Oct 29
Another silly random project I came up with.
You can find it here: http://www.samutz.com/blargh/articles/borderlands-custom-starter-saves/
Oct 22
I updated the FlowPlayer article with a working demo of the playlist functions in action.
Oct 08
Flowplayer is an excellent flash media player, capable of playing video and audio. It comes with it’s own playlist system, but it’s very limited.
This article details how to create a custom playlist system for Flowplayer using jQuery and Flowplayer’s javascript API. This system will allow you to manipulate playlist items without interrupting current playback and adds several functions not available in the Flowplayer JS API.
Read more: Custom Playlist Controls on Flowplayer with jQuery
Jun 23
I love AltNation on Sirius. I listen to it more than any other station. But I recently learned that I could no longer listen to Sirius internet radio because they now charge you extra for it, even if you’re a;ready a satellite subscriber. So I came up with the idea of writing a script that would automatically read songs recently played AltNation and add them to an “AltNation” user on Last.fm. Then from there I could listen to that user’s library.
Today I’ve finally put that idea in to action and created a user called AltNationFan that gets automatically updated with whatever songs AltNation has been playing recently using the Last.fm API.
As far as I can tell (I’m still relatively new to Last.fm), you can only listen to the station via the Last.fm client by adding AltNationFan to your friends list. If that’s the case, I’ll keep an eye on the account and accept any new friend requests that come in.
Oct 23
The nation’s broadband situation pisses me off. The big players (Comcast, ATT, Verizon, etc) claim to have nationwide service, but in the small town I live in, you can’t get any of them. They develop faster and faster services for their big city customers while my town gets shafted.
From looking at the big companies, you can get about 20 Mbps for about $60/mo, yet here the best $60/mo gets you is 3 Mbps, but even that has been as slow at 200 Kbps in the afternoons thanks to new sign-ups.
In a town where every middle school and high school student has a take-home laptop, we really need decent broadband service.
Aug 19
Every Nvidia Graphics Card With G84 or G86 Chipset Is Ready to Die
Dell Extends Warranties for Laptops With Failing Nvidia Chips While Nvidia Stays Mum
How about Dell laptops with other nVidia series cards?
My company bought 3 Inspiron 9400s, identical to one another. Each one has a GeForce Go 7900 GS.
One of those three shipped with the video card already defective. It started off with minor polygon/3d-model distortion in 3d applications (games mostly). Then the distortion got worse as time went on. Then eventually we started seeing other aspects of the video rending start to go corrupt, such as stretched/distored 2d graphics, bits of the screen missing. So we had Dell ship us a replacement video card. It’s been fine since then.
Then recently another laptop (mine) started showing the same symptoms as the first one. So we called Dell again and they sent us another replacement video card. Only this time the video corruption was still there and worse. So next, I tried swapping RAM with the last “no problems” laptop. Still didn’t work. We even tried swapping the CPUs. Still didn’t work. So we called Dell back and they send us a replacement motherboard. We installed it. Still no change.
So finally we swapped the video cards on my laptop and the “no problems” laptop. And it finally worked again.
So apparently the video card Dell sent us was defective out of the box. Which brings us to a total of 3 defective videos cards we’ve received from them (the first laptop, mine, then the replacement for mine).
We’ve called in again that we need another video card, and they basically told us that they don’t believe us and will be sending a technician to us to check it out him or herself, which has left me very angry with them as this means I’m without my laptop for even longer. It’s been about a month now since mine has become unusable. And to make matters worse, I live in a remote region that DHL doesn’t ship to, and Dell always insists on shipping through them even after we tell them we can’t receive DHL. And I’m sure it’ll take them another month to send a technician down from wherever just to look at it, tell us it needs a new video card, then leave us waiting for Dell to send another one, that could be defective out of the box.
Jun 26
After a couple of exchanges and about 2 weeks of waiting for parts, my new computer is complete.
Originally, I wanted a small, simple linux box to sit next to my TV and act as a media center, but later decided that wasn’t the best choice due to my TV being a low resolution SDTV. But I still had the “I need a new home computer” mindset, so I ended up building a gaming computer.
Before building this computer, I only had 2 computers. One is an old 1.8 Ghz AMD Duron box running Kubuntu. Over the years it had become a server, used for file storage, testing website stuff locally, and running an irc bot and bnc. The other is my 1 and a half-year old laptop that used to be one of the best for mobile gaming and now can’t even run Bioshock on the lowest settings without having framerate problems. Plus the laptop is owned by the school district I work for, so it’s not technically mine. But I do have a lot of freedom with it, such as installing games, music, etc. I could even run linux on it if I wanted to. As long as I can do my work on it.
I’ve gutted old computers and put together working ones from the parts, but this was my first experience putting together a brand new one from the ground up. Everything was bought from Newegg.
The parts list after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »
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