Finally, a class was cancelled at CSUS. It’s been 2/3 of an entire semester with 5 classes
and only 1 cancelled so far. When I was going to ARC, I could look forward to several missed
classes per semester :). Oh well, I got to go to work for an extra two hours and made some
extra money.

While I was at work, I bought a motherboard and a processor (AMD XP 1800+) with my employee
discount for the PVR box (mentioned below). I got home and assembled it using the
case from my
old computer. So far I haven’t turned
it on yet because of the shelf (mentioned below) made it hard to plug in cables, so I’m
waiting to get some more free time and run it in the other room.

Well, it’s been over a month since my last update, and a decent amount of stuff has
happened since then, I just haven’t gotten around to updating this page yet. So, in
a pseudo-random order, here’s my recent history.

car alarm
While my dad was here, he also put in my car alarm for me since I’m not very good at wiring
things, not to mention my innate fear of getting electromocuted. I managed to be little more
than a peanut gallery while he was hooking up all the stuff. We still need to buy some relays
so that I can have it trip my door-locks remotely too, but my dad is convinced that the simple
solution for attaching the relays to the circuit won’t work, so I’m not going to doubt him.
I’ve scanned the picture of the circuit so if anyone has any ideas on how to hook it up,
let me know. Here is the picture. Thanks in advance :).
It’s also the first time that my new car has been apart, so it was neat looking the way it
was made.

new shelf
Also while he was here, he put a shelf up for my computer. It makes it much more convenient
for my desk situation because it literally doubles the space I have. Now I can put my laptop
on the desk as well as my monitor and mouse for my desktop. Too bad the only linux drivers for
my 802.11b card
are Red Hat only binaries and I’ve got
Slackware on the router box I’d put it in. No amount of
fidgiting would make that one work.

update: pictures
1
2
3

custom pvr box
I’ve wanted to get a Tivo for a long time, but I’ve never really wanted to pay so much to
buy one and then have to pay a monthly subscription. At $250 for the 40 hour one, plus $250
more for a lifetime (for the box) subscription, it’s much more economical to build a computer
myself and run my own software on it. Not to mention it will have a lot more features like
net connectivity, and not having to plug the phone line into it. The only thing it wouldn’t
have is the ability to tune two channels at once with directv like the directivo can.
I browsed the net for software that I could use, and I’ve settled on running
mythtv. So last Monday (April 14th),
I got a 200 gig hard drive from fry’s electronics (I had the
name before they bought out Incredible Universe!) and put it in my current 1.333ghz desktop,
removed unplugged the other hard drives, and then installed Debian
on it. It took me a while to get the graphic drivers working for my geforce4 ti4200 after
finally downloading the kernel source and recompiling since Debian Woody ships with a
kernel compiled by an old version of gcc. Then it’s a long time getting the sound drivers
working for the onboard sound on my ASUS A7M266. In the meantime I went to Best Buy and got
a tuner card
(coincidentally enough it’s the same one the author of mythtv got) and managed to get the
drivers working for that thing. Finally, after turning off the KDE sound manager server,
I was able to get the sound recording working through the program. So now it’s a week later,
and I let it run and had it record a bunch of shows while I went to school+work. I plan on
reinstalling linux when I get the final box since I only partitioned it with 137 gigs since
that’s how much it recognized without the ATA100 drivers. I don’t think I like Debian that
much, so I’m probably going to put Slackware on it instead, although one of my co-workers says
I should put a “real” operating system on it like Red Hat or SuSe. I might contemplate Red
Hat, to get the wireless card working in it, although I’ve heard lots of bad things about it.

Anyways, that should be everything important that I’m willing to spill on this web page.
Hopefully I won’t forget to update (or be lazy and just not do it) so much and maybe more
frequent updates in the future :).

I’m selling
an item on ebay. I’ve had my ebay account for several years and never actually
used it for anything. Now I have, and hopefully I can make some money :).

On a related note, I hate how the phone I got last week to replace the crappy AT&T
free2go pre-paid wireless (more on that later perhaps) needs to be recharged every
other day. I liked the other phone (Nokia
5165) because I got the extended battery and the charge lasted for like 3 weeks.
However I didn’t really care for the menu system it had because there was only a
single “command” button so it was confusing as to whether the button would call
or hang up or call someone again. Oh well, that phone is not in use anymore and
has been replaced by my
new phone.

In other news, my good friend and co-worker at CWNet has opened a business this past
weekend. The Game Station is an Internet
Gaming Cafe with a T1 line running to it and consoles as well. I’ve been there the
past few days and it’s pretty fun, although there hasn’t been much business while I
was there. So if any of you are in the Sacramento area, feel free to drop by. You
can get directions to it here.
It’s pretty fun to play Battlefield 1942 with multiple people in the same server
when you can see each other’s monitors :).

On another note, my dad pointed out that my laptop was in this week’s Fry’s ad and
it had another instant rebate on it. So we both went, and my mom came too because
she was the one that had to put it on her credit card because the stupid credit
card companies deny me any other credit than the ridiculous $200 credit limit
“secured card” that I have, which puts a block on $300 in my savings account. Explain
that to me! To think I’ve spent several thousand dollars on that thing and
I still get denied, even though I’m preapproved. And then I get a ding on my credit
report making it even harder to get credit. </rant>. We thought that
Fry’s would give us crap because it was only an “instant rebate” and not the advertised
price, but they gave it to us no hassle, but not the 110% price match. We didn’t
really want to argue so we took it and went shopping. My mom ended up getting
Season 1 of Highlander
and Burglar, which I watched on my
laptop on the way home. I also got a Blue
LED case fan, but I don’t know if I like it yet because the LED won’t turn off
at night (unless it has something to do with that other wire we didn’t know what was
for). I also find amusing that Fry’s was selling gas masks. Good ol’ capitalism.

I also had fun wardriving (if you want to call it that) on the trip. I found 9 networks
available, but only 2 I could successfuly get in to. Not that I expected much though,
because the car was going too fast.