brentashley

Toy time again. FactoryDirect sent a coupon to me (I subscribe to their monthly specials email) for two of these USB Ezonics802.11b/128Mb flash beasties for Cdn$99, so Tim and I got one each. There’s a switch on it that swaps it from being a memory key to being a WiFi adapter. It also comes with a 3ft extension cable.

The cool thing about a USB wireless network adapter is that you can use it on multiple machines, even on a machine you don’t usually use.

The bogus thing about a USB wireless network adapter is that to use it on a different machine, you have to carry around a damn CD to install the driver.

The really neato thing about this toy is that you put the driver install files on the memory key part of it, so you’ve got it with you when you need it.

It’s my turn to do my bit to balance the propaganda spin.

Hidden somewhere in this picture is the biggest, most completely baked turkey in the whole wide world. Can you spot it?

photo: PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS / AP

Here are some of the fictitious email sender names used to spam my inbox lately.

Congest P. Snobbiest
Elitists A. Alabama
Midwifery O. Debauchery
Phobia C. Openness
Garners C. Residence
Pains B. Ostracism
Zwieback D. Steadfastness
Unsound T. Parkas
Geostationary D. Charger
Admiralty B. Demobilizes
Indelicacy L. Horrors
Localize E. Corrector
Convulsions T. Fibula
Temperance A. Apaches

It’s gonna be a slugfest in the leadup to the US elections this year. No trick will be too low. My bet is that the Republican supporters will be the dirtiest, and they’re starting out nicely with this cartoon of Kerry (detail snippet below) where it’s pretty plain to me that it’s no mistake that his hairdo looks just like a turban and his long face has been drawn out to look like a beard. Just you watch – this will be a theme that sneaks in all over.

My 11-yr-old daughter Jasmine started indoor soccer a couple of weeks ago for the first time. Her first game was last week.

You really know your kid has the perspective right when after the game, I say “Great game – you guys won 5-0!” and she says “Oh, was that the score? You were counting?”

I finally got around to figuring out how to image some various machines onto a newly installed cheap 5400rpm 80Gig drive I have on one of my home boxes.

I had contemplated tools like Norton Ghost and PowerQuest DriveImage but I wasn’t looking forward to farting around with multiple boot floppies to get network and PCMCIA drivers happening for my laptops and various other machines.

I took a look around for some Open Source stuff and came across PartImage, which comes on the Knoppix 3.3 CD.

I booted up my trusty Knoppix CD, opened a shell, and did the following:

… at which point, I was launched into the partimage program which has a full-screen text-based ui that is easy to navigate.

Within minutes I was copying my NTFS partition over the network with gzip compression at about 40 MB per minute.

I’ll have to do some testing on another machine I have, blowing away and restoring partitions. I can only hope it will be as smooth as it has been so far!

— update:

I just saved, trashed and restored a 250MB QNX FAT partition on a celeron333 machine using the System Rescue CD, following the exact same steps as with Knoppix.

Saved the 250Meg partition without compression in 2 min 38 seconds over the network, resored it in less than 5 minutes.

Gotta love the net.

I wanted to play a DVD today that my wife had brought back from England, but my DVD player choked on it saying the disc is restricted to Region 2, whereas of course the DVD player is set for Region 1.

I hopped on Google with my cheap $59 DVD player’s model number and within two minutes, I had the instructions to permanently set my player to Region Zero (all regions) simply by using my remote control to enter a code.

Now I can play discs from anywhere. Woohoo!

Made it to the meetup. Snowy today, traffic horrible. Tim stayed in Brampton so no cam, but I’m online at http://www.blogchat.com