So last year I bought a Sharp 46" LC-46D64U (refurb) off buy.com. That television had some problems, namely 5-10 dead pixels, many stuck on red, and near the center of the screen, and the 2.5mm rca-style input did not work, at all. So Sharp replaced it with a new (non-reburf) identical model. It has been great! Except for the occasional color banding with low-quality dvd players and what not...I don't know which device (tv or dvd) causes the issue...anyways, blabber blabber..blabber.

I finally got a nice little home-theater computer hooked up to the television. The relevant video input connectivity options are component, HDMI, or VGA. The computers video card (Nvidia FX5-series) has both VGA and DVI outputs. What I really REALLY want is to run the tv at it's native 1080p resolution of 1920x1080. The video card and windows do not complain when I select the display resolution option of 1920x1080, and from Remote Administrator (radmin) I can confirm over the network that the computer is reaching the correct resolution without any problem. However, the TV will not show a picture, and says "480i" up in the right hand corner. It Is Very Frustrating! I called Sharp, the *representative suggested I try a DVI->HDMI adapter. Brilliant! I had been trying to get 1080p over VGA, but when he made that suggestion, I had the sudden realization that 1080p is pretty hi-rez, and thus bandwidth-intensive, and that VGA might not be able to deliver enough bandwidth to do that resolution. At least, not on this tv!

So I have to get a DVI->HDMI adapter and I should be good to go... I'll update this as things unfold.

*As an aside, I just wanted to note that my experience with Sharps support department has been very good (everytime). I guess it just seems kind of rare these days to find such a huge company that provides such a smooth RMA for such a huge item out where there are no Sharp Authorized Repair shops. And they don't treat you like an idiot! (as a sub-aside, it should be sub-noted that this was all on the phone; - I never got a reply of any kind for the service ticket form I submitted via their website 2+ months ago (no e-mail acknowledgement of submission w/ a id# is always a bad sign, ehhe).

spilling the secrets of meteors! (a fun read!)

Let's just pretend the following were true:

So, I am running OpenWRT Kamikaze on my WRT54GS and
am using Comcast as my ISP, with 8 Mb. down / 2 Mb.
up service.  It's great!  Except for the random
dropouts.  I am using a wired network client when
I notice the dropouts occur sometimes for 20 seconds
every minute, for a minute or two here and there.  Blimey!!!

So I read on the internet that dslreports.com will do some free line-quality testing for you. Neat! The only catch is that your IP address must respond to pings!

So off I went to google..to find out how to open OpenWRT Kamikaze for WAN ping requests.

After a little more work than I had been anticipating, I found something even better than what I had been looking for!:

iptables -A input_rule -i $WAN -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type  echo-request -m limit --limit 10/s -m length --length 1:150 -j ACCEPT

Explanation of the iptables rule

The rule above will allow ping requests -- so your network node may be troubleshooted! .. however, it limits the number of ping requests per second to 10, and enforces a maximum ping request packet size of 150 bytes. This will make it a little bit harder for someone to DoS or DDoS you, so at least some very unskilled script kidd13s might be thwarted, should they try ;) Really, I just think it's cool to tune things so tightly.

Note: For the $WAN variable in the iptables rule, for my hardware setup I used the value "eth0.1".

Ah, VirtuaWin looks cool (feature clone app..), but what I was really trying to find was Synergy, the application that lets you use 1 keyboard/mouse pair to control two or many more desktops seamlessly! So nice..especially for controlling the home theater pc out in the living room from my laptop.

Make your Windows Desktop behave a little bit more like Gnome with VirtuaWin (it is open-source).

Uniextract is by far the nicest universal extraction tool that I have come across yet- and it is free.

I randomly searched for "Lobster pain". Partly it was not a randomly selected subject to query for, because I had just been discussing the health of the Lobster and Crab meat varieties with a colleague of mine (They are actually fairly or even quite healthy - Lobster has no fat..and good a good amount of protein [as long as you don't soak it in butter], and Crab wasn't tooooo horrible..). Anyways, we were talking about that, and then my colleage said to me

"I don't know if I could throw a lobster on the grill while it's alive though. That just seems so cruel."

To which I replied:

"I don't think they throw them on the grill alive!"

Which then got me thinking about boiling lobsters...and hence the search, and basically the realization that their nervous systems are so simple that they don't experience pain! Wow!

Laters.

As a follow up to my brief but pleasurably memorable forray into the HighSlide JS (''JavaScript'') image browser display enhancement library, I have found another cool looking contender called "LightBox".

Bug.gd looks like an interesting idea. I dunno, ..like searching Google already usually works pretty good for me when I come across errors (e.g. code compilation errors). Additionally, I don't know how I feel about the sites dubious marketing tactic of making a search plugin for the ever popular, trendy, [but mostly] just plain slow Mozilla Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6138).

G'day.

Update

On second thought, I think I much prefer http://stackoverflow.com/'s approach.

Late at night, my 24" LCD monitor is way too bright! So I have found a piece software which can dim it. It is nice because it is a super-lightweight application with a low footprint/overhead, and also has the options which allow for the assignment of a hotkey to activate a specific profile.

• Now you can use the Windows TrueType fonts in Linux - nice!
• ProFont and Sheldon fonts for Windows and Linux

In the second video, the we see the classic burning alcohol trick in the shortest form I've seen. The commentary is by a third party (mother?) who is wondering why there's a little tin cup with an open flame sitting on the motherboard of the laptop computer. BGA solder failure was a known manufacturing defect on some runs of Apple iBooks and IBM T series laptops, and probably others besides. People worked out that the video processor BGA contacts were the problem by physically pressing on the chip and seeing their video work. The first attempt at repair is usually jurt jamming something non-conductive between the chip and the case to keep the contacts pressed together, but that fix usually stops working after a while, so reflowing the solder becomes the only solution.

-- http://www.ifitjams.com/2008/08/reflowing-solder-under-bga-processors.html

CDBurnerXP seems like a nice (and free as in beer i think..) windows cd-burning and iso-image extraction utility.

I wanted to rename a bunch of Firefox session files, because they have been tugged along from Windows install to install, and the naming had gotten crazy and inconsistent. So I whipped this up:

Administrator@hammertime:/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/Administrator/Application Da
a/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ev0zie8w.default/sessions$ export IFS="
"; for f in `ls -1 zPortofire--* | grep '^.*\([0-9-]\+\).*$'`; do mv "$f" "`echo
f | sed -e 's/^\(.*\)\(200[0-9-]\+\)\(.*\)$/\2 \1\3/g' | sed -e 's/zPortofire--/Portofire /g' | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | sed -e 's/ \+/ /g' | sed -e 's/--/-/g' | sed -e
s/[ -]\./\./g' | sed -e 's/Portofire - /Portofire /g'`"; done

I'm not saying that it is complicated once you break it down...but I don't know many other people IRL who can create these useful little command line scripts.

hmm.

I have noticed a strange behavior in the way that Mozilla Firefox handles the TAB and SHIFT-TAB keys. Use your imagination (or do a mental simulation with the following scenario:

You are sitting in front of your computer. You click and subsequently run the trendy and well-liked (and Open Source Software (OSS) nonetheless!) Firefox Web Browser program (for some reason I feel the need to state the following: once Google implements plug-ins for the Chrome web browser, I think it will probably pick up a huge chunk of the browser market software quality things may well chagne -- and let's face it, FF's model is S-L-O-W in many instances when compared to the more advanced and well-suited multi-threading system used by Chrome. At any rate..I think that was just way too much information on a side topic..).

So ultimately, my question is simply, why does it take two reverse tab key presses to get to the search toolbar from the url bar, but only one to go from the search toolbar to the url bar?