Archive for January, 2006


Keepin’ it real (warm)

1/9/2006

Due to recent “adventures” in the home heating depaartment, when I eventually get around to building my own place I’m definitely going to consider electric heat with a redundant kerosene backup system.

The whole reason anyone uses a fuel based home heating system to begin with is to save money. However, with the rising prices of oil it’s not nearly as inexpensive as it used to be. Lots of people in New England are using wood to primarily heat their homes and use oil only as a secondary. It makes me think Why not just use electric? Now before you say “Well wait a sec there.. that’s even more expensive than oil!” Not really. As of now, the cost is darned near equal. If the cost of oil continues to go up (and it will), electric will actually be cheaper in the not-too-distant future.

The only reason I’d have a redundant kerosene “monitor” backup is just in case the power goes out. If the system is designed correctly, I could actually have a generator auto-switch on the moment the power fails and if the thermostat is low enough the kero heater will turn on.

Something to definitely consider.

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The mighty Toshiba

1/9/2006

Toshiba HD television

This is my first photo in a while. It’s of the new tv I bought. I also bought the Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith DVD at the same time I bought the set.

The picture absolutely does no justice to the tv at all. It looks ten times better in real life.

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I’d rather be living in…

1/10/2006

Have you ever set a goal for yourself, achieve that goal and then find out it isn’t what you really wanted? It goes along the same line with the phrase “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it?”

I’m at a point where (and I say this with a chuckle) I might be moving again. That’s right. A fifth move in less than a year’s time. Crazy.

In my almost thirty-one years on this Earth, I haven’t found anywhere where I could say to myself Yep. I like this place. I’m staying here. I got close to that point when I was living in Bangor Maine, but as I’ve said before, I didn’t fail in Maine. Maine failed me. I tried like hell to make things work out while up there, no doubt about that. Every single day I looked for work. None was to be found, I ran out of money and had to leave.

The ironic part is that I always wanted to live in Maine ever since I was little. During family vacations it was always nice to go there and I used to say to myself Yeah. Someday… Well, that someday came and you know the rest.

Now I’m at a point where the thought pattern goes something like Where could I be the most productive and moreover happy? I believe I know where I should be. With that in mind I’m going to get in contact with some realtors and make things happen.

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More Garmin POI goodness

1/11/2006

This entry is a follow-up to this one.

I should have noted in my last article about this (see above) that if desired, you can drive around with your i3/c340/2720 Garmin GPS Unit to mark waypoints, export to MapSource as a GPX, convert to CSV, then use POI Loader to send the CSV to your GPS as a POI Database.

Here’s how that’s done:

1) Drive around and mark the places where you want your POI’s to be. This is easy enough. Every time you come to a spot where you want a POI to be, just set a “Favorite” (waypoint). Do this as many times as desired.

2) Export the waypoints to MapSource when you get back home.

3) Export the MapSource waypoints as a GPX file.

4. Use GPXtoPOI to convert the GPX to a CSV (the only type of database that POI Loader uses).

5. Use POI Loader to import the database to your Garmin mobile GPS unit, such as the i3, c340 or 2720.

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In the event you have more POI’s to add later but don’t want to lose your old ones, the easiest way to do this is to have multiple CSV files and have POI Loader load them all at once.

Say you have an existing CSV file. Leave it where it is. Just make your new updated CSV file, put it in the SAME directory where your old CSV file is, and run POI Loader. The POI Loader software will take ALL CSV’s in the directory and load them into your GPS unit. Not to worry, these files are very small and won’t take away all the storage space… not unless you have several thousand POI’s. ;-)

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MapSource Longitude and Latitude in decimal display

1/11/2006

mapsource_long_lat.jpg

I wanted to blog this just for my own reference. MapSource by default does not display longitude and latitude coordinates in “strict” decimal values, but it’s easy enough to get it to. You just go to Edit then Preferences then Position and set Grid to Lat/Lon hddd.ddddd°.

Remember: Coordinates that are West or South are negative numbers. For example, 100 Main Street, Freeport Maine 04033 USA (which is just about where the L.L. Bean Mall is) has coordinates of N43.85754 W70.10256. Writing this as strictly numbers would be 43.85754 -70.10256 because West is a negative number.

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Back when 16 colors and DOS was king of the online world

1/11/2006

This, dear readers, is how I prove without a shadow of a doubt that I’m computer geek (grin).

About once I year I get the yearning for running a BBS again. No, not an internet forum, I’m talking about a text-based Bulletin Board System.

Some background information on BBS‘ing: My first online experience was with DOS. DOS v6.0 (before 6.22!) to be exact. The way people got online back then was by phone line only and you connected to local systems that people ran out of their homes.

Out of their homes? Yes. BBS SysOp’s (that’s System Operator - and I was one at one point) would run a single-node (meaning only one connection at a time) BBS using nothing but DOS and the BBS software of their choice. Multitasking? HA! Like it existed back then. Well, it in fact did, but that’s a whole other story.

A true BBS is nothing but text on screen with 16-color ANSI codes. No mouse. Nothing to click. Keyboard only. BBS users were usually local and people you knew mainly due to the reason no one wanted to rack up the phone bill with long distance calls to out-of-area systems. Message boards were predominantly local per system. Very up-to-do BBS Sysop’s actually used FidoNET which was an international messaging system that still exists to this day.

The modern version of BBS’s provide connectivity by means of telnet. Telnet is a protocol, like HTTP or FTP and usually operates on port 23. HTTP is normally port 80 and FTP is normally port 21.

What I need to run one of these bad boys is an ISP who would allow me to run a telnet server. And man, I wish I could.. but I can’t right now because it would violate the “Fair Use Policy” of my ISP. Blah.

Some would ask “Why bother? What’s the point?” Well, it’s for the same reason anyone does anything that’s considered “not necessary”:

Because they can.

Running a telnet BBS is considered to be “vintage computing” and anyone who knows me knows I love old-tech - especially when you can make it work on the modern internet.

Vintage computer buffs love to see if they take the oldest computer they can find and make it internet accessible. Examples of this are The TRS-80 on the internet and browsing the web with a Commodore 64.

Personally speaking I won’t go that old, but I do have an “old” computer that’s a Pentium 1.6GHz that would do nicely as a telnet server.

I’m hoping one day I’ll be actually able to make my lil’ dream of running a telnet BBS a reality. That would definitely be cool.

Oh, one more thing. If you ever wondered where I got “frosted side” for the name of my company from - I first used it when I was running a BBS in the late 90’s. Here’s the proof. And no, the phone number listed doesn’t work any longer. ;-)

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Windows networking follies and DirecTV

1/12/2006

Last night I encountered something darned peculiar on my home network. For some strange odd reason any computer on my network that has wireless connectivity ceased to “see” workgroups or even NetBIOS names. When using the net view command from the prompt, the error that appears is System error 6118 has occurred. The list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available. Okaaaay…

I tried everything to get the NetBIOS names to work again. I enabled NetBIOS over TCP/IP, tried static IP’s over DHCP, disabled all ICF stuff and so on. No luck.

I finally came across a web page that said something to the effect of “By the way, if you’re on wireless, NetBIOS names may not be broadcasted.” Ah-ha. My solution was to make up an LMHOSTS file with the line:

192.168.35.xyz servername #pre

“xyz” is replaced by the IP I use on the network and “servername” is replaced by the name I put for the box. I then go to the WINS section of the Advanced TCP/IP settings and hit the button for Import LMHOSTS and that did the trick.

The interesting part is that I was able to run it without this workaround for almost three weeks… and then NetBIOS over wireless TCP/IP suddenly stops working? Weird. This gives me more of an incentive to run a Linux domain controller - and it is possible. More on that later.

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DirecTV got installed today. I like it. It’s cool because I haven’t had any television programming (other than watching DVD’s) to speak of for a while now. My only complaint is that if you’re feeding the signal through S-Video you can sometimes see what I can best describe as “artifacts”. It’s probably only seen by people like me with widescreen tv’s that look really closely. ;-)

It’s good to have tv again.

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More DirecTV stuff, family stuff and general hoo-ha

1/12/2006

I’ve been messing around with my DirecTV box and there are a couple of rather cool features on it. One which I don’t use (because I primarily use a cell phone at present) is the Caller ID feature. You plug a phone into the box and when someone calls, the ID appears on the screen. Another is the “Autotune” feature where you can program your DirecTV box to automatically go to a channel at a specific time of day, have it repeat, et cetera. A little difficult to use but I was able to figure it out. Having “sets” of channels is also a good feature because there are a ton of them. I have a range set that suits me.

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Sis is visiting for a few days. She is enjoying our new DirecTV as well. Our family has always been one that has watched lots of television. When growing up we were always around the tube in one way or another.

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Speaking of family, Pop has to go through a few more procedures before he’s back to 100%. There’s this thing he has to do that we jokingly call a “roto-rooter” job where they have to open up an artery, fill it with something to open it up so the blood in his leg flows more freely. Evidently the amputated toe didn’t fix all the problems because there’s blockage of some sort. Fortunately this procedure is a one day thing and painless.

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I’ve been reading over what I’ve been writing lately and holy shit have I gone on a geek-writing binge, but you know, that’s okay. I’m really into tech, what can I say. (grin) In my early days of blogging that’s all I used to do mostly and I’m going back to writing about that again. There’s nothing wrong with that. My site is known to have search engine results from people looking for tech-help anyway, so it’s all good.

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With that said, here’s the latest in the tech dept.:

I have successfully gotten my file server to have its NetBIOS name “seen” again by the laptop on wireless, but the fact I had to do a workaround still bugs the shit out of me.

I took an older PC I had lying around and installed SuSE Linux 9.1 on it. I’m relatively familiar with it and can remote control it easily which is the reason I used that. Right now it’s sitting in stock form. Sometime this week or weekend I will attempt to make it into a PDC (Primary Domain Controller) with Samba. Then I will have all my Windows boxes use it as a true logon domain which should resolve all the stupid Windows workgroup problems I’ve been having. Besides which, it will give me an excuse to install the Linux version of ELE BBS on it to see how that flies. I believe you can get DOS doors to work on that via WINE, but we’ll see.

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Plans will go into effect relatively soon for the big move.. a lot sooner than I thought. But that’s not a bad thing. If all goes according to plan, I should be in a place much better than where I am now.

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Giving Debian a try

1/13/2006

After messing around with SuSE for a bit I discovered that it was working the older computer I have a bit much, so I’m downloading and installing Debian on it now. I downloaded the “business card” image and am letting the system install itself over the network. Simple enough. Hopefully I’ll be able make it do what I want it to.

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Not that brave

1/13/2006

debian.jpg

The above is me downloading a “desktop environment” (as in X-Windows) for Debian Linux, which is in progress as I’m writing this. I did not opt to put one on because I was getting impatient for the network install to complete.

I’m able to SSH into the Debian box, but then I realized something: I don’t know anything about how to get around a bash prompt in Debian. In SuSE I can more or less do anything but Debian is a different animal, so… I need some graphical environment help to get me going. Kinda sad, but hey, I’ve never used Debian so I’m allowed. :-)

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