Ok, maybe not that much, but still, I’d like it if my cellular provider (Verizon) would, for a low low price (say another $3-5/month), give us a VoIP adapter for our home phone and allow us to receive calls with CallerID to our cell numbers through it with no per-minute charges. Verizon’s coverage in our neighborhood is weak, and any time I use my mobile in my house, i regret it. At the same time, I feel silly spending for two cell phones, a land line with no features and DSL. It would be nice to cut one of them out, save a little money, and gain some convenience.

Even cooler would to skip the VoIP adapter and use a mobile with VoIP and very power-efficient WiFi that would choose the cheapest best signal.

Everyday Matters. “Do not fear mistakes. there are none.” Miles Davis said that.

Everyday Matters is a series of occasional essays on creative things, journal making, drawing,etc. intended to challenge, inspire and perplex. Please feel free to comment and straighten my ass out.

I like the look and feel of this blog. (via BoingBoing)

Many-to-Many: Moblogging from the front and the new Reformation

Jaques Barzun, author of the marvelous history of modernity From Dawn to Decadence (1500 – present), makes the point that the Catholic Church as a pan-European political force was done in by the Protestant Reformation, itself fueled by the printing press. Once the Church lost the ability to control the direct perception of scripture, thanks to the printing of (relatively) cheap bibles in languages other than Latin, their loss of political hegemony followed.

This is what we are seeing now relative to the military�s control of information. A year or so ago, someone in the DoD told me that the thing that would most affect the prosecution of the war in Iraq would be images of DAB�s � Dead American Bodies. The unplanned spread of photos of coffins, and now of torture victims, means that control of this part of the war is outside the military�s hands.

I’ve been babbling about this same basic parallel for the past 3-4 years, though my focus has been on the absurd extension of copyright as compared to the Catholic church’s control of scripture.

Its good to see a related meme gaining some hold.

Boing Boing: Online t-shirt store: “we were gagged by Google”

From: Google:The following…items that must be removed from your site in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:

Recall Bush – White T-shirt (with radio control on head)
Dumb and Dumber White T-shirt – Bush and Blair: The Movie
You’re Fired – George W. Bush White T-shirt
Dump Cheney White T-shirt – “Halliburton” tattooed across head
Miserable Failure T-shirt – George W. Bush
Kerry sucks (too) – T-shirt”

If this is true, then I’ve pretty much had it with Google. I have my doubts thought. Google backlash is growing in the run-up to their IPO, and stoking it would be a good way to get some free publicity.

I’m getting close with my HTPC.

I waffled long enough that the Biostar m7ncg-400 motherboards available were at version 7.2, which offer control of voltages and multipiers — Just the thing for running a cool system. I matched that with a Athlon Mobile 2500+ processor, 512 MB of memory and a 160 MB Barracuda (or was it 160). I stuffed them all in a Athenatech A100 case. All and all, compact and not too ugly to put into the living room.

Its a bit noisy though. The 60mm case fans don’t help, and the CPU fan is probably running faster than it needs to, since the CPU temp roughly matches the case temp (32C under load). I’m going to wait until I have the thing configured fully though before I start tweaking. I’m planning on cutting out the stamped fan openings and putting in wire grills for less turbulent flow, and perhaps using quieter fans. I’m definitely going to work on lowering fan speeds. The HDD is pretty quiet, but I may try isolating it from the case with rubber washers or something. The final possibility is to ditch one or more of the 60mm case fans in back and add an 80mm in front, which will likely require improving the airflow through the front panel.

Still left to do on the hardware software side:

1. Network connectivity in the living room. I’ll probably use wireless. I could get away with 802.11b since video storage is going to be local and I already have an 802.11b access point. However, since I need to acquire additional hardware, I’m thinking of going with something 802.11g ready so that at some point in the future, I could actually use a storage server somewhere else and still deal in high quality MPEG2 video

2. The actual tuner and PVR software. Probably going to go with SageTV and a Connexant Blackbird reference design based card.

3. THe TV front end. Sage does most things (TV, other vid files, pictures, music) in its own UI, so I’ll probably start with that, but I may need to try something else if Sage’s parts aren’t up to snuff.

4. Configuring the remote. I bought an ATI remote wonder and will have to set it up to drive whatever front end I use.

One final note: I started out with Corsair Value Select PC3200 CL2.5 RAM and it gave me fits. The system would reboot whenever I did anything even slightly graphics intensive. Memetst86 didn’t show any problems. I suspected the powersupply, but neither sever over or underclocking made a big difference as far as stability went. I finally started to believe other reports of problems with the above mentioned ram and the onboard video on my motherboard, so I swapped it for some Kingston Value Ram with similar specs which may have actually been cheaper, and my problems went away.

The fact that movable type’s configuration UI only allow you to limit the number of posts appearing on the front page by date, rather than number is annoying. I know I can acheive it by muddling with my templates, but as is probably obvious, I’m not keen on muddling with my templates at this point.