July was wet. And pretty busy for me. I’m not sure if August will be wet (I sure hope it is dry for at least two weeks) but I know I’ll be even busier. Various July highlights:
- Prompted by some hard disk drive errors I disassembled Hal, blew the dust out, and plugged him back together. The problem ended up being a bad cable but now the case has got a single air intake with a filter so hopefully the dust buildup will sharply decline.
- I’m working through the last three books of the Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series. Gripping and grim – I’m enjoying it and wondering how the conclusion will find Jacen Solo…
- Our basement flooded multiple times, once several inches deep. Uncool. Not much of my stuff was damaged but the water did ruin other items and created loads of unwelcome work in clearing out and cleaning.
A cool thing I did today was test out webcamFLV from the library. Dad’s old .3 (that is point three) megapixel camera is hooked up to Hal and I use it as a webcam. I found webcamFLV the other day, which is a free open source software that encodes streaming video and sound to be shown live on a webpage via Flash. To test it from another location I ran a looping music video of Bitter Taste by Spoken, positioned the camera to film that part of the screen, then opened webcamFLV and started capturing. From a library computer I opened my test page on kryptech.name and put in Hal’s IP address. Sure enough, I could see Spoken rocking on Hal’s screen at home! It was about .04 fps, granted, but that is dial-up for you. I’ll definitely have to play more with this come broadband.
About that, I’m hoping (desperately) that we’ll have Rogers cable mid fall. It looks like it might be a possibility. Please, please, please, please, please…