Archive for April, 2006

Easy to Reach CD Player

Friday, April 28th, 2006

For years I’ve kept a CD/DVD player in the computer box under my desk. But it’s hard to reach and there’s no good reason to keep it there. I can place it into an external enclosure for cheap enough and the USB is plenty fast enough. I found an enclosure for $45 on NewEgg. It came with it’s own power brick and USB or FireWire interfaces. The built-in fan was noisy so I unplugged it. It’s really only necessary when it runs a long time and the metal casing should help keep it cool. I know over the years CD players have gotten much hotter living in a case with CPUs, memory, and hard drives.

Here is the pic. It’s been a very positive experience. I haven’t found any drawbacks. Perhaps price. It basically doubles the price of the CD player.

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Patio Shelf

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

I’ve been very interested in growing vegies on my patio this year. It seemed to me that I needed a shelf, but the prospect of finding one to fit the narrow, long space I had in mind was not good. Weather resistance was going to be an issue too. The space I’m trying to fill is 5′ long by 13″ wide and about 18″ tall. On Good Friday I got a flash of insight and the result is the Patio Shelf in the pictures.

It has two legs 18″ long. The other sides are are thin slats of wood that ly on the metal railing of the patio. One side also has the luxury of being close to the build to prevent it from knocking about. This is on the third floor corner of an apartment building. Wind is an enormous problem. It gusts at 30-40 mph many times during the year. Heat and sun tend to eat up everything in the Texas pPnhandle. And humidity can dip into the single digits. The deck is an 8′ plank cut to 5′. Everything is finished with a stain/rub chemical, 2 coats and then 3 coats of polyurethane.

I’m very pleased with the results. It seems sturdy enough. It holds me sitting on it, ~190lb. The weatherproofing should last 2-3 years. The legs seem a bit unstable, but I will reinforce them soon enough.

Costs
8′ X 1′ $13
Stain $10
Polyu. $8
3′ X 1″ $5
Brushes $3
Sandpapr $2
Total $41

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Climate Control

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

I saw the Nova recently on Global Dimming. It was ghastly to see the global warming/dimming terrorism going on. You know, “OMG listen to us and do what we say or you’re all going to die!” Which seem particularly hollow, because they demonstrated that hundreds or thousands of Global Warming PhDs across the world failed to notice a basic instrument reading of how much energy, from the sun, is reaching the ground.

Anyway, the premise is that visible polution contributes to global dimming, making clouds brighter, more clouds, and reflecting more light from the sun. Invisible polution, CO2, Methane, etc., contributes to global warming. The two actions roughly balance each other.

While PBS chooses to broadcast climatological apocolypse, I choose to see this as great hope. These two forces may let us, the human race, make the planet the climate that we want. As opposed to the one we inherited from pre history. It’s not simple and the political issues are huge, but this represents great opportunity. This is the teraforming predicted by science fiction shows. We can make Greenland green and move farther north. Canada and Siberia could be more hapitable. Crops could be grown on more of the land. We can make it rain or not rain in parts of the world. This will be limited by the rotation and existing geography of the land, but we can have an affect. All we have to do is realize it and take steps to actively pursue these goals. They are going to happen any way. We already affect the climate. It’s just not being controlled.

This is the key to actively controlling the climate of our world. Never before has this been possible. There is evidence that civilizations have fallen due to climate change. Now we have the ability to prevent or cause this by choice.

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How to Share TV over the Internet

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

So, I was looking at Zatz not Funny and saw this. And it gave me a very cool idea. The current distribution methods for TV are satellite and coax cable, but the slingbox opens up new doors. Specifically, it lets you get TV from someone else without paying for satellite or coax. For example, I know someone in Midland who gets channels I want, but don’t want to pay for. She and I have high speed internet. So, she plugs a slingbox into the cable and into her network. One of my computers would look for the Slingbox “channel” and play TV over the internet from her local cable to my computer. My computer can be arranged to play onto the TV. She could get my TV shows, I get HBO and Cinemax, if I had a Slingbox.

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My Bedroom Stereo System

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

Abstract
My bedroom is also my meditation area. For guided meditations I need a stereo and preferrably a very good one. Sometimes nature sounds, bells, gongs, etc. are playing in the background. I also want it to play MP3s or Regular CDs and be very, very small. This is the solution I hit upon.

Steps
A regular CD player will only play CDs and you pay a premium for the MP3 option. Also, the choices at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target fell in the too big, too expensive, and limited categories. There is a very small side table by my bed and I wanted it to fit there without taking up all the space. I also found it necessary to have a remote control. That way I could start/stop the CD without getting up or reaching around (ie making myself uncomfortable).

It occurred to me that I had seen the perfect CD player at Walmart during Christmas. It was just sitting in the DVD area and didn’t come with speakers. I already had one of these tiny DVD Players. CDs and MP3s played just fine, but powered speakers were needed. There were a set of Altec Lansing VS2121 computer speakers lying around. DVD players have RCA audio connects and computer speakers use a small jack like a Walkman or tape recorder. There are cables to connect these to devices, for example playing your iPod on your home stereo. The cable from the DVD player was a small male and the cable from the speakers was a small male. A male-male connector piece would be best, but I had a splitter on hand. It worked and saved a trip to Radio Shack.

Illustrations
The pictures in the gallery show the cables and how I connected everything.

Conclusions
It worked great. To my surprise these speakers include a surround sound feature, are wall mountable, and include a subwoofer. The audio is extremely good. There’s no visual display for the DVD player to tell you the track, but it’s not really needed for CDs I use alot or make myself. There’s also the advantage of using a DVD to hold MP3s or CD Audio. The remote isn’t the best, but I’m familiar with it. I’m very pleased with the experience. I don’t think I could have fond a player this small, cheap, and with so many options.

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Technorati Claim

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

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What to do with winmail.dat

Wednesday, April 19th, 2006

I recently got an email in hotmail with a winmail.dat attachment. The email text included a pdf file, but there was not another file attached. After some digging this is what I found…

When an email is written using Outlook in the rtf format it can be received by other email programs as the text and an attachment called winmail.dat. That winmail file can contain pictures, attachments, fonts, etc. from the rtf formatting. To open the file you need another program that will unpack everything in the file. I downloaded WinMail Decoder 2.0 on trial and dropped the file onto WinMailDecoder.exe that comes in the zip file. If unpacked everything and voila I have my pdf file.

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