacking

    Got home tonight and got gas for the lawn mowers so Tiff and I could mow the weeds for the first time in 3 weeks (the grass is all brown - it really was just weeds). We then went over to the South Hampton park and walked a mile and a …

    read more
  11. Macromedia Flash finally works

    Ever since I upgraded to FC5 my Flash plugin has crashed Firefox. This typically wasn't too big of a deal since I primarily use Konqueror, but I've been using Firefox more often recently since it's javascript support and web debugging tools are a little better. The browser crashing was getting …

    read more
  12. PVR 2, Doug 1

    I guess I get one point for finally getting MythTV installed (better than last time). Unfortunately, I think my AverTV Stereo card is broken. I can't get it to fully tune in any stations no matter what I try - and I've tried a lot. Picking various card and tuner ids …

    read more
  13. HTPC One - Ignition!

    Sorry - guess all the space shuttle stuff is getting to me ;-)

    Thanks to a recent deliver of one ATI X300 w/ s-video output, my HTPC seems to be running. I'm currently watching The Polar Express through Xine, but there's a lot of configuring to go.

    The display is currently pretty …

    read more
  14. Desktop No More

    Well, I made my decision. I'm killing my desktop.

    I swapped Thor's Athlon 64 mobo with Manfred's Athlon XP motherboard under the assumption that the 64bit stuff will be put to more use in the PVR. That went fine (Thor was still FC4 - i386 version :-/). The problem came when I …

    read more
  15. Life without a desktop?

    So, I'm trying to figure out what to do about my dead Xbox. Well, not about the dead Xbox, but about not having a PVD. The problem is I don't have the hardware laying around to build a PVD/PVR/DVR. Unless I use something I already have - like my …

    read more
  16. Prenatal Visit Results

    First picture of our baby! It was really neat to watch the baby's little heart fluttering on the ultrasound machine. Tiff had to have an internal ultrasound since she's 7 weeks 5 days and the baby isn't big enough to be seen on an external ultrasound (more likely it's not …

    read more
  17. A-camping we will go

    Tiff and I made a small purchase this weekend.. a 2001 Coachman Clipper travel trailer.

    We managed to get pretty wet at Raystown this year. We had at least one thunderstorm every night this year (except Saturday). Friday night it literally rained all night, and started dripping on us around …

    read more
  18. Resurrecting the Schwinn Mirada

    My bike has been in my Dad's shed for quite awhile now. Quite awhile. I think it's time for me to get it out and use it a bit.

    The first thing it's gonna need are tires and tubes. I remember that getting them isn't a great deal of fun …

    read more
  19. Small Battles

    Well, while I might have spent about 4 hours of my evening trying to get my Xbox to work, I did manage to take 10 minutes and replace a dying fan in Thor to get my file server up and running again. I guess that should account for something.

    I …

    read more
  20. Xbox is on the way out

    Looks like I might have to revive my PVR project. My Xbox's network card appears to have gone out, and after a night of fiddling w/ it, I don't think I want to put any more effort into it. Now I just have to get it working again so it …

    read more
  21. kernel-2.6.17-1.2145 seems a little better

    Well, it still tries to force the bcm43xx driver in place, but at least I can rmmod it and modprobe ndiswrapper without things getting wacky. I'm going to try to get the bcm43xx driver loaded up w/ WPA and see if it works at all... here's crossing my fingers.

    read more
  22. Post-Vacation Thoughts

    The vacation was very nice, and much needed. We left Saturday morning around 07:00 for Ruckersville, VA and arrived around 10:00 - pretty good time. We went to the ACAC waterpark (mostly a big pool with a couple slides) and spent the afternoon there, baking and swimming. We ate …

    read more
  23. Big Mass Update

    Figured I need to throw a ton of stuff out there, since it seems like so much is going on.

    Last Tuesday (the night before my vacation to Raystown) I had a trustee meeting at church. I had no clue what was going on, but I was supposed to go …

    read more
  24. Perspective

    Ah .. the blogger returns! At first, you might think I'm referring to some other recent life happenings, but there's a lot more than that.

    Life at PA.net was good. I didn't really like where the owners of the company where going (or not going, actually) but the work was …

    read more
  25. Busy and Eventful Weekend

    We spent the weekend running around all over the place. Saturday we had a birthday party for Gabe Burkholder at Adam and Shanen's place where we got to see a bunch of people we hadn't seen in awhile (some of them very pregnant!). After that we went to my parent's …

    read more
  26. Trackbacks Disabled

    Due to comment spam, I've had to disable trackbacks. I don't think this is a big problem for anyone; the technical implementation was really bad. I don't have any approved trackbacks, but 1,938 non-approved trackbacks - all spam. This should hopefully slow down the flood of 'approve this comment!' emails …

    read more
  27. Fox Hunt winners!

    [Brady] and I managed to find N3MMH in a little over an hour today using a 3-element yagi we built yesterday (and finished this morning) out of an old TV antenna. Not bad! Of coruse, that means we have to be the fox next year...

    In other ham-related news, I …

    read more
  28. Crazy DNS

    After a FC4 glibc update a couple weeks ago, I've found that yum updates stopped working. When I went to debug it, I eventually found that the "lesser" programs like ping and ftp worked, while the "higher-level" programs didn't; like curl, wget, ncftp, and yum.

    I tracked this problem back …

    read more
  29. Site Update - Gallery 2.1

    I've finally upgraded my photo album to Gallery 2.1rc1. I've been holding out on upgrading due to the fact that Gallery 2.0 didn't have an RSS module - now 2.1 does :-).

    The theme was very easy to modify to include my custom header and footer to merge it …

    read more
  30. One Month Later..

    Yeah, I did get my car back last month. Really should've blogged about that awhile ago :-/

    Got my first "Genius of the Day" award yesterday at work. Made me feel good, even if it was just a small suggestion for a change to how the customer sees stuff.

    I got …

    read more

links

social