05 Aug 2005
Just before we moved into our new house earlier this year, I posted thirty-nine photos of it (empty). The first comment read something like this:
A house without furniture is one thing. An atrium without Bonsai is a crime.
– Sam
Well, today we were chopping a moderate-sized mulberry tree (read: big enough to put a sizable dent in our house, or the house next door, if we weren’t really careful. Actually, we’d already had a limb fall on the roof of the neighbours behind us, which we carefully — and by that I mean with a chainsaw — removed without any damage) that decided it’d love to fall into the back of our house. You can sort of see the mulberry tree in this photo… it’s the massive one towards the right of frame, but the sun obscures its density somewhat.
Mercifully, we were cutting high up enough that it didn’t quite fall far enough to crash into the glass itself — we hadn’t thought that far ahead, otherwise we would have shut the crazy roof shutter things as a precaution — but it did slam into the back of the house, and the doors were open (because we were running power to outside… the usual)… so, presto, our atrium becomes a garden.
I didn’t think anything of it (aside from “oh, crap, this is going to take some cleaning up” and “oops, there goes the back wall of our house”, amongst other things) until later, so unfortunately the photo isn’t as good as it could have been:
Just… imagine it with a rather dense tree there. It’s better than a bonsai-filled atrium. It’s an indoor micro-forest!
03 Aug 2005
I wrote some months ago about my adventures with cleaning and rendering useless a motherboard that I’d found on the side of the road, in which I accidentally removed a surface-mounted capacitor from the surface it was mounted on (duh).
It appears that capacitor did absolutely nothing.
Earlier this afternoon, I played with a bunch of hardware trying to find some stuff that worked for Marcelo, before establishing that the best of the bunch, the motherboard I’d broken (or ‘broken’) — it seemed to be really good quality in the whole time I was playing with it — was absolutely fine. After much changing and plugging and everything else that’s involved in building a computer from scraps, we wound up with the following specs:
- Pentium 3 866
- Gigabyte 6VXC7-4X-P motherboard
- 384MB of RAM
- 16MB Voodoo3 (2000, I’m pretty sure… it had TV-out, too — as in the socket was there and soldered on — but the blanking plate covered it… go figure. Didn’t have time to pull it apart/an S-Video cable to test.) AGP
- Two hard drives… a 10GB (his original) and a 13GB (added)
And it all seems to work without any problems, despite missing that 400th capacitor lost one fateful day ;) Ah, I love technology when it just works even when it shouldn’t!
03 Aug 2005
I’ve just uploaded the Bake the Cake video from the beginning of the year to Ourmedia/Archive.org because my iiNet webspace ceased to exist some months ago now, and it lacked any other permanent home (with sufficient bandwidth).
It’s still just the WMV file, but I’m hoping to put a higher resolution version/different media format version up at some point in the future. You can grab the WMV file here, or view the video’s page on Ourmedia. If nothing else, consider this an experiment on my part with Ourmedia/Archive.org’s services.
02 Aug 2005
I wrote some time ago about Opera performing brilliantly and how, when Firefox collapsed on me (it’s still a bit shaky – middle-click opening of new tabs is now rather flawed, even in the ‘fixed’ release), I fell in love with it. Well, as much as one can with a piece of software, anyway.
I also wrote briefly of how Tori told me about a very cool media service called GarageBand, which publishes music from independent artists free of charge, even going so far as to offer (shock, horror) un-DRM-encumbered MP3 downloads of the vast majority of tracks.
So where does Flash fit into all of this?
Well. About that. GarageBand has this nifty Flash player thing going, which is very cool, except for when you’re using Firefox: every time I have it running whilst trying to do anything in the background (that is, within Firefox, in another tab or something), the audio buffer dies until whatever I’m doing in the background has started to render (or maybe resolved a host, or something… whatever).
Opera, on the other hand, handles this flawlessly. The window pops open, Flash loads faster (notably, using exactly the same plugin as the Mozilla family, if I recall correctly), and I can do whatever I want in the background without it skipping a beat. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a browser should be.
02 Aug 2005
Okay, this should hopefully be the last word from me on this. I’ve discovered there’s a bug report on this issue in Ubuntu’s Bugzilla system, which has some pretty informative comments.
I uninstalled Tabbrowser, Web Developer Toolbar and Image Zoom extensions (as well as FireFTP, but that’s just because I never use it anymore/it’s always been too clunky), then restarted Firefox — presto, the Preferences work again, as does myriad other things. I’ve reinstalled the Web Developer Toolbar extension as well as Image Zoom, and restarted, and now everything appears to be working as normal again.
