Our living room as bike parking lot. Notice that we have 6 bikes in the photo and only 4 family members (and that’s not even counting the 3 more at my house). That little purple bike in the foreground needs to go, and I have one of the bikes at my place up on Craigslist …
Category Archives: General
Bicycle Content
The coming days should bring some updates to the blog. Bicycles are big in our house at the moment, so I’m going to start posting the related household news. 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 …
Updated my TeX install
Just updated my BasicTeX-2008 install to the 2011 edition. Pretty simple really. 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 …
Highlander Temperature Control Repaired
We’ve been having problems with our Toyota Highlander temperature controls. The system would blow hot/cold air randomly. Messing with the controls would get the correct temperature for a few minutes or seconds and then back to random temps. 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 …
Handmade Cables
Tonight I find myself putting together good old DB-9 connectors, and I realized that it’s been a long time since I have had need (or even seen) these connectors. They were once pretty ubiquitous, first on my Atari 2600 joysticks, and then as RS-232 cable connections. These cables are actually for connecting stepper motors to …
What’s Wrong with Windows
This last semester, for the first time in years, I built a new Windows computer. For most things I prefer to use my Macintosh, but there are a couple of devices that Kim and I want to use that only have Windows drivers. Also having a Windows system also made my grading tasks easier for …
Best product of CES 2011
The annual Consumer Electronics Show is over. Sadly it was not the latest and greatest technological innovation that caught my eye amongst all of the product announcements. It was an April Fool’s Joke. Specifically, it was yet another joke product from the minds of the screaming monkeys at thinkgeek.com. Every year for April Fool’s day …
Portable Programming Rig
I’ve been using a Macbook Air as my main computer for a couple of years now, and I’ve generally been happy with the setup. The only real shortcoming of the Air was attempting to program while on away from my home office (and the external monitor). There just isn’t enough screen real estate on a …
Byte Review of the Original Macintosh
Since byte.com is being revived soon, and in spite of the fact that the new incarnation sounds lame, I’ve had a good time going back and revisiting some of the publications of the day. You can find archives of Creative Computing here and here, as well as Compute! located here. But the initial review of …
Christmas Day 2010
Now that the orgy of torn wrapping paper and discarded cardboard is over. The gifts I gave seem to have been mostly duds. Kim doesn’t like the sheets for the bed, and the girls don’t seem interested in building any of their projects. I had planned on spending the afternoon busily assembling the minor DIY …