The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey August 18, 2012

So This Happened...

So this happened: Frankly, I've been tempted by BMW ever since I spent a few days driving a 325 while visiting with my folks a couple of years back. But it took this long to execute on the temptation. The Prius was such a sane, safe choice: great gas mileage, some fun bits of technology built in, and ... great gas mileage. But while it is only three years old, it was starting to get rattly and junky - primarily plastic things on the interior failing. The driver's seat starting to come apart. Stuff like that. And frankly, it's not…

Brian Bilbrey August 12, 2012

Day Six

According to the historical records, this is in fact the 7th day. But in this much more specific and present-tense circumstance, this is the sixth day of my summer cold. It was never really a sinus thing, it seems to have skipped from throat straight to ears with only a by-your-leave to the nasal passages. My left ear was pretty plugged for a couple of days, and while that seems to have slightly abated, some of the pressure and all of the ringing is still in the hizzouse. The quality of my focus is suffering, too. I actually took a…

Brian Bilbrey August 9, 2012

Update: Dortmunder

Anthony commented on one of the early pictures of Dortmunder, asking "How does your new computer behave?" Unremarkably is perhaps the best answer - in that there's nothing to remark on, it just keeps ticking on. It's currently acting as my home IMAPS server (dovecot), as well as an IRC (irssi) launching spot that stays connected in a screen session. Agog:~ bilbrey$ ssh dortmunderLast login: Thu Aug 9 17:40:36 2012 from 192.168.1.100[bilbrey@dortmunder ~]$ w 17:41:11 up 25 days, 20:38, 1 user, load average: 0.11, 0.04, 0.05USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHATbilbrey pts/3 17:41 0.00s 0.15s 0.04s w...[root@dortmunder pacman.d]# pacman…

Brian Bilbrey August 5, 2012

August Already?

Time flies. I'm "in between" classes, so I'm just reading ahead for the first class of the Fall session, which starts on August 20. This weekend, I got some work done replacing broken shelving in Marcia's fabric room, cleaned up and fixed up a couple of things in the woodshop, harvested a metric big volume of veggies (mostly tomatoes), made more salsa, made some chili, and... oh, yeah, worked at the office for a few hours yesterday. I've got gear that's making me very, very angry (as nearly everyone's favorite Martian has been known to exclaim). * * * Our…

Brian Bilbrey August 1, 2012

Fuzzy? Mac Air MiniDP/HDMI vs. Samsung Syncmaster P2770HD

What a lovely lead, eh? But I had a heck of a time finding my answer, and while I never did find precisely what I wanted via search engines, I did get enough of a hint that I finally figured it out. I have Agog, this Mac Air. It's got Thunderbolt/Mini Display Port output and I've got a MiniDP-to-HDMI adapter. I also have this 27" HDMI + DVI Samsung Syncmaster P2770HD display. Here's the problem: When I connected the Air to the Syncmaster at full resolution, the screen image was displayed with about "half an inch" missing at the top…