23.07.08

Home Security

Posted in House at 1:02 by Simon

Following on from my “boredom” post, here’s something that has been keeping me busy for a while. I have a home server called Frankenputer, and it runs a package called Zoneminder along with the web server.

Connected to it I have two black & white outdoor cameras (el cheapo $30 things from Harbor Freight) and one indoor colour wired ethernet camera. The outdoor cameras are connected via very long cables to individual video capture cards in the server. The problem I am having right now is that the picture quality at daytime is fairly noisy:

At night though, it’s plainly crap:

Zoneminder is also fairly terrible at motion detection, requiring a very clean image to work with, and very precise fiddling with “blob counts” and other non-intuitive variables. If I connect either of the cameras to a proper TV, there is absolutely no interference, leading me to believe that the interference is being generated inside the server. However, if I connect a closer source of video to the server (such as a VCR), the picture is also perfect! I think what is happening is that the long run of camera cable (100 feet) is causing the composite video voltage levels to drop, and interference in the server is becoming more noticeable. Any hints would be appreciated though.

I am wondering whether to retire Frankenputer and get a new motherboard, CPU and memory, or to get ethernet cameras all around. Here’s a snap from the ethernet camera:

17.07.08

What is Boredom?

Posted in Weird at 10:04 by Simon

Is boredom a good thing or a bad thing? I used to view it as being a bad thing, but now I see it as essential time to relax when you can’t think of anything else you could possibly do at that moment in time. When people are bored, they catch up on TV, clear out the email inbox, and potter around the house. It helps rest your brain from the day’s work and allows you to do those little things you wouldn’t normally have time for. If you’re really bored, you might not even have anything remotely interesting to do and may take a nap!

I have noticed that for perhaps the last four and a half years (since I graduated) that I have had absolutely no moment when I could say I was bored. I have always had something I needed to do, something nagging me at the back of my mind to finish.

15.07.08

New Car

Posted in Car at 14:56 by Simon

For reasons related to my life, I am not permitted to call my car “my other love”. So, I will just say that last week I said goodbye to my Lancer Evo VIII, and picked up a Lancer Evo X MR. Goodbye, faithful old car!

Hello, new:

The new car has a 6-speed sequential gearbox, which is technically a manual, but it has three automatic modes. In sport and s-sport, the car will downshift in anticipation of a corner and blip the throttle, similar to how racing drivers do heel-toe braking (that is, pressing the clutch and brake with the same foot). It also has S-AWC (super all-wheel-control), which is an evolution of the previous stability enhancement device that has been a part of the non-US Evos for a number of years. This version will actually kick out the back end of the car during a turn if understeer is detected in order to push the car to the centre of the corner!

Edmunds recently reviewed the Evo against the Nissan GT-R, Audi R8, new Porsche 911, new Elise and 2008 STi, and the Evo surprisingly flattened the $80,000 911 around a test track and mountain road. Only 2 seconds behind the R8, with some minor performance upgrades it would beat all of the cars in the test.

The car also has an altimeter, for when it is flying.

13.07.08

Deck

Posted in House at 14:42 by Simon

For the last few weeks I’ve been building a deck. My “bible” is the Home Depot Decks 1-2-3 book, which does a fairly good job of explaining how to build a deck to someone with reasonable carpentry skills.

This is actually only my second carpentry project - the first being some shelves in the garage.

If there’s anything I have learned, it’s the following:

  1. Don’t be afraid to buy the right tools.
  2. You will need at least two drills (corded and cordless). You will need a cordless one for difficult areas, and a corded one for the screw that won’t go in or the hole that won’t appear.
  3. You always need more screws/nails.
  4. Measure twice, cut once.
  5. Your posts will try to sink to the centre of the earth. There is nothing you can do to stop it, so you may as well make the posts stick further out of the ground in anticipation.
  6. If you are British, get some SPF-50 and a hat.

13.06.08

England Trip

Posted in Family, Fun, Travel at 7:05 by Simon

I was given orders to take a week off, so I decided to see my family in England. So far I have gone for a bike ride and slightly cheated because I rode an electric bike, which helps you up hills. It was a lot of fun, and really fast! I also found some trolls at a nearby pub and a duck crossing sign.

More pics to come soon!

15.05.08

UPS Invent Time Travel

Posted in Weird at 23:08 by Simon

I logged onto my Amazon.com account today to discover an item of mine had been delivered early. What surprised me is when I tracked the package via the UPS website for more detail, I discovered they had invented time travel! They haven’t got it quite right yet though, because my package ended up in the wrong state.

In my mind, someone was very confused to open the package and find a Blu-Ray movie, before the format was even released…

Yay UPS!!

Imagine if you could send packages back in time (without altering the timeline, i.e. the parallel universes approach). I would send myself a top-notch laptop back to 1991, because I was still using a 10 year old computer back then. I would also send myself a friend who knows a bunch of martial arts back to 1988 to kick a few arses.

On the other hand, what could your past self send you in return? That one is a little easier… you could just put something in a drawer for a number of years and it would have time travelled (unless it is food). You could ask your past self for a couple of shares of MSFT or GOOG. I, on the other hand, would gladly exchange the laptop for just one curry from my favourite Indian restaurant in England, which sadly shut its doors last year. R.I.P. Mughal Dynasty.

18.04.08

Stupidly Expensive Crap

Posted in Car, Music at 11:30 by Simon

Following on from my rant about Monster Cables, here is the latest plight in my life. I got a satellite radio for my car in 2002 back when they were still pretty expensive, and I still have it now. It works, but the volume knob broke off. I glued it back on in only the special way I can, and now it is wonky (bent, for you US readers out there). So I called up Pioneer to get a replacement, and they sell one - for $35! This is for a piece of plastic - it doesn’t have the actual volume control included, just the little piece of plastic that you turn! They know you are not going to buy a whole new stereo over a matter of $35, so they can charge what they want.

Incidentally, I bought it.

This gets worse though. The radio comes with a little remote control for the most lazy driver who can’t even reach 24 inches over to the front panel to change the track. It takes one of those button batteries, and it has a small latch to keep the battery in. Note exhibit A:

This is a piece of plastic about 25mm across (an inch), and they charge $11.77 for it! It’s smaller than a freaking Lego brick! Hello people! You can hold the battery inside with a piece of tape!!

08.04.08

Psycho Hotel

Posted in Travel at 23:58 by Simon

A couple of weeks ago I went to San Diego on business. When I arrived, I waited for the usual eternity for my bag, before realising it must have gone missing. After that I had to queue up to speak to an airline official for ages, only to be told it was still in Denver. Great. I had left Denver three hours ago and my bag was still there.

This is where the fun begins. I arrived in my hotel room to be greeted by a large “P” scrawled on the mirror in some kind of grease.

Feeling brave, I decided to check what was on the menu for room service. I looked on the desk and there was nothing, so I opened the drawer, and instead of the usual hotel information booklet and Latter Day Saints bible, I found an odd proclamation:

This actually scared me a little and I looked behind me expecting to have my head lopped off. This is when I noticed the smoke alarm hanging off the ceiling, probably from the last bloody massacre that occurred in the room.

The only thing I couldn’t photograph was the smell of paint in the room, obviously still strong because they had just painted over all the blood.

I asked for a new room.

19.03.08

Monster Cables

Posted in Fun at 0:39 by Simon

Cookie Monster

I haven’t said anything yet and I’ve already violated two copyrights - oops. Last night I was in Circuit City buying a new TV. I needed a couple of HDMI cables, but declined to buy the “cheap” cables on offer - they were charging $74.95 for 6 feet! The expensive ones (Monster Cables) started at well over $100. What surprised me was that DVI cables (essentially the same thing) cost about $100 in 2004 when using them with TVs was relatively rare, so they have actually gone up in price.

I know better than to spend crazy money on digital cables when I can get certified HDMI cables for $7 online. I actually bought a $100 cable in 2004 and compared it against an equivalent el-cheapo one, and found there to be absolutely no difference. I promptly returned it. The guy in Circuit City claimed that the colours were washed out with the cheapo cables. I told him I was a graphics engineer, and that it is impossible for random bit errors to selectively wash out particular colours in images, but he didn’t believe me.

I’m wondering, do many people actually buy into the belief that if you spend $200 on a power filter, you will actually see the difference? Reducing the mains hum delivered to a good amplifier can be a good thing, but how many people can actually hear that hum to start with? It makes me laugh when I see that people have spent hundreds on these cables when they have those tiny 6 inch high cube speakers and are watching their DVDs in simulated surround because they didn’t know to operate their receiver. Oh well.

PS. Someone told me recently that the cookie monster is on some kind of a diet. Poor bugger.

16.03.08

RAID

Posted in Computer at 22:05 by Simon

RAID can

Two weeks ago I had a realisation that the server I rely on for hosting websites, handling the home security system (future post on that to come) and secure file transfer was running off a 10 year old hard drive. This is what happens when you build Franken-Puter from a bunch of old parts. I opened it up, and sure enough, the assembly date on the hard drive was sometime in 1998. It’s a 10GB drive, which was pretty big (and expensive!) back then. Incidentally, my first computer had a 4MB hard drive. Yes, megabyte. I also disabled a line on the power supply that prevents it from turning on if the voltages are not high enough, which probably wasn’t the best idea. $100 later and I had two of the smallest hard drives I could find (80GB) and a new power supply costing a whopping $12.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the OS to boot from the new drives in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration. On Linux with software RAID, you set up an md (multiple disc) device and add the drives to that, then boot off the new md device instead of directly from one of the drives. The problem, that I found out after many hours, is that Ubuntu Desktop edition cannot boot from md devices due to the md device driver being loaded after the OS starts. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. I had to reformat with Ubuntu Server edition.

I’m happier now that I have a good backup (although it is on site) and that everything is running off a good (though cheap) power supply. Hopefully I’ll get another 10 years out of it!