Sunday, November 28, 2010

Another rant -- Colorado Public ... Radio?

www.cpr.org is not a site dedicated to cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. No, the letters stand for Colorado Public Radio. RADIO, yes, RADIO. However, I challenge you to find their radio broadcast frequencies on the home page. Or even an obvious link. FAIL.

A search for frequency will bring you to the Station Map where you will find that in and around Denver, the classical music station is 88.1 and the news (and news talk) is on 90.1.

Now you may be asking why in the world I'd be looking up an FM transmitter in this day and age. I still have analog radios. Really. And my ogg music player has one built-in and I regularly have it with me when exercising. And it's the holiday season here in the states... and I need to exercise. And yes, I can exercise to classical music.

Friday, November 5, 2010

FBReader full-screen feature

Let's get this out of the way first: This is a totally self-serving post.

FBReader, an e-book reader that can handle EPUB, has a feature to go full-screen. This is very useful--but also quite confusing. None of the menubar buttons seem to enable/disable this feature. Yet, it's fairly easy to accidentally turn on or off--and completely baffling when it happens. A quick google turned up nothing really obvious about how to enable/disable/toggle fullscreen mode. Thus, this blog entry.

Without further ado, here's the shortcut key: <RET>. Yes, the return key or enter key is the way you toggle fullscreen, full screen, full-screen off and on. And this does make some sense. The return key is pervasive on most PDAs, handhelds, and certainly on the author's laptops. So, it is nearly universally available (and moreover the enter key makes little sense in the body of a more-or-less read-only document format like EPUB.)

I've intentionally loaded this blog entry with searchable terms so that others trying to figure this out can easily find the information. That's why keyboard shortcuts and the word fullscreen appears several times with various spellings. Likewise, FBReader appears repeatedly. FBReader, which has nothing to do with FaceBook and does not predate FB, was certainly something I was aware of prior to my knowledge of facebook.

I don't yet own a Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader or any other dedicated ebook reader. Moreover, I don't have an iPhone, Android phone, Palm or other smartphone. I do have a Nokia that can apparently also run FBReader and I may try that out at some point but I have not yet done so. And no, I've never owned the original FBReader device, Sharp Zaurus.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Undocumented ILO2 Settings

There appear to be some undocumented ILO2 settings, as a google search for:

oemhp_rawvspport

turns up zero hits as of this date.

However, by logging into a DL380 G62 ILO-2 CLI console, you can see this setting:
hpiLO-> show /map1/config1  
status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED


/map1/config1
  Targets
  Properties
    oemhp_mapenable=yes
    oemhp_timeout=30 minutes
    oemhp_passthrough=disabled
    oemhp_rbsuenable=yes
    oemhp_rbsulogin=no
    oemhp_rbsushowip=yes
    oemhp_telnetenable=yes
    oemhp_httpport=80
    oemhp_sslport=443
    oemhp_rcport=23
    oemhp_vmport=17988
    oemhp_tsport=3389
    oemhp_sshport=22
    oemhp_sshstatus=yes
    oemhp_serialclistatus=yes
    oemhp_serialcliauth=yes
    oemhp_serialclispeed=115200 bits/sec
    oemhp_minpwdlen=7
    oemhp_hotkey_t=NONE
    oemhp_hotkey_u=NONE
    oemhp_hotkey_v=NONE
    oemhp_hotkey_w=NONE
    oemhp_hotkey_x=NONE
    oemhp_hotkey_y=NONE
    oemhp_high_perf_mouse=automatic
    oemhp_enforce_aes=no
    oemhp_authfailurelogging=3
    oemhp_computer_lock=disabled
    oemhp_rawvspport=3002
    oemhp_console_capture_port=17990
    oemhp_console_capture_enable=no
    oemhp_interactive_console_replay_enable=no
    oemhp_capture_auto_export_enable=no
    oemhp_capture_auto_export_location=http://192.168.1.1/REDLOF/capturePCThPCTt.ilo
    oemhp_capture_auto_export_username=0
    oemhp_capture_auto_export_password=0
    oemhp_console_capture_boot_buffer_enable=no
    oemhp_console_capture_fault_buffer_enable=no
    oemhp_shared_console_enable=no
    oemhp_shared_console_port=0
    oemhp_key_up_key_down_enable=yes
  Verbs
    cd version exit show set oemhp_loadSSHkey

And as you can plainly see,
oemhp_rawvspport appears therein.

Mentioned Elsewhere

Okay, I was reading scrollback from a chatroom at work and saw this phenomenally cool video (that kind of makes me wish I was still 20 y.o.) Probably best viewed with volume off, there's just the camera operator's commentary and a few honks from passers-by.






Props to Vinsh for sharing.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Uncle's Day -aka- Cub Lake Trail


CUB LAKE
Originally uploaded by MERLIN08
My neice Jessica invited our family along with part of hers for a pre-Father's Day hike in RMNP. We hiked along the Cub Lake Trail which starts in the meadow and works its way up to Cub Lake. I'm now calling the day before Father's Day Uncle's Day in commemoration (though there probably already is an Uncle's Day according to Hallmark.)

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Summertime

Today was glorious, warm, sunny, and summery. It was so nice out when I got up, I went out to "flush" the backyard of canine detritus. That was quick as it had been done recently. This was prep for mowing. However, it looked like string line trimming needed to happen, so I grabbed my trusty B&D whacker and went to work... After cutting for a couple minutes, it dawned on me that 6am* might be a bit early for the fam and the neighbors... :^) So I set down the whacker and had some breakfast. But it does illustrate how glorious today was.

As I was eating breakfast, I noticed birds retrieving dog hair from the back deck welcome mat. I grabbed some video equipment to record this (as last summer there was quite a pecking order established between a few birds competing for materials that was hilarious.) Unfortunately, by the time the gear was gathered and aimed, the birds had given up.... Maybe tomorrow.

I did ultimately get five hours of yard work completed before lunch. And followed that up with a high school graduation (air conditioned!) And then a bit of tool shopping to replace the worn out string trimmer. I picked up another B&D trimmer. I went for battery operated this time so that we don't have to string power cords all over the yard. (I don't think gas-powered are all that good for the air.)

And now, blogging from the coffee shop during a thunderstorm. Northern Colorado, late May, delightful.....

*I regularly wake up before 5:30 a.m. to feed the spoiled rotten Shih Tzu.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Presidential Memorial Day Observance

I found this nugget:
[President] Obama is not retreating on Memorial Day. Instead of visiting Arlington cemetery, Obama and the first lady will participate in a Memorial Day ceremony at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Ill., about 50 miles south of Chicago. Moreover, not every president has spent Memorial Day at Arlington. In 1983, President Reagan was at a summit meeting, and the deputy secretary of defense -- not even the veep! -- placed the wreath. Nine years later, President George H.W. Bush passed off the wreath to Vice President Dan Quayle. And in 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney took on the wreath mission, while President George W. Bush was in Texas.

References:
http://www.cem.va.gov/cems/listcem.asp list of National Cemeteries (why not visit one near you?)
http://www.cem.va.gov/ includes the info on President Obama's visit to Lincoln National Cemetery

Fort Logan National Cemetery
4400 W. Kenyon Avenue
Denver, CO 80236

Monday, May 24, 2010

Blog Post-A-Day, NaNoWriMo Redux

As anyone (anyone, please, throw me a bone, anyone?) who reads this blog knows, I epically failed at the "blog-a-day" for 30 consecutive days plan last November. However, the long days (sunshine from 5am to 9:30pm) are motivating me to blog again. No promises (or even plans at this point) on frequency, but hopefully MORE than once every half-year.

Middle of Nowhere Update

I went back to Albin over the weekend. Prior to that, I sent my son up there with a Cradlepoint router and a Verizon Wireless USB EVDO cell phone modem. This particular Cradlepoint has an external antenna. Once again it worked fine. And by worked fine, I mean if you were in the garage with it, you got a great WiFi signal from the Cradlepoint (and its MIMO rigging.) However, the garage is detached and 40+ yards away from the house. Within the house, the signal only penetrated 1/2 a room--so you had to be almost staring out the garage-facing window to use the WiFi-Cell router.

I had brought a Netgear wireless router and about 50' of Cat5E. However, the reason the Netgear was scrapped became obvious. Although the WiFi on it was working fine, the WAN port apparently was not. So, I got a nice signal from the Netgear but a signal to nowhere.

And on that note, I'm full circle--back to the middle of nowhere. I don't plan to return to the hinterlands for a while, so I've terminated the Verizon Wireless account. (As always, Verizon Customer service was quick, knowledgeable, and efficient--no joke.) There was at least one other bit of good news. There were many other folks at the family reunion, many sporting AT&T phones, mostly iPhones, and they were able to get a cell signal much of the time at the north end of the house.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Toy or Tool

I've been looking at getting a new toy/tool and am leaning towards this one:

This machine comes from the long line of eee pcs from Asus. This one is a Tablet computer--so it's not just a "pad", it's also a computer. It does have a few shortcomings, primarily that it is limited to 2G of RAM. It's also a bit tricky to convert it from 160GB HD to an SSD (rumors of 16 screws to do so.)

However, it does run Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and that (with a few tweaks/fixes) enables about everything except a fully functional multi-touch and pressure sensitivity. I'll likely keep this multiboot. If you are one of 'doze kind of people, bear in mind that the Starter edition is pretty much a non-starter on this box and you'll need to pay the Ballmer for something more (or re-read that first line: IT RUNS LINUX.)

There is a promotional video here and a "hands on" video here (but a bit long.) I think if I purchase this, I'll do a "hands on Lucid" video for teh Intartube.