(via Engadget)

By “cool”, Kim means self-winding watches, and particularly skeleton-ized watches with visible movements. She occasionally hunts for them on Amazon, but doesn’t find watches meeting her aesthetic (and financial) requirements. It took some doing, but I managed to find a (discontinued) watch that fit the bill (pictured above). After a lot of searching on eBay and paying really close to retail price, I snagged one used. Kim’s got her “cool” watch at last. That particular model is from Kenneth Cole, but I suspect it’s a version of a Chinese watch from Seagull.

During the search I came across a terrible site for those (like me) who love to shop for watches. If you have a hankering to kill some time staring at different ways to blow up a bank account, check out Watch Recon.

Mostly, I’ve moved over some adventure games from Legend Entertainment and Infocom, and the Pro Pinball series from Cunning Development. Timeshock and the Web both worked flawlessly, but Pro Pinball: Big Race USA needed a little tweaking. Specifically, the DOSBOX configuration needed to have the abstract volume name set and the amount of memory had to be raised. Here’s what the DOSBox Preferences.conf file looks like:


[cpu]
core=dynamic

[autoexec]
ABSTRACT Pro_Pinball_3


(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Now I have a free XBL Silver account which is free, but I don’t play enough multi-player games to justify $60/yr. for a Gold account. I do currently spend $8/mo. for Netflix streaming — now Microsoft wants me to pay for Gold access just to get at content I already pay for.

To be clear:
I paid for the Xbox 360.
I pay for Netflix.
I pay for my broadband connectivity.

So all I want is for Microsoft to let me use the app (that’s already on my Xbox) to use the things I’ve already paid for. For this they want $50 each and every year (subject to price increases).

Fail.

For the record you can buy a Roku as little as $50 (one-time purchase) and get more currently available apps.

Both kids received bicycles for their birthdays this year. Much happiness and a bunch of riding ensued. This has naturally led to more riding for Kim and me. in an effort to avoid paying for a campus parking permit, Kim has already been riding to work most days. So, I just needed to hop on my bike to make it a family affair.

After a few evening rides in the College Park area, we took a longish (10 mile) ride in Rock Creek Park — from Peirce Mill to Grubb Road, and back. At the mid-point of our ride, we enjoyed a nice Sunday brunch at the Daily Dish. The ride was a relative success, and we plan on trying to enjoy a couple more such outings while the weather holds.

I deleted the old installation using:

tlmgr uninstall

then downloaded the latest incarnation from http://www.tug.org/mactex/2011/morepackages.html, then installed it.

I had to update the path in my .tcshrc to point to the new bin directory, and voila! Latest and greatest TeX install.

I then went ahead and ran the post installation steps from my previous post.

Luckly, the Internet has lots of documentation on this problem:

http://www.devalcourt.com/2010/03/fixing-2004-toyota-highlander-ac-and-heat-issue/
http://www.tundrasolutions.com/forums/highlander/32217-heater-quit-sort-of/

I followed the directions online and the repair was pretty straight-forward; anyone who can use a screwdriver and has basic soldering skills could have tackled this repair. The whole thing took less than 30 minutes. We ended up saving close to $1000-$1500.

Tools required:

• 10mm nut driver or socket wrench
• #2 philips screwdriver
• soldering iron
• solder wick or desoldering tool
• wire stripper/cutter

I’m grateful that the information is out there and that I have at least enough basic skills to perform this type of repair. We had all the tools and skills in the house and frankly, our 10-year-old has the skills required to complete this repair with some guidance. This was a great example of where some basic DIY saved a lot of time and money.

It’s amazing to me that Toyota hasn’t done a recall on the part, since this seems to be a pretty common problem and a simple fix to a relatively expensive part.

As I sit here soldering, shrink-wrapping, and enclosing the connectors, I realized that this task was part of my first paying job in computing. I was a employed as a trainee technician at ComputerPro of Kensington, MD when I was 13 or 14 years old. They mostly sold Kaypro and Leading Edge PC-compatible machines. I remember the first 286 systems arriving while I worked there — that must have been around 1985. That job was my first exposure to CP/M and DOS, the first time I saw a hard drive, and the first time I tried “business software” (Wordstar 2000 & Wordperfect 4.1).

Thinking back, those days were pretty exciting in the personal computer field. Hardware was expensive and the software was pretty rudimentary. Most PC users were still just hobbyists or gadget freaks,; there wasn’t really all that much you could use a computer for back then. But, it was the beginning of something big, and eventually it led to the whole world changing. Tonight, I working on a small desktop CNC mill. Most people who own one today are just hobbyists or DIY freaks; there isn’t really all that much you can use it for at the moment. But, I wonder if this isn’t the beginning of something else big?