Archive for the ‘tech stuff’ Category

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No Escape from Xbox Live hell

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Gah, stupid microsoft.

I canceled my xbox live account months ago, in response to their homophobic practices.  Today I get spam from them letting me know about some new pricing model they are coming out with.  The mail basically says “yeah, there’s no unsubscribe option because you gave us money once, so the law can’t stop us, so we aren’t going to even let you ask us to stop, screw you!”.

Yeah, that totally makes me rethink my plans on never subscribing to xbox live again.  Not.

UPDATE:  The xbox-live-support-by-email-tech suggested calling 1-800-469-9269

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Goliath Awaits (MR)

Monday, August 30th, 2010

I love the internet, most of the time.

Like when it can supply me with not just the name of a half-remembered tv-miniseries, but the entirety of it.  Mark Harmon has had a long career, even if I don’t realize it sometimes.

The film is just as over-the-top-silly as I remembered it.  Caricature villains, a rigid social structure under autocratic rule offered up as a impossible utopia to the messiness of a real world under democracy, doomed by the frailties of human ego.

And yet, it still manages to age remarkable well.  It helps that 90% of their time is spent on a liner built during WW2.

Most annoying plot hole is the whole “it’ll never work” rigmarole over the heat exchanger.  What exactly did the script writer think the difference was between a heat exchanger based on lava, and a scotch boiler based on oil?  Pointing out that simply generating more oxygen doesn’t remove carbon-dioxide would have been more believable.  Whatever.

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Posted in movie review, tech stuff, tv, video | No Comments »

iPad 3G is dead =(

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

When I foursquared in this morning, it was all working fine, but by the time I got to Nickerson Street Saloon for lunch, it was dead of the worst sort.  PC doesn’t recognize any sort of device being plugged in.  sigh.

UPDATE:  I would swear I had done all the possible combinations of the two buttons available to me, for the standard 10 seconds.  Then again, he said it was 15 seconds of holding down both home and power.  So far, looks OK again.  All things crash.

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T-Mobile suckage

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Something has gone wrong with the t-mobile tower that serves my house, and I’m wavering between getting 3-bars of service that don’t actually work, and straight up “no service” error messages. Of course you can’t get any sort of customer support out of t-mobile without a phone; they claim to have a chat support system, but it doesn’t actually work, and they don’t offer any support by email. Too bad I finally kicked my land line to the curb. At least the cable modem still works.

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open iPad, insert video

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Someone came up with a decent xvid/divx player for the iPad, and it’s even free.  CineXPlayer seems to totally rock, in my limited testing so far.  It lets you load movies via the iTunes file sharing system, doesn’t require pre-conversion, supports seeking forward without losing audio sync, resumes from where you left off.  Once I get home, I’ll have to thrown some more unusual avi’s at it, see what it makes of them.

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AT&T 3G down in Seattle, again

Monday, August 9th, 2010

It’s been up and down all day today, and of course, AT&T has zero support options for the iPad service.  My kingdom for a T-mobile capable media-pad.

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I Keep Things For A Reason

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

It happens, eventually.  Everything comes round again.  The Sega Saturn has been sitting in a crate for years now, and I finally have a use for it….Karaoke practice.  Since everyone insists I sing when I go to karaoke, and since they never have a song I really want to sing, I went ahead and spent a couple bucks on some karaoke CD-G’s of my own.  As I recall, I was kind of annoyed that the dreamcast didn’t include cd-g support, so there was a few minutes where I confused that annoyance with memory of support.  Eventually I remembered I had to back yet another generation.  Still works just fine.

No one has Gary Chapman’s “Your Love Stays With Me”, in karaoke form.  Maybe I can find someone to help me re-record the backing tracks.  You know, because other people want me to sing.  No interest on my part in singing, no sir. =p

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Posted in music, tech stuff | No Comments »

Blizzard RealID of Evil

Monday, July 12th, 2010

In response to the RealID debacle, I canceled my pre-orders for Star Craft 2 and for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.  They sent me a response to an emailed question today, which of course ignored my question completely, while including this gem near the end, “Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.”

Translated from PR speak, “we’ll be making it mandatory right after the christmas rush, so fuck off”.

Yeah, I’m not regretting my decision to make leaving permanent.  Welcome to the post-activision-world we all knew was coming.

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Posted in World of Warcraft, cranky, tech stuff | No Comments »

AT&T 3G down in Seattle?

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

At least around lake union, today.  It was getting pretty spotty earlier in the day, and now my ipad just says “could not activate cellular data network”.  I blame all the techies with their toys.  Those other techies, not me.

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NIS finally!

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Trying to setup an NFS/NIS pair of systems at work has been driving me nuts.  All the HOWTO guides kept referencing an /etc/sysconfig/network file that is a directory on my systems.  I guessed, correctly, that what they wanted in those files should go into the /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0.   Everything else seemed pretty much straightforward, but connections would fail with the NIS client unable to even see the NIS server.

In my /var/log/messages, I saw

Jun 23 12:41:02 machinename ypserv[23456]: refused connect from x.x.x.x:35684 to procedure ypproc_domain_nonack (domainname,;0)

It turned out I needed to add to my /var/yp/securenets file.  When I first opened it up, in only had 127.0.0.0.  After I added a netmask for my subnet (255.255.0.0   x.x.0.0), things went much more smoothly.

And after all that, it turns out that the customer problem had nothing to do with NFS or NIS, it was a simple permissions issue of 755 vs 775.  d’oh.  If only they had sent the logs first, instead of last.

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