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Personal

Greensburg showcased on NPR

Story on All Things Considered on Greensburg rebuilding Green (fitting). It’s become quite a convergence of the channels. The Discovery Channel is doing a show on the rebuilding of a Greener Greensburg. The Learning Channel is following around a chosen family as they rebuild their house. My in-laws (the Mayor and his wife) have applied to be in that show, as they have yet to break ground on their new house.

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Categories
Personal

Resistance: Fall of Man review

Awesome game. Great plot, extremely long play (for me, maybe 30 hours at Hard level). I actually played it last Christmas with the PS3 I “won” the right to buy on Amazon, but just put this review up because I finished Halo 3.
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Categories
Personal

Halo 3 review

Finally played through Halo 3 at Heroic (started at Legendary, got stuck, changed to Heroic).

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Here’s my brief review. It’s fun, and plays well. At Heroic, it took me about 20 hours to play through.

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Personal

BMW 335xi review

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I got my new car at the beginning of November, it’s one of the first 2008s to come on the line in Munich. Here’s some of my thoughts on this vehicle. I got the lighter blue (monaco) outside, light tan and walnut interior, and premium, winter, as well as HD radio, USB/iPod and satellite radio packages.

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Personal

Stumble’d upon’s illusions

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Trying out StumbleUpon, after a recommendation from a friend.

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Categories
Technology & Gadgets

Playing house with Gutsy Gibbon

Well, rumors of a user-friendly installation and easy compatibility for Ubuntu 7.10 are greatly exaggerated. Although it’s easy to use, it’s really quite difficult to install. Here are some of my trials and tribulations, and how I fixed them.

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Personal

Thanksgiving snowstorm

Got a wonderful snowstorm (and some not-so-welcome 9 F temperatures) in the early morning on November 21st just in time for Thanksgiving (American, we already celebrated the Canadian one in October in Montreal).

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Categories
Personal

Japan

Here’s some of the stuff I’ve found interesting about Japan. This is my first time back in almost 3 years. Link to the photo gallery.

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Categories
Personal Technology & Gadgets

Daylight Saving Time

Finally upgraded all my computers and slugs to take into account the Daylight Savings Time switch in November versus October. All my computers and clocks seemed to do it all automagically, but my slug didn’t. Here how I fixed the time on the NSLU2 running SlugOS (formerly OpenSlug). This particular slug runs the weather station using wviewweather, so you’ll see a 1 hour (not real) gap in the data when I did the adjustment yesterday.

  • login
  • ipkg update
    ipkg remove timezones
    ipkg install tzdata-americas
    rm /etc/localtime
    ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Mountain /etc/localtime
Categories
Personal Technology & Gadgets

POCSAG decoding

My current project is to get rid of my digital fire pager (and possibly those of other folks on the department who are interested).

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I purchased a Realistic PRO-57 scanner, which is easily modified (done) to add a discriminator output using the excellent instructions here. I also purchased a two level data slicer to provide a serial port output. With the serial input, I can have any computer or slug in my house (with serial-USB adapter) send me an e-mail or a text message when I get a page. I’ll keep y’all appraised if it works out.