i summon one kim

I’ve entered the next stage of serious Hi-Fi by purchasing my first outboard Digital Analog Converter (DAC): the Entech 203.2 Number Cruncher. It is indeed a great enhancement to the AudioTron I added six months ago.

Encouraged by the promises on the AudioTron mailing list of greater sound from using the optical digital output of the AudioTron, I started to look for an affordable DAC. My receiver has no digital inputs, and I didn’t want to upgrade it now, as it would undoubtedly lead into wanting a 5.1 (or 6.1) system and new speakers and … (more…)

I’ve been experimenting with Apache::Gallery to start an easy to manage photo album on my pages. The results are now in. Thanks to the template approach it was possible to have the album share the look and feel of my site.

In the process of creating the templates I have also converted my standard layout to a PHP library. I still need to polish it quite a bit, though, but at least now it is easy to change the general look in just a couple of spots for all pages.

The next task would be to rewrite the web log from scratch with a well planned URL scheme in mind. Passing CGI variables as parameters makes it difficult to share bookmarks to articles, and the current workaround is very delicate in its configuration. The support for topic and keyword search is also lacking.

Being under the weather, I’ve been catching sleep, drinking hot tea and listening to Internet radio. I actually just learned about WOLF FM on the AudioTron mailing list today. They play a refreshingly well varied mix of the last three decades.

Highlights from this afternoon include Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes, Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp, Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey and Money for Nothing by Dire Straits. Then throw in artists such as Glass Tiger, Laura Branigan and Rod Stewart. That’s true variety.

I added a Turtle Beach AudioTron to my stereo system this week. It’s an MP3 / WMA player that fits comfortably in a rack together with all the other hi-fi gear. I have already been storing the best parts of my CD collection on the home network as MP3 files, so I can listen to my favourites on the train (just copy files to a portable MP3 player) and while working on the computer. With the AudioTron all those files can be played on the stereo system. (more…)

I have been using my computer to record TV shows, and watch them later (well, you all know what a VCR can do). But under Windows XP the Media Player cannot keep up with the MPEG decoding. The CPU is pegged at 100% and video/audio sync suffers.

I am running this on a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 which has 512 MB of RAM, so it cannot be a hardware performance issue. With Windows 2000 there were no problems. Windows 2000 is decoding fine even on a 800 MHz Pentium III laptop and 1280×1024 full-screen display mode. (more…)

I’ve been converted to a Windows XP Professional user! I’ve run XP on my desktop for a couple of months now, and I finally rebuilt my laptop (for the 5th time) in the hopes of making it work better. The install procedure needs some cleanup, but for the most part that will have to wait until something breaks enough to require re-installing.

My laptop troubles began when I tried to install XP on it — the wireless LAN would no longer work for more than 30 seconds. Unfortunately reinstalling Windows 2000 Professional did not result in the same reliable system that I had before.

Since I’m already planning on 802.11a I won’t spend time in fixing the old infrastructure (especially with one of the Airports dying on me), but instead get the new gear running with XP. More about that later…

Running XP on the desktop has been a good experience. It runs faster and smoother than Windows 2000. Some of the major winning points:

• much better CIFS (or SMB) performance
• system snapshots for recovering from bad software installs
• device driver rollback capability
• support for more (modern) hardware

Seems like this was — for once — a worth-while upgrade.

Well, at least half a Saturday (just in case Otto is reading this — I’m working on the new NetBSD kernel, really). With the day’s chores completed I can look forward to a (hopefully) double-feature movie night, in a big screen home theater!

Since the last few Saturdays have been more or less work-filled (well, last Saturday most of my time was spent waiting, but nevertheless) it is nice to have a day with my very own agenda. Sleep late, have some breakfast and good coffee, check mail (the on-line kind), have a chat with my friends…

On the NetBSD front I would need to accomplish a couple of things: enable MPPE for PPTP connections, and try to debug IPsec panics. The latter are caused by more recent kernels, which are required by the former. Fun!

Movie choices for tonight include Moulin Rouge! that I’m told must be viewed on a huge screen, The Terminator with a brand new 5.1 stereo remix, and The Score which comes with very mixed reviews. But that’ll be another entry.