Dean Vaughan

Weeee

January 5, 2009 – 1:49 pm

Saturday afternoon turned out to be pretty nice. It rained early in the morning, but by noon the temperature had come up to 70 and most of the rain had dried up. I took the KLR for a ride up 186 and over to Horse Head lake.

Not much to say about the ride. Everything is brown and dead because of the winter.

The highlight of the trip happened five minutes into it when I came upon a Boxster in the Post Winery parking lot.

I dig the red calipers.

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I Miss the Summer

January 3, 2009 – 12:03 pm

I really do...

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Keeping Busy

January 1, 2009 – 4:50 pm

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Golden Shower Gloves

December 21, 2008 – 11:09 pm

I broke down and bought some equipment from Rev Gear. I ended up with new boxing gloves, mma sparring gloves, and bag gloves. We've had a couple of pairs of the boxing gloves floating around the gym for a few months, I obviously really liked them. I took a chance on the sparring and bag gloves and it paid off. I have small hands and wrists that make fitting gloves a pain, but these fit great. They are very comfortable and have a good feel when striking.

I was using a generic pair of Everlasts before, the Rev Gears are a night and day improvement. I won't be going back.

A++ would buy from again!!!11one

To ring in the upcoming new year I decided to wash all of my old gear.

For reference, the water coming out of the facet is clear.

And just because, Can Cat:

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Operation Silent Xbox

December 2, 2008 – 10:34 am

I use a soft modded Xbox with XBMC as a home theatre PC. I do not have cable TV or satellite, my DVD player isn't even plugged in. XBMC is the only way I watch TV or movies.

I really like this setup. It is easy to use and I have never had a problem with it besides one; my Xbox is loud. It is not any louder than a normal Xbox and in PC terms it is pretty quiet. After years of working around computers hard drive whines and fans annoy the piss out of me. Where as a normal person would never hear it, I can. Normally I can tune it out, but sometimes, like when I pause a show, I can hear it.

This is what it sounds like:

It is slowly driving me insane.

I tried out a Popcorn Hour A-110 and it did not have any where near the features or polish XBMC has. It was quiet though. I've also tried MythTV it was a pain in the ass to setup and use. Also the PC needed to run it wasn't any better noise wise than the Xbox.

Now my plan is to make the Xbox silent by purchasing a new hard drive and fan.

HD: Seagate Barracude 7200 80GB ($52 shipped)
Fan: Noctua NF-R8 Ultra Silent 80mm ($21 shipped)

Both of these come recommended as being very quiet.

Here is where this story gets sad.

The fan couldn't push enough air and my Xbox was getting too hot. Back to the old fan. Thing is, even spun up, the original fan isn't very loud. XBMC keeps it at around %20 max spin anyway. It's silent.

The new hard drive was just as loud as the old one. From experimenting a bit the hard drive is by far the loudest component in the Xbox. The only other noise makers are the DVD drive, the case fan, and the GPU fan. I never use the DVD drive. The GPU and case fans are pretty much silent.

What recourse does that leave me with? Not much really, I can purchase an SSD hard drive which will be silent as the night is dark, but they cost about $250 for 80GB. That's more than I paid for the Xbox, new hds, and fan put together. I'm not willing to do that.

My other option is to build an HTPC from scratch and use XBMC Linux. Again, relatively high cost would be factor in this too.

What I ended up doing was pushing the Xbox as far back into my entertainment center as possible. A couple inches of wood and a TV make for ok sound proofing.

Good times.

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Building pdftk (PDF Toolkit) on FC9

December 2, 2008 – 10:08 am

The PDF toolkit is command line app for manipulating PDFs. I use it to split faxes received in Hylafax into one file per page. I recently upgraded a server to x86 64 Fedora Core 9 and found that all of the precompiled versions of pdftk wouldn't work. I tried to build my own and got some awesome errors: