Week 43 - Hot Wheels!

Hot Wheels!, originally uploaded by Twister65.

Another DailyShoot.com entry makes it into my Project 52. That's kinda like cheating... or is it? :)

This one had to do with choosing something that was nostalgic... a childhood sport, game or activity. I chose Hot Wheels because I used to play with them as a kid. It's something I don't see many kids doing these days, at least not in the same way that I did when I was young.

Every spring, someone's parents would receive a truckload of topsoil, or sand, or dirt dumped onto their drive way. For a few days, it became our playground, and we'd build intricate roads and tunnels on this "island" and drive our cars for hours. Kids just don't do that anymore. The don't have the same imagination that we did.

With this entry, I’m also trying a different layout that Flickr’s integration publishes. I think I like the larger photo.

Name change? WTF?

Yep, I changed the name of my blog. And I added a fancy new graphic that took all of two or three minutes to throw together (subject to change). It took longer trying to figure out what code in the blog template forced it to be centered. *sigh*

So now the name matches the domain name.

I recently started digging into my family ancestry and figured that naming it with my own name might make it easier to find, should I ever decided to break off with some family tree stuff here as well.

Incidentally, you can also get here using www.scottpaterson.org. I thought that scottpaterson.org would also work, but apparently it doesn’t. I must have messed it up.

My Xbox Elite – R.I.P.

My 2½ year-old Xbox Elite died on Saturday morning. No, not the RRoD (Red Ring of Death) or the E74 error, both of which every Xbox owner dreads.

I simply wouldn’t power up.

On Friday night while I was playing Red Dead Redemption, I noticed what can only be described as “snowing in the wild west”. Yet, it wasn’t snow. I booted up Blur for a look-see and the symptoms were the same. I continued to play for a ½ hour or so before powering it down for the night.

I searched the web to find that this could be an early indicator of the E74 error, which is basically an overheating GPU.

On Saturday morning, I grabbed my can of compressed air and cleaned the rear grill of the Xbox, in an attempt to help keep it cool when I turned it on. It wasn’t extremely dusty, but it had more than I expected.

After I was done, I hooked it all back up and hit the power button.

Nothing. No lights. Nothing at all.

I checked all connections and still nothing.

As much as I feared the RRoD or E74, either of those would have been a good alternative since both are covered by a 3-year warranty. But dead meant I’d have to pay to get it repaired.

No, I wanted to play games this weekend. So, I went out to Future Shop and picked up one of the newer “Arcade” Xbox models. As basic as they come. For $200 plus tax, I got a new Xbox with a 1-year warranty and another controller. The alternative was be to pay ~$120 and wait 2-3 weeks to ship it to MS and have them ship a refurb back to me.

I decided that I will still get the old one repaired, to keep as a spare and put in the basement for the kid to play. Time will tell if this is a good idea or not.

I logged a ticket on MS’s Xbox site and they sent me an email with a UPS label to print out, and I’m currently waiting for the shipping box to arrive so I can send it to them.

That’s pretty much the whole point of this blog entry – to keep track and see exactly how long the entire process will take.

• Saturday, May 29 – logged the repair request in the afternoon (credit card was required)
• Sunday, May 30 – received an email from UPS containing links to: instructions, the UPS return label to print, and a receipt.

Stayed tuned for more. :)

Week 42 - Yellow Lily

Yellow Lily (42/52)
Originally uploaded by Twister65

For some reason, I thought the yellow lilies in our front flower bed bloomed earlier than this in previous years. I checked photos from previous years and found that they usually bloomed in early June. I guess they're right on time.

There are many buds this year too. More than I've seen in previous years. This is one of the first and actually opened up the following day.

Week 41 - Container

A container
Originally uploaded by Twister65

Yeh, I'm a day late... I was busy socializing on Saturday and then we had fireworks in the evening, and then I had to watch the series finale of LOST. Busy, busy, busy! :)

I originally shot this for Dailyshoot.com, but it really turned out well so I chose it for this week's Project 52 posting.

I fired off about 5 or 6 shots before I ended up with this one. I placed it on my dining table, and the only lighting I had was from the light fixture above the table. I sat it close to one end of the table, and then I sat at the opposite end and almost rested the camera on the table to get the shot.

This container came from St. Maarten while I was on a Caribbean cruise that I won in 1989. I remember arriving on the island with hundreds of other people and we were all making our way toward these large taxis to ride into town for a day of shopping. Before we could get there, locals were lined up ready to sell their wares. I think I paid about $3 or $4 for this. It's cute... and currently holds loose change on my desk. :)

Privacy? What privacy?

I'm not a web expert, nor am I the paranoid type... but should QuitFacebook.com, who has privacy concerns against Facebook, be tracking its visitors with cookies?

I found these in Firefox's cookies.

In case you're wondering what they do:

• __utmz tracks where a visitor came from (search engine, search keyword, link)
• __utma tracks each user's amount of visits, first, last visit.
• __utmb and __utmc are used to track when a visit starts and ends to some decent time resolution (c expires quickly). If you look at cookie state changes (e.g. using firecookie), you will see these change regularly.
• __utmv is used for user-custom variables in Analytics

http://helpful.knobs-dials.com/index.php/Utma,_utmb,_utmz_cookies

Why would they care where you come from? Or how often you visit their site? Hmmm...?

Setting date and time on Mini DV Pocket Video Camera

I picked up a cheap Mini DV Pocket Video Camera off Ebay recently for 1 cent. Ok, so the S&H was $15.99, but for the whole price, it was a steal. My intent is to mount it onto my R/C plane this summer and shoot some aerial video like I did a couple of years ago with another camera. Since it has no internal storage, I also ordered a 2GB Micro SD card for it, from another Ebay vendor, for $7.

My purchase finally arrived yesterday. The camera is smaller than I expected which makes it ideal for my purposes. The brackets it came with will make great plane mounts.

The software drivers came on a mini CD and installed without a hitch. The printed instructions were clearly translated from Chinese, and not too surprisingly, difficult to understand. On the CD was a batch file, Updata Time.bat, used for setting the device’s internal date and time. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. (That’s not a typo – that’s how it is spelled) :)

I searched the web and found a couple of different YouTube videos demonstrating how to set the date and time on this camera. None of them worked. First, it didn’t seem to recognize this TAG.txt file that the videos used. The file created by the batch file is named time.txt. The information being put into the file didn’t look quite right. I determined that it was parsing the date from my PC incorrectly, either because I’m running Windows 7 or because the region is set differently than a Chinese system.  After some trial and error, I managed to fix the batch file so it inserted the date correctly, and in turn, was accepted by the camera.

If you have one of these cameras and the batch file isn’t working for you, the solution is really simple, and you don’t need to mess around with the batch file.

Open Windows Notepad (NOT WordPad) and enter the following information on a single line: yyyy.mm.dd hh:mm:ss.  So, for example, if you were to use today’s date and time, it would be 2010.05.18 08:29:00. Note: the time format is 24 hour time. Save the file to your desktop as time.txt, plug your camera into the PC, copy the file to the camera, unplug the camera and turn it on. When you turn on the camera, it will read the date and time, set it, and remove the file on its own.

If you’re the type, like me, who wants to fix the batch file, this is the section you need to change:

set b=%date%
set yy=%b:~0,4%
set zz=%b:~5,2%
set dd=%b:~8,2%
set xx=%b:~11,3%

Change it to the following:

set b=%date%
set yy=%b:~10,4%
set zz=%b:~4,2%
set dd=%b:~7,2%
set xx=%b:~0,3%

If it still doesn’t work, you may need to add or change one of these lines:

if exist J:\DCIM copy time.txt J:\

Change the “J:” to the drive letter that the camera appears as on your system.

That’s it, that’s all. I might throw together my own video and post it. In the meantime, I let the author of the linked video above know about this so if anyone contacts him, he can share the information.