A day after I posted to their technote saying ‘the best way to improve this technote is to ship the intel version,” Adobe delivers. You can thank me later.

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Woke up to the heater on (sigh). It was 67 inside, nice and cool. Heater turned off. Went to Home Depot last night and bought reflectix, which is essentially aluminum paper bubble wrap. Didn’t pay attention to the R-values as there are many rules on the instruction sheet.

So I took down one of the pieces of cardboard I had wedged into the skylights down, and this stuff was just the right width to be shoved up into the skylight. it says it wants 1/2 inch space, but I figure the double pane on the skylight supports that. Also, there was a lip around the top of the skylight box, so I just cut a length and used my yard stick to push the edges up into the lip, with some hanging down inside. I can see little pokes of light, but much less than the cardboard allowed, plus this reflective value should be much greater.

I’m leaving the other skylight cardboarded and will see if I can find a way to determine height of day temperature effectiveness. I don’t have a infrared thermometer yet, but I’ll work something out.

I got a 25ft roll so maybe a couple of sheets to lie inside the blinds might help on the sunny side while I am here, just move it from window to window as needed and let the blinds hold it up. Hmm…. Renting makes one try and find solutions on the cheap that are not terribly awful looking.

Buyer beware!

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Boing Boing reports on a cool new Haunted Mansion papercraft model!

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while not a mac story, Ars has a story on how Microsoft is letting people test drive the new Office 2007 beta not by downloading it, but by running it over the Internet using Citrix, which allows you to log into a remote machine much like VPC, or Timbuktu. I find this quite novel actually, as this means people can try true betas out, no pirated copies, no betas to uninstall or muck up your computer.

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A quite nice, not too spoiling review of the movification of our beloved attraction can be read here.

Friday night I went to see a charity screening of Serenity with Charles and Janet. We had dinner with Elizabeth ahead of time, then carpooled to downtown and found parking. We had drinks at the Gypsy, which was donating 10% of all food sales to Equality Now. The screening and raffle tickets proceedings were donated to Equality Now as well.

The event was organized by Firefly fans world wide, with Portland having the largest sold out event, 500 seats, plus another $650 from raffle tickets sales. Janet won three times, a Love Bot doll (don’t ask heh), a gift certificate to a comics shop and 4 tickets to a Portland Beavers game, which she graciously gave to me! They also gave me my second club shirt – a cool Dragonball Z design. Thanks!

The evening was a lot of fun, the movie was great a second time around and I had a blast.

Today, temperatures reached 101 and the house was 92 inside when Elizabeth and I bailed for the mall to cool down. We had snacks at the Cheesecake Factory (but no cheesecake – the horror!) and did some shopping. When we came home it was 94 downstairs and 98 upstairs. Now all of the windows are open and the temperature is starting to go down, a little.

Tomorrow we’re to hit 98, then 84 on Tuesday. Sigh. At least the heat doesn’t last for too long here.

Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room turns 43 today!

Thanks to Dave for this link of a MagSafe connector attracting sand.

The Oregon State Beavers shut out the #2 Rice Owls for two games straight to advance to the championship round of the College World Series. After losing game 1 11-1 to the Miami Hurricanes, the Beavs came back to beat the Canes, then the Owls twice to double eliminate them and move on.

Now they face the Tarheels who beat Cal State Fullerton.

Its a big deal in Oregon to beat #2, being unseeded and all.

Game 1 is on Saturday!

Here are two recent stories of laptop batteries catching fire. I think I’ll be turning my laptop off when I am not around, although I am not sure if that will actually prevent a battery from exploding.

• http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32550
• http://wcco.com/consumer/local_story_148150249.html

yes my favorite movie, The Princess Bride, has been re-re-released. This marks the fourth time I have purchased it. Laserdisc, DVD, not-as-crappy Special Edition DVD, very nice DVD.

This new edition comes in two box covers, The Dread Pirate edition and The Princess Buttercup edition. I bought the latter because the art depicts them face to face, whereas the DPR edition depicts Wesley close with Buttercup in the distance on her horse, which just didn’t feel right.

I have not looked at much but I did watch the Battle of Wits scene, which on the previous two DVDs was horribly dirty with nasty film noise. This new DVD is very clean. I still don’t think it holds up to the Criterion laserdisc print, but it is acceptable.

Of course, once the HD wars are won I am sure I’ll be buying this movie yet again.

This is a two disc set and sells for the very reasonable $19.99.

More tests to http://nitro.ucsc.edu, running Talisman 1.2 RC1 on a Linksys WRT54GS 1.1:

10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 1.93Mb/s running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 14.97Mb/s

Yeah!

ok I really want this to work. I bought a refurb base station at The Mac Store. I did this crazy thing because of my iChat woes and also to test the hardware and latest firmware. Nothing like an overzealous geek.

I brought it home and plugged it into my G5. Upon opening the Airport Admin Utility, the software said “Hey, there is new software for your base station, 5.6!” Sweet, so I click upload and off it goes. Within a few mins I had the base station configured for WPA2 and off I went upstairs.

I connected via the Mac Book Pro and opened the Airport Admin Utility and upon connecting to the base station, the software said “Hey, there is new software for your base station, 5.7!” Weird. Ok, so my G5 was out of date somehow. I am not sure why, I always update stuff, even airport on my G5 Anywho, I update.

All is well and having just run some speed tests with my WRT54G2 running Talisman 1.2 RC2, I knew a 1.92mbps up and 2-8mbps down was ok from the living room. I got the same speeds on the AE! Sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

Then Elizabeth on her PC laptop tried to connect. No joy. So after a good while of researching I found out she had older broadcom drivers. Joy. I set up the WRT again and after some fun with that, I had her back on the net so she could work.

Yesterday I got permission to update her machine. So I installed new drivers from HP, but it still didn’t connect. Then I installed a new utility, but still no connection. Then I ran all of the latest MS updates, one of which was for her card (remembering I had just installed the latest from HP not an hour before) and after all of that, it would finally connect.

yay! So I ran some tests with myself, all is good. Until she sat near me on the couch.

With her radio near my radio, the Airport Extreme tests dropped to a horrible 175kbps up and 300-800kbps down. I ran the tests over and over. Nothing helped. I could move into the kitchen and it was a little better, but not much.

I unplugged the airport and reconnected the WRT. With both of us sitting in the exact same spot, I got 1.93mbps up and 8.2mbps down. Over and over.

I had both base stations set to the same channel, same WPA password and in the spot when they were active.

So alas, it looks like it might be going back, unless anyone has some ideas?

Update: I returned it. I picked up Call of Duty 2 instead.

LAN and Wifi speeds comparable to WRT54GS.

Elizabeth’s PC no connecty to Apple. Probably her older drivers. Have not updated yet. Went back to WRT.

Of course Talisman 1.2 RC2 broke wifi, and some firewall issues kept some of it from working at all (no google, etc) so downgraded to RC1.

Fun eh? All to fricken’ ichat.

As you can tell from my mystic posts, I’ve been trying to solve this can’t iChat AV in Tiger issue even though I’m talking to people with PhDs and what not. Or not talking to them should I say.

I had Vonage switch to SIP port 5061, but then eliminated the Vonage router altogether and still had issues.

I then upgraded my Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 to Talisman/Basic 1.2.RC2 and wow, with just uPNP I could talk to John, or Tim, or Patrick, but not more than one of them at once. Grrr.

Oh anf then, my wireless in WPA mode is dead. Known issue, rc3 coming soon.

So I got the offer to buy a refurbed Apple Airport Extreme Basestation for like $20 off list. I’m going to try it but my gut tells me I won’t be happy. I already lose a port, which means some other piece of hardware is needed (I was using 1 2 ports on my linksys in conjunction with a Netgear 4 port gigabit switch). I’ll test the wifi speeds, the lan to wan speeds and see if it actually works for iChat and Vonage. Report later tonight.

Apple, if anyone is listening. Come on, please. At least make a cool wizard that says “Hey, we noticed you actually connected to two people, mind if we snag your router info, ISP so we can let people know what works?” Anything would help other than this religious voodoo we’re going through.

In these days of “Get a Mac” ads, its sad my ichat experiences are reminiscent of why we’d giggle at Windows users.

Over 802.11g via my Linksys WRT54GS 1.1 running Talisman/Basic 1.2.devsnap.RC1

http://http://nitro.ucsc.edu/ is the test suite.

TCP/Web100 Network Diagnostic Tool v5.3.3d click START to begin Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 1.92Mb/s running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 8.11Mb/s The slowest link in the end-to-end path is a 10 Mbps Ethernet subnet

click START to re-test

Sigh. I hate iChat. Damn reliance on routers.

Anyway, had Vonage move to port 5061 (they said they were at 10,000? no, they are clueless, was probably 5060) and then changed router to use these settings:

We’ll see.

I uploaded my YMCA video to Google as a test. Wow the quality is cruddy, but at least it is not my bandwidth!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1744636162111112533

Hey its time for another SteveCast! A short update on what is going on in my life including a shout out to a dear friend…

P.S. The restaurant was the Clark Lewis

 

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