I've been reading up on a lot of computer hardware recently in preparation for building my new system. Although I don't have the specifics pinned down yet, it will likely be based on an Intel Core i7 860 processor running on a P55-based motherboard with 8 GiB of DDR3 RAM. In this process, I have found a growing annoyance inside of me towards reviewers that omit simple, yet powerful, information from their reviews. I'm talking about ...More »

Hi everyone, I just wanted to give you a heads up that Matt's Live at the Concert Hall performance airs tonight on Bravo! at 10pm EST. My brother and I were at the recording for the show and it was a lot of fun; very different atmosphere than a traditional rock concert. It was particularly strange to see them record all of the interview-aspects first, and then have the band perform all the songs after. ...More »

I am in the process of trying to get hardware video acceleration working via VDPAU on my T61 laptop. Rather, I should say I was working on this, as I in fact succeeded (mostly) today. In the process, I had to upgrade my laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). On one hand, I had everything working on Jaunty nicely the way I like it; on the other hand, Karmic brings a ...More »

The past 24 hours have been.. well, interesting. Yesterday (which was a Friday, for those of you counting) I swung by my apartment to pick up my hockey gear. The elevators were not working, so I had to take the stairs. The emergency lights were on, however so were all of the main lights. My computer was still running, meaning there had been no power interruption. I shrugged, grabbed my gear, and went outside to ...More »

I need a new phone. I mean, I desperately need a new phone. My current phone, a Samsung SPH-A500, is many years past its prime and is flakey and unreliable at best. Lately, it seems to enjoy entering "safe-hold" mode and is unable to boot. My replacement phone will have certain characteristics, including but not limited to running the Android operating system, doubling as a portable media player to replace my aging iPod ...More »

Hi everyone, I just wanted to write you a quick note welcoming you (belatedly) to 2010; hopefully this year I will do a better job of regular posts (Ha!). More »

In the past, I have used dynamic IP services such as No-Ip.com and DynDNS.org to provide my home with a stable identifier on the internet. My router, a Linksys WRT-310N (running DD-WRT) is supposed to support running a daemon to update your IP at providers such as these, however I found that the scheduler ceased to call the update script after about a day. As a result, my IP address was usually out of date, ...More »

For those who are not aware, Matthew Good's new album Vancouver is currently being aired on his website. This is slightly different from the previous web stream in that a) it is higher quality, b) it is live, i.e. everyone listening to it hears the same thing at the same time, and c) there are extra goodies in there like interviews, live recordings, demos, etc. You can access the live radio stream here. Concerts Incidentally, I will ...More »

Last week I posted my first puzzle. I only received one response this week; it was from Calden, whose solution was quite a bit different from mine but which also made plenty of sense. I'll cover his solution later on; for now, here is the intended solution. As you recall, we have two one-dimensional ropes at our disposal that each take one hour to burn. The key thing to note is that if you light both ...More »

This is the first puzzle in what I hope will be a successful series operating in concert with Calden. This first puzzle is fairly straightforward and was posed by another student at SFL. You are given two one-dimensional ropes. Each rope takes exactly one hour to burn, however the time is not distributed evenly through the ropes (e.g. if you cut one rope in half, one of the halves could burn in 59 minutes while the ...More »