Time and Change

Well time has been passing pretty fast lately.

After a visit to a mate who'd done a lot of work on his yard in the last few years I was convinced of the need to think a bit bigger in the back yard department. So i've ordered a shed and a new verandah and have spent the last month working on some site preparation. Well I still have plenty of time but a sense of urgency is starting to creep in since there is still just so much work to do. Originally I was just going to work on the site prep and worry about the rest of the yard later but I do have an awful lot of time and it would save work if I got a few things, like a long retaining wall, out of the way first. Rather than moving piles of dirt and things from one place to another multiple times, I can just move it where it needs to end up and leave it there. Might even be able to get some lawn going by then.

It's been damn slow going though. Weather is too hot or too wet, i'm too hungover, I don't really feel like getting covered in sweat and dirt that day, or lately i've just been extremely tired. I often fall asleep infront of the tv before going to bed. So sometimes I just need to sleep for half a day to catch up a bit. Blah. A few hours, a few days a week, using nothing but a bucket and a spade, well, it's slow and hard work. Disappointingly I haven't lost any weight mind you :-/

The front yard isn't dead but it isn't really flourishing. The thyme lawn is growing very slowly but at least the roses are about to flower again. I think I haven't been watering it enough. The vegetable patch is going pretty well though. Button squash are already fruiting regularly, as are the cucumbers. Tomatoes have a lot of growth and i've had a handful of tiny cherry tomatoes off this week, but they've just covered themselves in masses of flowers so maybe they'll kick in properly by Christmas or New Year. A few more bees around with the weather warming up and settling down too. The sweet potato slips are starting to grow at last - I think they need the ground to warm up a bit more first. I've tons of things in pots too, so just keeping everything alive takes an hour or so every day.

My house-mates just moved out on the weekend so things have gotten a lot quieter all of a sudden. Well it might help me sleep a bit more in the mornings, but the sudden lack of company will take a little while to get used to again. Another visit to another mate gave me the idea of putting in an en-suite for one of the bedrooms and renting it out to a professional woman, so I'm considering that too. Visiting friends is getting costly!

I never finished Uncharted 2 - although I still intend to one day. I'm a fair way through Ratchet and Clank: A Crack In Time too. The last one I played was a bit easy and lacking something new, but I think they did a much better job this time - if you were ever an R&C fan and lost interest, this one is worth a shot. Oh and they finally implemented triple buffering so no tearing and little slow-down when they drop a frame. I also got Dragon Age: Origins but haven't played it very much so far. Partly because others wanted to use the TV, and partly because it starts a bit slowly and feels a bit too 'pc-game' (I can barely read the typeface on most windows!). I think I played more of a neat little free game called 'Widelands' which I found when looking for a 'The Settlers' like game from the Amiga days. I was playing with UAE one afternoon and re-discovered that gem. Widelands has the mechanics all there but the lo-res graphics on the Amiga had a lot more personality and charm (and much better sound fx). Back on the PS3 I got a PlayTV - quite happy with it so far. Certainly a few things could be improved but it works quite well, and it's easier to setup than MythTV. I might get another one just to plug into my PC for MythTV since my USB tuner never worked properly (lots of broken data, particularly if both tuners are on but not specifically so). At $150 it's not bad for something that I KNOW works reliably and with Linux.

Haven't touch Haiku or the beagle boards or any coding at all for ages either. Well now I have an excuse in the yard ... but part of it is that many of the interesting things to do are just problems that are too big for a part-time hobby. Well there's still the idea of a little game, that could still be simple I guess - although my game-designing mate has dropped off the radar lately too. I suspect once I'm working on something interesting again I'll find coding as a hobby more interesting too. Perhaps!

And this period of what I like to call my `unpaid long service leave' finally has a cap to it. I've got some more work lined up early next year which hopefully will be more up my alley than the last few jobs I've had. Using CUDA or I would think more likely, OpenCL to do some image processing. CELL BE would've been fun but with the new PS3's not supporting Linux it would be a hard sell.

Holidays are great ...

... you don't have to do anything.

Oh I've been poking around in the garden and the yard, playing with Haiku (porting emacs, but not much) and reading lots of blogs about the impending catastrophic failure of western civilisation and drinking and eating too much. And even playing some Uncharted 2 (probably the best game i've ever played to date in all respects, technical, graphical, story, acting, action, aural maybe not but certainly up there).

More beagleboard stuff

I've still got some problems with the USB port - although now i'm using a USB HDD for the OS it seems to be a lot more stable. Every now and then it dies and requires a reboot. Hopefully the BB guys and/or TI work out what it is, both of my boards have it. Instead of using the usb OTG port i'm using a PC PSU to run the board - I thought that might help the crashing problem, but it didn't really make any difference.

I haven't had much fun with the default demo build of Angstrom. It's limited in strange ways. I haven't been able to get it to compile either; I got it further by forcing a serial compile, but it still eventually dies, and the build system is shitting me off too.

I gave Android another go - now i've got a screen. Yay, a phone interface. Doesn't really work with a mouse and keyboard, the network wouldn't work and things crashed a lot. Oh well, I think the basic idea is right (throw everything away and use linux as a set of device drivers), but a phone-os has little appeal to me (i'm still using a nokia 8250).

So I tried the Touchbook's OS from Always Innovating ... it's just a custom build of Angstrom. Much better though - the sound even works (sounds quite nice quality to my shitty ears too), although mplayer doesn't now :-/. It's also a bit snappier (it has the powervr drivers and some dsp stuff too). Running off the usb hdd is a lot faster than flash too - it was my old playstation hdd so it isn't even a particularly fast drive. It seems to be set up reasonably nicely although it has a few weird things - like no shadow file (`sudo sh' gives you a root shell). I have to manually bring up the usb ethernet adaptor, otherwise it basically works straight out of the box.

I've also been trying to get haiku to build, but not having much luck. Not that I expect it to work but it can't even get past building the cross compiler. Sigh. Well i'll try with a manual build of gcc rather than the system's and see how that goes. I couldn't register with the haiku site to ask questions since it wanted a 'captcha' that it decided not to display, but they've been making site changes so I should probably keep checking.

Apart from Angstrom's weirdness, linux and the distributions around it are starting to give me the shits somewhat. Progress just seems to be bigger and slower like every other system. My laptop's are running slower now I `upgraded' their distributions. I don't think the 'open saucer' crowd's motto of 'more eyes make bugs shallower' really sums it up, I think 'enough eyes make even the worst software work'.

And i've been reading various ARM & OMAP manuals on and off. There's a great deal of complexity in that little chip. My foot's pretty ok but now I have a sore shoulder. Too much hunched over computers and soldering irons and carrying buckets of dirt.

Woof

Well my beagleboards arrived. And i've spent the last couple of days getting them going. Ugh. Actually it arrived about midday yesterday - but it seems like a couple of days already.

I got the serial console going pretty easily and after a bit of a false start with a dodgy SD card I got it booting reliably. But I couldn't for the life of me get the damn video working all day yesterday and most of today. The problem is the video format option has changed every kernel revision, so it took me some time to track down the right one. It didn't help that I only had cables to hook it up to my TV which is a bit pickier about what it will accept. Although I finally got it working - it was off the screen and not very usable though - I went and got a dvi-d cable today so it's now plugged into my old monitor. The computer shop also had a second hand usb 100mbit ethernet adaptor for only $5 which saved a longer trip or unnecessary spending.

Tiny tiny thing, lost in wires and crap on the desk.

I also tried getting the cross development environment up. Sigh. Another stupid build system (it's written in python ...) to deal with, and it builds a whole distribution which isn't really what I wanted at this point. And it failed part way though building it's 3000 'steps'. Well I suppose i'll keep trying but i'm in no rush right now. The angstrom distro seems a bit flakey too - doesn't want to mount any of the usb drives I have. I've had some usb issues - if it gets particularly busy, usb just drops out and needs a reset to fix - appears to be some hardware bug with the OMAP itself :-/ Otherwise it's kind of neat. Not the snappiest thing running X or firefox, but it works - powering off a usb port with no cooling required. Feels similar to ps3-linux, although mplayer is pretty slow (then again, it's using 1/600th the power!).

Had a bit of a turn with my main box too - I had to reboot it since I stole the dvi-d port on my monitor for the bb and it wouldn't turn on the vga without it (or at least, it was the easiest way). After that it wouldn't let me log in - orbit issues. Turned out all the orbit directories in /tmp wouldn't go away, infact the directory wouldn't list properly and only some files would delete. Hrm, I thought jfs would be more reliable than that. A forced fsck fixed it, and it deleted /tmp altogether.

And I hurt my bloody foot last week. Not exactly sure what I did to make it happen but best I can work out is that I ended up with tendinitis. Sore as buggery for a few days - but I had things to do including riding around and walking around shops all day last thursday and I didn't let a little pain stop that. But since after a whole week it wasn't getting better I thought i'd better look up on the internet and find out what I had. After the last couple of days of resting a lot more seriously it seems to have gotten a lot better. I'm still treating it gently but it was ok enough to ride the 300m to the computer shop and back and limp inside.

Total success

Well on Friday I got my Chef at last, so apart from making some bread (which didn't really work out - insufficient volume to mix properly, i'll try that again today) and some biscuits I thought i'd try something a bit more ambitious, making pizza.

Hmm, yummo. I didn't have much in the fridge, but I managed ... anchovies, capers, smoky bacon, onion, capsicum, cheddar cheese all on a home-made sauce (some garlic, oregano, and a couple of tins of tomatoes). The strong flavour of the sauce made a good base, and pretty much everything else added up to a very nice pizza with a particularly strong flavour. I put some wholemeal flour into the dough too which added a nice texture and flavour too.

And I just got a shot of the finished result while there was still some left.

Bit easier than I thought - the dough making is easier than making bread since you only have to let it rise once and it isn't so picky about getting the structure right. Still took a while but you could probably streamline the effort to speed it up, and there's a few things you can do in parallel, and/or even do offline by freezing partial results.

Partial success

I've been meaning to for a while - with all this time lately I certainly have the opportunity for once - to make a lasagne.

Using a pasta machine to make the sheets of course. I used a hand mincer to make the mince too. Those things are surprisingly hard to find these days. Perhaps also surprising is that even using the cheapest meat I can find it makes probably the nicest mince I've cooked. Bit of a pain cleaning it though.

So the result. Tasted very nice, but a little on the dry side. Since I used fresh pasta I figured it didn't need cooking separately. I was half right. It did cook ok in the oven, but since I'd reduced the sauce a bit on purpose -- I wasn't sure how dry it should be -- it ended up a bit dry. I was also a little short on sauce so the penultimate layer was just bacon instead, which helped dry it out, and I think I had too much pasta to sauce. Next time I wont cook the sauce so long, and have more of it (or make a thinner dish).

Spring

First day of calendar spring. Not very sprung but I suppose there's a bit of sun out there.

Well as seems to be the case lately it's been another long lull between posts. I've been busy just 'bumming around the house' for the most part, although I've also got into a habit of spending money. Ordered a high-spec Kenwood Chef on the internet - I have a cheap food processor but it doesn't really mix properly and wont knead dough. But unfortunately it's still in the queue after a couple of weeks (from supplier). I tried buying locally but nobody sold the model I was after around here, plenty of places sell the Kitchen-Aid stuff but if i'm going to spend that much money I may as well go the whole hog. I go through spurts of cooking so it will be nice to have some decent gear.

Also just ordered a couple beagle boards. With Sony dropping the Other OS support in the new PS3's, I think that journey may as well come to a conclusion, at least for the time being. Not that I've been inspired to do any programming whatsoever, and they may just collect dust, but I'm hoping I can come up with something to put on them. I wonder which order will arrive first.

Last week I got my hands dirty converting a large coffee table with small drawers into a large coffee table/trunk. What was surprising is the whole thing is put together with only nails! Not even glue! Well it made it easy to disassemble the bits I needed to. I didn't need any extra timber as I re-used bits from inside it, although it could probably use a ply floor for strength and aesthetic appeal.

I took the top off, which already had a splitting join in it about half way across, used the drawer rails to make a spline across the middle and attached large triangle gate hinges to the that and the tops.

Added in some battens and bobs you're uncle. Actually it was a surprising amount of work, considering I haven't done any woodwork for ages and chiseled out the hinge rebates by hand. It's a bit rough -- the chisel wasn't too sharp and slipped some -- and unfinished, but I think I did an ok enough job with some of it. I'm sure glad I have a drill I can use to put screws in - there's over 70 in it now.

Considering the table is always covered in junk it may not be the wisest conversion ever, but it sure has a hell of a lot more room for storing crap now. So now i've been thinking about other woodworking stuff to do and other tools to buy - like a router which would've made the rebates a cinch - unfortunately I have no workshop, garage or even a gated car-port so I might have to hold back on that. If I ever get my retaining wall and paving done I'll have a deck to do at least.

I also found some interesting looking indoor plants and got some nice large pots for them - I have some other indoor plants but they're piddly little things or look like rubbish. I have some seedlings going early too - normally I'm months late with those. Trying to add some life to my herb pots too, and a little more work on the very slow process of creating a thyme lawn in the front of the house. And I think I finally got the ants nest out of the potted lemon tree. I have so much 'real' work to do out the back of my house it isn't funny but the weather and my apathy is holding me back on getting into it so i just keep poking around at the edges.

And so it goes ...

... and so on it goes ...

3 weeks of idleness. Actually I've been busier than I have been for a while. All sorts of stuff. Pruning trees, spraying weeds, new computer, installing various operating systems, cleaning, cooking, eating. Getting fat(ter).

Well. I made some pasta by hand, and liked it so much I bought a machine to help. Not that it really makes it any easier to make, it does however make the product a bit more consistent.

I found a shop that sells my new-favourite super-hot-sauce.

I recovered my rear speaker drivers from being repaired, and wired them up. They'd been in the shop for nearly 6 months(!).

I installed a couple of desks I acquired from work, from my very generous boss. And the bar fridge.

Bought the previously mentioned 'new computer'.

Tried lots of operating systems. Solaris (hence to be known as 'f*n slowaris', Arch-linux 'it's just too much effort, and i couldn't get X to work', gentoo 'it's just too much work/waiting around', and finally settled on GnewSense - it's an awful lot prettier than ubuntu, and it comes with Emacs AND a f*n compiler. I also had a good look at haiku ... hmm, interesting. It inspired me to revisit my own 'os', although all I managed was to recompile it on the new machine.

Also looked at mythtv. I have an old PCI card that does analogue TV capture I thought i'd use as a test. mythtv is a weird application. Anyway, managed to get it build from source - although for some reason, initially it would only run remotely* (* for some reason, now it also runs locally and no longer aborts with an X error). I also tried getting some other capture programme but unfortunately only mythtv managed to keep audio/video sync. Also unfortunately - recording and viewing seems to crash my box hard once in a while (the dreaded blinky keyboard L.E.D.'s.) - so I caved in an ordered a USB digital tuner unit.

Hmm, what else. Baked an apple cake. First recipe I found on the internet. Apart from the cooking time, which was wildly underestimated, it produced a rather decent result.

Oh, and pruned a tree out the back. Made a big mess of it but I think that was what was needed for it. It'll grow back. If the weather keeps improving like it had been for the last few days I might even manage to get back out there and clean it up ... and then prune the mandarin tree as well.