Jefflog

We’re in the process of setting up a home office for Hong, so she doesn’t have to be bothered by the daily commute to work. She has a company-provided laptop, and the laptop comes with wireless networking built in, so it should be easy to connect to our existing network at home and plug into the office, right?

Not a chance. You see, the laptop is “locked down”. No one but the administrator can change the wireless settings of the laptop, and of course, corporate policy won’t allow the administrator to change the settings for our home network. When calling the company’s tech support on the telephone, they were paranoid to the extent that I wasn’t allowed to talk geek-á-geek to the guy on the phone, but then he suggested that we would have to use the wireless network in unencrypted mode. Yeah, right… There’s no way I’m letting my neighbors sniff my network that easily.

The other options were

1. Drill holes into the wall to connect her laptop to my router;
2. Buy a long Ethernet cord and snake it down the hallway;
3. Buy this handy pocket router.

We chose the third option, and it just arrived today. This thing is sweet. Not only does it serve as an external wireless client (which means you don’t need an administrator to install drivers on your machine), but it can also work as a wireless access point when you’re on the road and only have wired Internet access. It’s pretty small, about the height and width of a credit card and maybe 1/2-inch tall, and comes in a handy carrying case. Bonus points for allowing the option to plug it into a USB port for power rather than using the included power supply. Highly recommended.

I put some new videos on-line this morning. In particular, check out this video of the hailstorm we had last Friday.

One of the “perks” I get to enjoy from working at home is being able to make my own cup of coffee. (Yes, that pun was intended.) No longer am I relegated to drinking whatever sludge happens to be sitting on the company-wide coffee burner and brewed from individual pouches of ground beans of dubious origin. I can make myself a fresh cup every time and make it as good as I want it.

Here’s my java-making routine, performed by me twice or thrice daily:

1. Use good beans, ground freshly. Finding good beans can be hard, although you might check out The Coffee Review for some good pointers. I like these fair trade beans, although I also recently got some Kenyan beans from Starbucks that were also very good. I tend to shy away from “blends”, since that usually translates to “hoping the good beans we included mask the flavor of the mediocre ones.”
   You’ll need a coffee grinder as well; this Braun coffee grinder has served me well, and only set me back $15.
2. Use filtered water. When it comes to drinking water, I’ll drink from the tap as readily as bottled water, but my coffee has to start with filtered water. It makes a huge difference. We’re not asking for Evian here; water from a Brita pitcher will work just as well.
3. Use a French Press. It’s such a simple device, but the result tastes better than the automatic coffee makers. To use it, just put the ground beans in the glass, pour in almost-boiling water, then let steep for four minutes before pushing the plunger and pouring your coffee. It’s really not much more trouble than an automatic.

I finally decided to roll out this new theme I’ve been working on in the past couple of weeks. I never was very happy with the previous theme, and I’m pretty proud of this one.

One caveat: it doesn’t render very well in Internet Explorer, but I figure I can’t be troubled by trying to support browsers that haven’t had their core rendering engine updated in four years. In fact, IE users should get a message along the top of the screen to upgrade their browser.

This weekend, Fry’s Electronics opened up a store in Indianapolis. I had been to a Fry’s in Southern California about 12 years ago (to get some 1 meg DIMMs for my Atari ST, yay!), and even back then it was well known within the geek community as a mecca for all things electronic. Primarily a west-coast chain, I was excited to see them opening up a location here.

So, I went out with a friend of mine to scope out the new location. Guess what I learned? It’s really no different that a super-large Best Buy or CompUSA. Sure, they’ve got 50 different kinds of headphones and probably about everything a consumer would want, but I guess I was expecting something a little, umm, less consumeristic? You know, things like soldering irons and RAID controllers, not $399 Dell computers and washing machines. Actually, they probably do have the soldering irons there, I just wasn’t looking too hard, and certainly the hardcore geek section is far smaller than the consumer-oriented remainder of the store.

Despite the crowds of people there on opening weekend, we didn’t find any super deals that we had hoped for; prices seemed about the same as any other place. I had wanted to get a DVD burner, but I ended up putting it back on the shelf after realizing that I could probably find it online for less. I walked out with just a camera bag for my digital camera and camcorder.

To give you an idea of the size of the place, they had 50 (!) checkout lanes. Turns out they had flown in most of the staff from the west coast locations for the opening weekend; my cashier hailed from Oregon. Something tells me they won’t be able to keep up the volume of shoppers to warrant 50 checkout lanes for long, in much the same way the local Super Target has 40 lanes yet the most I’ve ever seen open at one time would be about 10 or so.

All in all, not a bad place, and certainly would be fun to go there if I had $1000 sitting in my pocket begging to be spent, but not quite what I was expecting.

Over the weekend, I went back and re-encoded the home movie clips posted on-line into the open source Theora codec. I initially did this because, after upgrading my copy of iMovie from version 3 to 4, the Quicktime output seemed choppier, and the system would error out whenever I tried to tweak the export settings.

In the end, I was pleasantly surprised by Theora. I managed to get twice the frame-rate and a 44% larger image with comparable file sizes. For now, I’m keeping both the Theora and Quicktime versions available on-line, so check out the two different versions and see if you don’t agree that Theora is far superior. Future clips might be available in the Theora format only.