Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Put the old ISA SoundBlaster card back into moe. Had to put these lines into the kernel config:

device          pcm
device          sbc0    at isa? port 0x220 irq 10 drq 1 flags 0x15

Also, I had to go into the BIOS and tell it to reserver IRQ 10 for ‘legacy ISA’.

Then, ‘dmesg’ showed:

pcm0:  port 0xe400-0xe403,0xe000-0xe003,0xdc00-0xdcff irq 11 at device 7.5 on pci0
pcm0: 
sbc0:  at port 0x220-0x22f irq 10 drq 1 flags 0x15 on isa0
pcm1:  on sbc0

Note that the SoundBlaster is on pcm1. Now I checked it:

moe# cd /dev
moe# cat sndstat
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0:  at io 0xdc00 irq 11 (1p/1r/0v channels duplex)
pcm1:  at io 0x220 irq 10 drq 1:5 bufsz 4096d (1p/1r/0v channels duplex)

When I tried ‘sh MAKEDEV snd0’, nothing worked, but when I noticed that the SB was on pcm1, I did ‘sh MAKEDEV snd1’ and then it all started working.

There is a crew filming a movie in front of a house on San Pasqual near Caltech. I guess that it’s supposed to be set in some place that’s not Southern California, because they’re wrapping sheets of rubber fake bark on the trunks of the palm trees to make them look like ‘regular’ trees.

Abiword was broken this morning. It was complaining that it couldn’t find:

libintl.so.2
libexpat.so.2

Both of these were present in newer versions, so I just made soft links so that the old name would resolve and the program could run.

In a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture moment, there is a bus parked near our house. It’s painted in New Jersey Transit colors. Maybe this is like those stories I’ve read about migrating birds being blown off-course by storms. But the route marker on the front says “Beverly Hills”. Maybe NJT has a new Weehawken-Beverly Hills route going…

  

Lucinda learned to ride her bike today. She practiced up and down the driveway. Later on, we went to an empty parking lot up the street and she rode around for a long time. She is able to balance, as well as to start and stop by herself.

Also, this afternoon, we made a fire in the fireplace and toasted marshmallows. This was Lucinda’s first time to have toasted marshmallows, and she liked it a lot.

Figured out how to set up automatic recording with Coaster on Lucinda’s Mac. For thresholds, I set -28db and 1500ms for the stop, and -22db and 200ms for the restart.

The computer was making a ‘fan going bad’ noise. After opening it up and poking at the fans, I figured it was the chipset cooler fan that was going bad. I replaced it with the one from the old main board, which was the one that I recently bought from the Soyo web site. Now things sound normal again.

We went to see “My Blue Sky” at The Project in Downtown L.A. today. This was an art installation of sound recordings from various places. Very strange. After that, we went to the Museum of Neon Art to see the “Bumfuzzle” exhibit.

Lucinda is learning to ride her bicycle without the training wheels. This evening she achieved the equivalent of the Wright Brothers’ 12-second first flight. She rode down our driveway far enough to show that she now understands the concept of how to balance on the bike. She still needs to practice to train her reflexes, but now she knows what to do.

Today we took Lucinda to the Skirball Cultural Center to see the exhibits there. She was curious to learn more about Chanukah and such, so this was a chance for her to see a bit about Jewish culture, even if we aren’t actually Jewish. [Despite having a Jewish-sounding name.]