2005-01-27: Minor update

So, I've made some minor progress on the front room. However, the 'visual value' of this progress is at a bonus compared to most of the house work I do, because this is visible immediately upon entering the house. I was amazed to discover that I didn't have any recent pictures of this spot of the floor to compare against - but take it from me, this represents a substantial improvement. There shall be a Fry's run tomorrow, officially so that Nicole can check out the laptops. However, my nefarious intentions involve buying reusable cable ties so that I can tidy up the cables visible in the lower right corner of the picture. Oh. Well, and perhaps a shielded VGA cable or a DVI connector, considering that there's occasionally static visible on the computer output on my plasma TV. Static on VGA is just not supposed to be seen. Ever.

Other changes inflicted upon the area included cutting down a few of the cardboard boxes (yes, they did wind up in the box graveyard under my bed), spooling up the power cable and hose on Artoo, and relocating a gun case long enough to house a Mosin-Nagant 91/30 into my bedroom. The Denny's bag to the right will be removed some time soon, probably around when the cables get out of there. Another substantial note of progress was categorizing all the targets visible on the table by whether they've been shot or not, and if shot, whether they had sentimental value or were meant as shotgun targets for the next range run. I'm almost inclined to try and take some of the huge pile of unused targets back to Iron Sights for credit or something. At any rate, you'll notice there are three distinct piles, one of which is held together with a spring clamp.

On a further note, Craig came over to show off some video tapes from back when he used to play ice hockey. This precipitated my re-wiring the power setup for my entertainment center, finally getting the Cyberpower 1250 UPS reconnected so its cell doesn't go bad (it was unplugged for a month... hope it's still ok), and lastly hooking the VCR back up. I also hooked up my Dazzle so that I can start doing VCR captures again, and a few things were made evident:

1. VHS actually doesn't look bad on a plasma screen. It does in fact look much better than I'd given it credit for.
2. I've got way too many remotes. I need to set up the palm pilot set up as a universal programmable remote, as I've planned on doing. In the meantime, I discovered that my surround sound system remote does control a passable number of the VCR's functions, so it was usable.
3. Letterboxed VHS doesn't look so great on a plasma. The low res of the NTSC signal, combined with the fact that a good chunk of the screen is only showing black pixels, results in visible pixellation from the actual data area of the screen when viewed in widescreen on the plasma.
4. The VHS version of Riki-Oh looks a bit reddish on my plasma screen. However, it still rocks. And apparently, people on Amazon recommend buying maximum strength Pepto-Bismol along with the movie. Wusses.

Anyway, I also managed to get Ares (the Fedora Core 3 linux box by the TV) to stop locking up at the hardware level (no ping, no keyboard response, had to power cycle it) every time I tried to connect to it with VNC. All I wound up having to do, was swap the "vnc" module in the xorg.conf file to load as the FIRST thing rather than the LAST thing. Strangely enough, this was opposite from what I had to do to get it to work at all back in the days of Redhat 9. I'm probably only a few kernel tweaks away from being able to dump stuff from VHS to Ares. Note that you only run into this weirdness when you're remote'ing the :0 display. That having been said, it's worth it for big-screen Happy Tree Friends goodness.

Now, if someone would just come up with a good Linux-based universal IR remote that I could use over either SSH or VNC, I'd be set.