Stan’s Obligatory Blog

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.

The computer has developed a new quirk. Now if I tell it to reboot, it goes down and stays down. It hangs in the hardware reset phase. Then if I pull the power cord to cycle power, it seems to usually self-test and boot after about six or eight power cycles. So far it has done this on Sunday morning, and then twice this evening.

Installed XFree86 4.3.0 and Mozilla 1.5 on Bort for testing today. The only catch was having to add ‘cd /usr/local/linux-mozilla’ to the ‘run-mozilla.sh’ script.

Added an optional title to the blog program. The title defaults to ‘Web Log for <yourname>’. The title field overrides this. Also added a few new fields to the logusers table:

alter table logusers add column l_logtitle tinytext after l_lastname;
alter table logusers add column l_textwidth int(11) default 100 after l_displaynum;
alter table logusers add column l_textalign char(1) default 'L' after l_displaynum;

I added a title field to the log, so individual entries can have their own optional titles.

mysql> alter table weblog add column title tinytext after parselevel;

Then I added logic to edit.php and weblog.php to add and display the titles.

Going to experiment with recording audio with Lucinda’s Mac:

http://www.visualclick.de/

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=1f1f7qj.boz2xg1u22znqN%40%5B192.168.0.2%5D

Tried to scan, and xscanimage was broken. Had to recompile from ports and reinstall. Had to edit /usr/local/etc/sane.d/epson.conf to point the ‘epson’ backend at the USB scanner. Tried to print, and ran out of black ink. Put in a new cartridge.

Got a new 256MB PC133 DIMM from Staples to replace the one that had gone bad. $54.06 with tax. Sent in for the $20 rebate from PNY.

I installed the ‘audio/mad’ port which can convert MP3 to PCM:

moe# madplay -v -o raw:Entropy.pcm Entropy.mp3
MPEG Audio Decoder 0.14.2 (beta) - Copyright (C) 2000-2001 Robert Leslie
     Title: Entropy
    Artist: MC Hawking
     Album: A Brief History of Rhyme
      Year: 1994
     Genre: Rap
   Comment: www.mchawking.com
 00:03:21 Layer III, 128 kbps, 44100 Hz, joint stereo (MS), no CRC
7722 frames decoded (0:03:21.7), +0.2 dB peak amplitude, 7 clipped samples

Then to burn them to a CD:

moe# burncd -f /dev/acd0a audio  mighty.pcm emchawking.pcm creation.pcm crazy.pcm LedZeppelinMedley.pcm JesseHelms.pcm Entropy.pcm fixate
next writeable LBA 0
writing from file mighty.pcm size 20664 KB
written this track 20664 KB (100%) total 20664 KB
next writeable LBA 9149
writing from file emchawking.pcm size 36306 KB
written this track 36306 KB (100%) total 56971 KB
next writeable LBA 25108
writing from file creation.pcm size 24408 KB
written this track 24408 KB (100%) total 81380 KB
next writeable LBA 35887
writing from file crazy.pcm size 24304 KB
written this track 24305 KB (100%) total 105686 KB
next writeable LBA 46621
writing from file LedZeppelinMedley.pcm size 54301 KB
written this track 54302 KB (100%) total 159988 KB
next writeable LBA 70415
writing from file JesseHelms.pcm size 33480 KB
written this track 33481 KB (100%) total 193470 KB
next writeable LBA 85144
writing from file Entropy.pcm size 34749 KB
written this track 34749 KB (100%) total 228219 KB
fixating CD, please wait..