The Time Sink

...and all through that weekend of disconectivity (by choice as much as anything), I was continuing work on the garage and attic areas, taking advantage of the last cool days for a time (it'll be in the 90's all week) and setting up the projects for evenings, weekends and this summer. Now there's a sentence!

The good news is that I at least feel like I have a handle on where some things are for some of the more immediate projects, and maybe a clue or two on the major ones... The trick now is to be able to allocate the time (stop laughing!) to clear off two workbenches (electronics and one woodworking) to be able to lay things out.

There's nothing particularly special about the photo on the blog today, other than it hasn't been on a Windows box for any processing... Lightcrafts makes LightZone available as a freebie for Linux, and Version 2.4 just came out (Windows last week and Linux yesterday). I figured since I had the HDD I was using for backup for this AMD box still connected I'd pull up a photo and see what happened.

Short version: LightZone 2.4 rocks a little harder than 2.1: by the time I was done processing the RAW file in LightZone, there really wasn't much I needed (or wanted) to do in the Gimp. So there you have it. ...and garret, you may have another toolbox you can add to the shop (during the Winter months at least <g>).

Let's see... Yeah, all sorts of busy what with this and that. I'm still missing RSS feeds, and that's driving me all sorts of bonkers: I rely on them to keep me up to date on site updates. ...and when the one feed went south, it synchronized that southern exposure to all my other boxes. Yeah, 'darn' is way too soft a word.

So, I'm updating and trying to rebuild that system because I really haven't found anything that works better for me than InfoRss added into Firefox/Swiftfox.

...and of course, I'm rebuilding feeds from various sources (old files, the laptop, whatever I have socked away on the server) and I didn't add two and two and realize I was testing on what was essentially a new installation (on the i386 box) and didn't think to reset the defaults to something more reasonable and Cecil and everyone else I was relinking to (collating files and finally using an OPML format to concatenate it all) was getting hammered by the blasted thing. I've disabled the reader on all platforms for the moment. It'll take another night to shake the last bits out...

Oh, and the laptop? It's getting an incremental upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.1 (successful) to 7.04 (in progress) to see how well that process works. I'm seriously thinking the next trip to the coast may involve that machine with LightZone and the Gimp handling the photoblog work.

Interesting couple of days for upgrades: the laptop is now running Ubuntu 7.04 after something like 28 hours of near continuous upgrading from 6.06 to 6.1 and then to 7.04. Of note, the new distro found the embedded wireless card and has it set up (I never did get it running even under the hack that allowed that card to be 'wrapped'). Oh, and the video is now running under the restricted drivers; that should give me some darned decent response.

...and it was fun (instructive?) watching the terminal while the installer tried probably six kernels against the hardware, downgrading each time the setup failed until it found one that matched up. All in all it looks like the 'long way' works pretty well as opposed to blowing away the install and starting fresh. I haven't found anything in /home that didn't pass through okay.

The only glitch I've found so far with the installed software was that Swiftfox bounced back to the Firefox 1.5x installation and missed the Firefox 2 install. That was easy enough to fix (uninstall Swiftfox and give it another go). Next up, configure the modem and see how well it works against the modem bank in San Luis Obispo; it would be nice to not have to take the dialup router along.

Working in the yard and the house...

The de-webbed comment above was in reference to me taking down the network for the weekend and rearranging the components on the workstation hutch in the kitchen. I never did quite make it into the garage, so that portion of the show will have to wait for another day.

Weekend work turned out to be a nice gig: I lined out the rest of the garden plan for the front of the house, got some inside electrical done while it was quiet, and finally think the pool is ready for Summer use.

Click image for larger version

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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