quietlife.net

DEleted

26 Mar 2005

Click here to see the reason I deleted Econlog from my RSS aggregator.

car blogging

24 Mar 2005

Following suit with Blake’s Thursday Car Blogging, here’s some cartalk. I don’t have any of my own, since, well, the most exciting thing going on with my cars is patching cracks in the vinyl. Turns out not much interesting goes on when you own two late-80s nissan sentras. It’s a blessing and a curse. Well, mostly a blessing.

My friend Matt finally got his 1959 Chevy Fleetside. It looks awesome.

I am not big on American cars, but I really like the direction some of them are taking with this revival of the aggressive muscle-car look. Check out the new Dodge Charger SRT-8.

Check out the new Scion concept. It’s frightening – like the Scion xB’s evil twin.

Latitude X300 & trackpad

16 Mar 2005

As I’ve mentioned before, I am running Linux on my Dell Latitude X300.

Like most laptops these days, it has a trackpad. While annoying, trackpads are far less annoying than the alternative – those little button knobs in the middle of the keyboard.

One annoyance though is accidentally clicking the trackpad (which takes as little as a light brush with your thumb), which while typing can have all sorts of unfortunate side-effects .. minimizing the window, closing it, losing focus, etc.

Fortunately, using a combination of hacks, I have tamed the touchpad. (Yes, I am using “touchpad” and “trackpad” alternately. At first, I did it by accident, but now I am doing it on purpose since people will probably search for both, and I want to be Google Friendly!) Specifically, what I was interested in was:

  1. Disabling the trackpad entirely while I have a USB mouse plugged in.
  2. Disabling the trackpad temporarily while typing.
  3. Having a transition between the two states be quick and convenient.

Here’s How I Did It:

  1. First, you’ll need to get and install the Synaptics touchpad driver for XFree86/Xorg (outside the scope of this document).
  2. The driver comes with two utilities:
    • synclient – this program allows you to change various settings for the touchpad, including disabling it entirely.
    • syndaemon – this handy program runs as a daemon and will detect typing and disable the touchpad until the keyboard is idle for a customizable amount of time.
  3. Customize the following script to your needs. Several things may differ for your specific environment: <pre>#!/bin/bash PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin:/sbin PIDDIR=/home/cwage/var/run/ SYNDAEMON=/usr/local/bin/syndaemon SYNCLIENT=/usr/local/bin/synclient

while true do

There is probably a better way to look for a running Xserver, but this will

do for now. This exits the script immediately if the X server dies. Prevents

80 million copies of the script hanging around if you restart X.

if [ ! -S /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 ]; then exit fi

This next test is how I test for the presence of a USB mouse on my

system. You could also do “grep -i Mouse /proc/bus/usb/devices” but I

had a bizarre problem with my laptop wherein the mouse actually

disappeared from /proc/bus/usb/devices while I moved the mouse (?!)

Sometimes it’s easier to just pretend some things never happened and

move on.

        if [ -d /sys/class/input/mouse1 ]; then if $SYNCLIENT -l | grep 'TouchpadOff          = 0' > /dev/null; # If we've detected a mouse and the touchpad is on, turn it off # and start syndaemon then start-stop-daemon --stop --pid  \ $PIDDIR/syndaemon.pid --exec $SYNDAEMON
            $SYNCLIENT TouchpadOff=1 fi
        else if $SYNCLIENT -l | grep 'TouchpadOff          = 1' > /dev/null; then if ! ps auxw | grep syndaemon | grep -v grep > /dev/null; then
            $SYNCLIENT TouchpadOff=0 start-stop-daemon --background -m --start --pid \ $PIDDIR/syndaemon.pid --exec $SYNDAEMON -- -i 0.2 fi else start-stop-daemon --background -m --start --pid \ $PIDDIR/syndaemon.pid --exec $SYNDAEMON -- -i 0.2 fi
        fi
sleep 3 done

</pre>

  1. Put this script in your .xsession or something that gets executed when you first log into X. It will run and constantly monitor for a USB mouse, or a lack thereof, and do the right thing. Voila!

pooch

09 Mar 2005

I found this little guy running around our neighborhood this morning. He had a collar but no tags (come on, man, how hard is it to put tags on your dog?!) We drove around the neighborhood a few times asking random people if they were missing a dog. The owner finally tracked us down tonight but not before we dropped him off at animal control (as much as we both want a dog, we can’t handle one now – too busy, allergies, landlord forbids it, etc). So, all’s well that ends well.

But, we were curious about what breed he was – looks like some sort of pit bull, but he was perhaps a little small (but then, he was a puppy, so..)

Anyone know?

Image of a Lost Dog

He was a cute little guy.

computator

07 Mar 2005

Okay, so it’s been like a week and a half and my computer room still has computer parts strewn across the floor like there was an episode of battlebots in there or something. This is because I have been entirely too busy to address the little problem I had. I likely will continue not to have any time. So, a quick poll for my dear readers. Should I return the requisite parts and try to order new stuff and put it in my case and maybe get it working or maybe not? Or, should I do .. this:

Dimension 2400n
Date & Time:
March 06, 2005  11:33:06 PM
SYSTEM COMPONENTS</p>
Dimension 2400n Qty    1
Intel® Celeron® Processor at 2.4GHz with 400MHz front side bus, FreeDOS™ included in the box, ready to install Unit Price   $389.00
Catalog Number:  4
 Module  Description  Product Code  Sku  Id
Processor Intel® Celeron® Processor at 2.4GHz with 400MHz front side bus BCN24B [221-3174] 1
Operating System FreeDOS™ included in the box, ready to install DOS [420-2955] 11
Memory 512MB Shared DDR SDRAM at 333MHz (Performs at 266MHz for 400FSB systems) 512M3 [311-2076] 3
Keyboard Dell Quietkey® Keyboard QK [310-1582] 4
Monitor No monitor N [320-3000] 5
Video Card Integrated Intel® Extreme Graphics IV [430-3900] 6
Internal Hard Drives 40GB Ultra ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive 40 [341-1676] 8
Floppy Drive and Memory Keys No Floppy Drive Included NFD [340-8688] 10
Mouse Dell 2-button scroll mouse SM [310-1871] 12
Network Interface Integrated 10/100 Ethernet IN [430-0441] 13
Modem No Modem Requested N [313-3607] 14
CD or DVD Drives -- Read, Write and Store Data Single Drive: 16X DVD-ROM Drive 16DVD [313-0917][420-5079][462-7805] 16
Sound Card Integrated Audio IS [313-0847] 17
Speakers No Speaker Option N [313-4514] 18
Limited Warranty, Services and Support Options 90 Day On-site Basic Plan B90D [902-7980][900-3961][960-3249][960-2800] 29
Onsite System Setup No Onsite System Setup NOINSTL [900-9987] 32
Mail- In Rebate None NONE [463-1832] 81
Miscellaneous Dimension 2400N DIM24N1 [463-7355] 82
TOTAL:
$389.00