Rorschach.net

Why only ten and not an infinite number of dimensions? This handy video explains why. Guaranteed to mess with your mind. SCIENCE!

I spent the majority of my weekend and a good chunk of the end of the week working on home tech things.

• Ditched Time Warner Cable for ATT. Spent most of the day digging into the internal wiring of the house. Couldn’t find the drop for the phone line since I haven’t had a land line in over 6 years. Eventually figured out the wiring and connected. I’ve got a single gateway plugged into the phone line. The TV reciever/DVR is just a box connected over Ethernet to the gateway. 802.11g is built into the gateway so it takes the place of a wireless router as well. Xbox connects direct to the gateway and the rest of the house is on wireless.
• I’m very pleased with the Internet connection. I get ~10Mb/s downloads on speed test sites even in high traffic times. Streamed a movie in HD over the Netflix Xbox service with no changes in quality.
• Finally got some HD channels. My TiVo series 2 isn’t compatible with the service so I’m relying on the provided DVR. I’m gonna miss my TiVo.
• It was time to upgrade the wireless bridge in the office. D-Link has a nice 4 port bridge that can also act as an access point. Something wasn’t working right with DHCP over the bridge so I changed the two desktops to static IPs and everything is fine. Switched from WEP to WPA and was finally able to enable the Xbox as a media center extender.
• Cleaned out about 3 cubic feet of dust and grime from the PCs. My wife likes a clean desk so they go under, hoovering up all the fur and dirt. Wife’s PC had a cable blocking the fan for the video card. No wonder it was dying after less than a hour of use.
• I’d been getting disk errors on my secondardy 500GB drive for about a week. I noticed as I was testing after the cleaning that there’s a faint grinding noise coming from the drive. My drives are mounted vertically, moving that drive to horizontal stopped the noise.
• Went to Fry’s and bought a Seagate 1.5TB SATA drive for $120. That’s $0.08 per gigabyte! 7200rpm and a 30 meg cache so it’s got some throughput. Transferred all the data from the dying drive to the new one (about 300GB) and set up the same drive letter so no links are lost. Even with formatting I’ve got over a terabyte free.

To do list:

• Wife’s PC is still suffering the occasional hard lock. Nothing heat related and no traces in the event log. Virus scans and HijackThis come up empty.
• Bedroom TVs are still on Time Warner. Need to configure the gateway to push a TV signal over the co-ax connector. Cancel TWC before the next billing cycle if ATT keeps performing well.
• Shut down the TiVo and return the TWC reciever. In other words re-cable the living room entertainment center.

• I think I'm officially looking forward to the day when Google Wave will take over all this email, tweeting, IM and facebooking. #
• Ditching Time Warner for ATT today. If I'm not back later the day has gone horribly wrong. #
• Hottest day of the year and I'm at home with no A/C. #
• Conversion successful. Streamed an entire movie over Netflix in HD. Still working out the kinks in the local wireless. #
• Cleaned roughly 3 cubic feet of dust from both computers. Reset cables and unblocked fans. Turbines to speed! #
• Fixed the bridging problems by using static IPs. I think my main games drive is about to go. Fry's trip in the cards. #
• Is there any better drinkin' music than Tom Waits? I think not. #
• Every Tom Waits song has one of those lines… #
• "Half drunk all the time, and all drunk the rest" #
• "How'd the angels get to sleep when the devil keeps the porch light on?" #
• "Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk." #
• "The large print giveth and the small print taketh away." #

• District 9 in 4.5 hours. Looking forward to the flick. #
• Looking to bail on Time Warner and move to ATT for data and TV. Research engage! #
• That was a good movie. Impressive sci-fi flick for $30M #

• Downloading Hearts of Iron 3 from Steam. Now how the hell do I get my strat guide? #QT3 #
• Time to get some chores done. Nice day to open up the house. #