Koozie Notes

Weaknees Tivo

My new Tivo for the bedroom arrived today from Weaknees! I ordered their 140 hr model with a USB network adapter. Tonight I will be busy crawling around in my attic running cat5e cable to the bedroom.

-Chris

A Visual Ride through Chernobyl

A friend sent me this interesting link to a Visual Ride through Chernobyl.

I travel a lot and my favorite destination lead through so called Chernobyl "dead zone" It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite? because one can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul. People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods, lakes. Roads haven't been built or repaired since 80th but in places where they haven't been ridden by trucks or army technics, they stay in the same condition as 20 years ago.

Pretty cool photographs.

-Chris

Update: 20 MAY 2004
New information on Slashback might show that this story was stretched.

Ultimate Boot CD

I found a post about the Ultimate Boot CD on Andy's site and it looks like a cool tool.

Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Wouldn't you like to avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD? Then the Ultimate Boot CD is for you!

I'll need to download the iso, burn it, and give it a whirl.

1. Hard Drive diagnostics tools
2. Darik's Boot and Nuke [DBAN]
3. NTFS tools
4. Tom's Root Boot

-Chris

Coffee Baby

I found another funny article covering IT's obsession with caffeine.

A quick scan of the recycling bin in any office where developers work will likely turn up more than your average collection of empty bottles and cups of Dr. Pepper, Diet Coke, the "energy drink" Red Bull, Arizona's iced Ginseng Tea or Starbucks Frappaccinos.

"Most programmers are highly independent and highly intelligent," says Harry Weller, a partner with venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. "They're allowed to wear what they want, do what they want, and even work when they want, but they have to make their deadlines."

What can I say, I love my morning cup of joe.

-Chris

Netflix Founder

My local paper picked up a story about Reed Hastings, the guy who started Netflix.

Hastings then came up with the idea for Netflix when he returned a rented copy of the movie Apollo 13 more than a week late and got slapped with a $39 penalty.

I decided to give Netflix a try after I got hit $8.00 in late fees for 2 DVDs that I also paid $8.00 to rent. So I just blew $16.00 for 2 DVDs and felt like I got cheated at the same time. Hum... Netflix sounds like a good deal to me.

-Chris

Update: 9 July 2004

Found another copy of the article [usatoday.com].
Also try searching for Reed Hastings.

Need a Million Dollars?

I had a good laugh this morning reading a story about a Georgia woman who tried to pass off a counterfeit 1 million dollar bill at her local Walmart.

-Chris

Update 31 OCT 2004
I found a copy of the story along with police report on thesmokinggun.com.

say "Help"

While thumbing through my April edition on MacWorld, I read a little piece on the OSX 'say' command. I must admit I have some fun with my family members getting the laptop to speak.

~cks$ say "Help me, I am trapped inside this computer"

If your not familiar with Unix command, just find the terminal.app in the utilities directory and run the command above.

-Chris

Getting Things Done

Well I've been busy at work with my label maker and listening to a new audio book, "Getting Things Done" by David Allen.  If you find yourself swamped at work and forgetting to do things, take a stab at this book.  I downloaded the audio book from iTunes and have been happy with my purchase.

David's site even has some free articles to get started.

-Chris

PDF::API2

I had some success this weekend writing a new script to generate PDF reports and to email those reports auto-magically.  Big thanks goes out to the deveopler of PDF::API2, a Perl module for creating PDFs on the fly.  The documentation is sparse for this module, but I did find a good set of examples to inspect.  I used Mail::Sender to forward the reports on to their final destination.

-Chris

Update: 1 APR 2005
I found a new tutorial covering PDF::API2.  With Pictures.

The Real Tivo

I found a fairly balanced article on Tivo titled, "The Real Tivo." If you are still considering on taking the leap, you might find the article a worthwhile read.

-Chris