Tech-monster

The boy has a natural sense of curiosity that we wish to foster and nurture. But there are limits to what we will encourage. These are experiments where we've had to draw the line. Although sadly, lines were drawn too late.

1. Plastic forks AND crayons in printers
2. CDs jammed into a PC drive
3. Two DVDs at once into a combi TV-DVD player*
4. Milk on a laptop keyboard
...and the latest...
5. Poker chips in a wii disc drive**

*when we finally bought a new and multi-region DVD on the cheap and hooked it up to the tv-dvd combi machine it took great offense at being supplanted and coughed up both the jammed DVDs - a minor tech miracle.

** UPDATE: After one failed attempt to fix the wii - I gave it one last try and it seems to be working. Turns out there are about 8 screws in a wii console that you really don't need at all.

The football hack

I did get to watch Tennessee play and get beat last week. I did that despite the fact that content is supposed to be limited to US IP addresses.

Here's how I did it.

I downloaded a free VPN - that's a virtual private network. If you use a laptop away from work to access your work network, that's what you're doing. Work ones are supposedly secure and often have a little key fob thing which gives you a code to access the VPN. This one was just downloaded onto our laptop (scary - eh?) and then you power it up. It's aimed at freelancers and other folks who are using wifi in airports and punching in credit card numbers or whatever.

Anyway, the VPN's servers are based in the US. So when I accessed the internet through the VPN, it appears that I'm in the US. So CBS lets me watch football.

Easy.

I'm now looking for a VPN that will let me access a site where I can watch the Tennessee Volunteers win.

So, for reader Sam, who wants to watch premiership football aired in the UK or cousin Dana who wants to watch the X Factor (which, btw, I'm starting to get into) or whatever, this solution won't help you.

Sorry.

Although maybe there's a reasonably cheap VPN based in the UK? That might be worth looking into. I also investigated options for proxy servers where you tell your PC that it's actually running from Guam or whereever - and there were both US and UK proxy addresses. But I couldn't understand the instructions about how to do it, never mind actually get it to work.

Buddy encounters a squirrel, and two new toys

At Richmond Park last Sunday, Buddy had an encounter with the beggar squirrels that inhabit the restaurant area. They've learned to lose a little fear in exchange for tasty treats. Buddy was enchanted with the quarter-tame critters.



My photos came out not so good, most of them. I need to improve on the whole action shot thing. But I pulled them together with a little lame video clip and voila 84 seconds of something not quite so bad.

I used two new things (new to me) to do this.

1. Picasa 3. I'm a big fan of Picasa photo editing software. It's not the best, but it's quick and easy to use - there's no faster cropping I've found and everything feels pretty intuitive. This latest version has a few new tricks, like retouching and lets you pull a movie together (as above) pretty quickly. It's still kinda crashy though and even though it seemed like I could upload directly to YouTube, I couldn't get that to work and had to upload from the YouTube interface.

2. YouTube now has soundtrack! You can "swap audio" from a list of tunes. I don't know if it's copyright free or what the deal is, but presumably that's YouTube's lookout. I added the soundtrack you can hear above. The list isn't huge and I couldn't quite time transitions as I might have liked. But hey, it removes the frisson of fear that some record company's solicitor might pop a demand for £1500 for violating their intellectual property rights.

Update: oops, I failed to mention the most important thing about Picasa - it's free.
Further update: my old pal is back online and blogging and says it's talk like a pirate day which is NOT an invitation for me to talk about copyright violations and internet piracy - which is what I did, totally unintentionally.

Sleep or the Vols?

Eegads - an 8pm kickoff? On a Monday? That it means it starts at 1am here. I'm sleep deprived already. I have two really important meetings tomorrow. To top it all off, at the beginning of each season there's the whole new challenge of trying to find out exactly where I can listen to live or archived games or maybe even watch.

And I've got to admit, I haven't quite figured it out yet. Why do they got to change it every year? Last year it was the easiest and simplest yet - I even had a saved link where I could listen to the games without ever seeing the score if they were on too late. This year, I'm all confused.

I'm moaning. I know. Tonight, it has to be sleep - whatever little I may be able to procure.

Go Vols

O'Henry twist

It's not quite The Gift of the Magi - but both of us received DVD sets for Christmas - and last night our DVD player gave up the ghost.

-0-

We didn't pay much for our DVD player. We bought the thing at ASDA - a supermarket chain owned by WalMart. We bought it because once during a trip to the dump I found about 30 ring binders full of porn DVDs. Clearly a local production company was having a clear out. Now, I have to say I'm not a big fan of porn or the porn industry but also not being one to sniff at dumpstery-goodness, I thought - this must be a sign. A sign to get a DVD player. Because up until that point the Vol-in-Law was having a one-man boycott on DVD players because of the the artificial segmentation of the global market into DVD regions through a mere twist of code - just to extract the maximum consumer surplus. Code which some poor Swede went to jail for cracking.

But when you've got 2 binders full of dumpster porn (we randomly selected two - it just wouldn't be right to have a whole shelf of the stuff - that would be trashy) you gotta have something to watch it on. So we bought a cheap DVD player and 8 Mile with Eminem which was super discounted.

Thanks goodness Mr Marshall Mathers. It turns out that they weren't porn DVDs at all, but rather CDs storing files of porn movie cover art and promotional materials.

And I really enjoyed watching 8 Mile. And we returned the nasty promotional materials whence they came.

How's that for an O'Henry twist?

Wireless

I successfully changed out our broadband router, splitter do-hicky thingy - for a slicker, smooth-white ipod-y looking thingy that also does wireless broadband Internet access.

I only had to dial up one call centre (though I did have to navigate through about 50 touchtone menus). And you know what, they gave my the password to my husband's new email account - and all I had to know was our address and his mother's maiden name. I had to do that 'cause I couldn't register the broadband without it.

I didn't break anything or put any holes through walls and I only swore quite a lot. My marriage wasn't under threat at any point (though I do wonder the Vol-in-Law didn't do this himself, given that it was on his account).

Today was a good day.