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2005

Lego Star Destroyer

I remember when the Lego Star Destroyer came out in Christmas of 2002. I begged my wife for one for Christmas. At $300, it was the biggest Lego set to ever be released at over 3000 pieces. I had a vision of assembling it and never taking it apart and setting it on a pedestal…somewhere.

Alas, I never did get one.

Via Wonderland, an old blog post but a good one.

This couple did get a Lego Star Destroyer, and using their webcam at 5 second intervals, took over 4000 shots of them putting it together over 10 hours, including a dinner break. It’s a classic blog post from Jan. of ’03. Alice is right, someone desperately needs to put that to music. At just over 4 minutes, it would be a perfect music video.

Medium and large versions of the video are available here.

Lego Star Destroyer

  • in Humor
  • 1 min read

Smart Advertising

I live about 35 minutes from downtown Minneapolis, pretty far out in the suburbs, in a town of just under 20,000 people called Chaska.

As I’m driving back from dropping the dog off at the kennel (which is really far out there), I see a billboard just outside the Chaska limits for an upcoming GI Joe toy convention in downtown Minneapolis.

Now, I don’t know if they did any market research about who exactly lives in Chaska, or just couldn’t afford a real billboard closer to downtown, say on a busy highway, but I can’t believe that that billboard is going to be effective at all.

Just to give you an idea of how far out I live from Minneapolis:


Google Map from Chaska to Miinneapolis

BurnIt Club

How cool is this – the Burn It club?

I came across Kymberlie McGuire via her Flickr site.

The Burn It Club looks very cool – every quarter she picks a theme, past themes have included driving music, remixes, and school, and you email her to join a group. She puts you in a group of 4, and you make 5 mix CDs (all different artists and songs, just follow the theme), one to keep, one to send to Kymberlie and each person in your group, and you get one in return.

I’ve bookmarked the site and definitely want to join in on that the next time it comes around. What a cool idea.

Cursed, I tell you

I’m cursed I tell you, cursed.

It’s a well known fact in my circle of friends not to let me build PCs. Something always seems to happen. I’d guess I have about a 30-35% success rate on the first try that PC’s I build work.

One of my major goals this week on vacation was to rebuild a few machines, including:

  1. My server
  2. Athlon 64 box
  3. Music backup box which (I think) had a bad video card
  4. Rebuild my wireless network, including my wife’s laptop with a MIMO card

Well, I’ve had a 25% success rate this week. Some vacation.

To recap:

The server: I’ve watched the server die a slow death all week. From the first hard drive failure 6 months ago, I’ve seen the CMOS reset, the BIOS reset a few times, and now booting from the DVD drive isn’t working. I looked into buying a 1U rackmount server today to replace it, but can’t seem to get wife approval yet.

Athlon 64: Swapped out processors and video card (got a sweet deal on a 6800 OC), now getting a 25 or 52 error on the Abit uGuru machine. Need to take the memory out and troubleshoot. Figures.

Music backup box: Success! Swapped out video cards (took the 4200 out of the Athlon 64 since it got a 6800) and bam, no more lockups. Yay.

Wireless Network & Kelly’s laptop: Success and then oops. Wireless network swapped out, got WEP up and running, and went to install the MIMO card in Kelly’s laptop (my old one). Followed directions, installed the drivers first, then put the card in the PCMCIA slot, and the card wouldn’t power on or be recognized. Very weird, as especially for the last year I had been running an Atheros card in that laptop when it had been running Linux as Broadcom built-in wireless sucks. Flashed the bios, and bam, machine won’t power on. HP told me to take it in for service. Wife not happy with me at all, as she wanted it on our trip home this weekend.

Success rate this week: 25%. To top it all off, I had powered off my desktop to do some cable management, and when I powered it on to go to HP’s site for support, I got 2 non-system disk errors. Was reaching for a LiveCD when I rebooted one mroe time and it came on. I was pretty livid at that point.

Moral of the story? Don’t let me touch your PC. Ever.

Playing with Panorama



storm-panorama-full-big, originally uploaded by silwenae.

There was a huge storm Monday night, and the sky was 3 different shades of colors.

Attached are two (attempted) panoramic shots of the sky from my backyard. Unfortunately, on both attempts, you can clearly see the stitching lines, but you can see the sky changing colors.

The big one above was made with Microsoft’s Digital Image Suite 10, and the second, smaller one below was made with The GIMP with just the first two photo’s.

storm-pan-part1-big

Podcasting now in iTunes

Sheesh, I mention the other day how I’ve gotten in to podcasting in a big way, and then Apple goes and makes it mainstream just to copy me (no, really!).

Apple’s iTunes 4.9 now has Podcasting support. Windows users can download Apple’s iTunes 4.9 here. Suppose I should fire up the old Mac Mini and take a look.

And for the record, I’ve been downloading podcasts for the last year intermittently, and burning them to CD for long car rides. Just hadn’t done the whole automated thing.

Supreme Court rules against Grokster

The verdict is in this morning and the Supreme Court has ruled against Grokster in MGM vs. Grokster.

Here’s a couple of key points from the article:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that companies that sell file-sharing software can be held liable for copyright infringement.

(Emphasis mine) – Companies that market and sell P2P software for the sole purpose of infrigmenent is what the court is saying. Software such as bittorrent – which was developed to transfer large files such as movie trailers and linux distributions – wouldn’t be an issue. That, and bittorrent is free.

“One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright … is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” Justice David Souter wrote in the ruling.

The Supreme Court has remanded the case back to the lower court that originally ruled for Grokster.

The good news is that 1984’s Betamax ruling is still law. Devices made, that could infringe, can still be made. What the court has said is don’t create a device and market to the fact that it’s only made to infringe copyright. The bad news is, that burden of proof is now on the manufacturer’s to prove that they didn’t create and/or market to the fact that a device can infringe.

It’s not over yet. I’ll update the post when the EFF gets their opinion up.

Google to launch video service Monday

John Battelle’s blog has the whole story:

I’ve confirmed that Monday Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. This is the logical next step for Google’s video search and upload function, which began taking uploads from anyone who cared to submit back in April.

Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged as “free” available for real time streaming through the VLC player, which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

This is big. Mr. Battelle goes on to theorize that this is a shot against Microsoft in the coming war as Windows Media Player is a stand-alone app with it’s own DRM issues.

VLC is a pretty cool project. I’ve been using it on Linux and Windows since January when The Current launched so I could listen to the AACPlus feed. VLC does it all – video, music, streaming, server, it’s a pretty amazing piece of software and it will be very interesting to see what Google has done to it and how it continues to evolve.