Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

  • How not to sell a new product

    SageTV has a new hardware product that I’m interested in, a Media Extender box to get content from a PC with the SageTV software loaded up to your living room without having to have a noisy PC next to the TV. The problem is that there is absolutely NO information about exactly what it can do. Here’s what I know from their website: It displays stuff on some sort of television.

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  • Mint soda!

    Al Sicherman reports in the Star Tribune a new mint flavored commercial soda, called Snow, available from metro area Kowalski’s. I’ll be hunting down a bottle or 3 today. A google search did turn up at least one person who wasn’t quite so happy with his experience with a bottle of it..

  • New router

    Due to some problems on the network, I isolated the issue to my venerable old SMC Barricade router. A port had gone bad a couple of years ago and now traffic through it was starting to drag and packet loss was getting pretty extreme. So I replaced it with a Linksys WRT54G like most of the rest of the world and just finished getting it up and running. A couple of points for others who run into these problems:

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  • Bad batch in the offing?

    I opened a bottle of the African Skies after 55 hours of carbonating and 2 hours chilling, and it was not a good thing. It wasn’t quite a bad thing either, but definitely not a good sign so far. There was barely any pressure release when opened, and the liquid was essentially flat. Very strong yeast smell and taste. Nothing really off that I could pinpoint, but not good so far.

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  • Happy Holidays to Me!

    I bought myself a digital camera for Christmas. I’ve been thinking about getting one for awhile and it worked out nicely with some other shopping I was doing. The camera is a Canon PowerShot A520, and over the last day of playing with it seems to be pretty good. Not too small, not too large, decent optical zoom and while very simple to use also has lots of advanced stuff if I want to get into it.

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  • Blogburst!

    Sometimes when it rains it pours, and right now I’ve got the bug to write. I just added a fairly large page collecting some of my opinions about soda brewing and look to be likely to post at last once more today.

  • Late season, late night

    For the first time in far too long I put down a couple of batches of soda on Friday night. Kind of late in the season by some estimates, and it was certainly late enough at night (didn’t get started till 11pm) but I’m pretty happy with it all so far and can’t wait to chill the bottles tomorrow. Batch #1 is pretty simple: Gnome Root Beer Extract 2lbs C&H Washed Raw pure cane sugar 1 lb Billington’s Light Muscovado Sugar 2.

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  • When old machines start to get alsheimers…

    PLEASE NOTE! Due to recurring issues with my server here at home I have decided that it’s time to replace it. I looked at the various options for doing so, and while I had hoped I could wait another 6 months, I’m going to replace my primary machine and cascade things down the line. That means that the venerable Gateway P3-500 is going to be replaced by the BYOB P3-700 over the course of the next 3 days.

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  • To the universe, with thanks

    With the house pretty much clean, the roast in the oven, and everything else out of my hands for dinner this afternoon it’s nice to take a few minutes to rest and think. There has been a fairly common tradition with the American holiday of Thanksgiving to talk about all of the things that one is thankful for in their lives. Normally I don’t participate in this tradition since it so often seems like a way to pander to those you want to show off to, and an easy way to screw-up by not mentioning someone that you should have.

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  • New sidebar item: BlogMap

    I’ve added a new little item to the right sidebar called a BlogMap. Basically it shows where I am, as well as what else is near me. Sort of interesting, and we’ll see how long I leave it up. More info at feedmap .net (BETA)