2 Bit Hacker

Well, thanks to the Hindenburg upgrade on Friday, we know have enough space for me to get my pictures uploaded again. So, my gallery is back online, with most of the pictures that were in it before. I also spent a little bit of time today trying to grasp the Gallery skinning system in order to make it’s match the rest of my site a bit better. I think it’s better than it was, but still a long way off.

The main problem is that skins are just a new CSS file, and they didn’t give useful classes or ids to a lot of the fairly important elements, like the table cell that holds the image, which makes it hard for me to match it exactly to the rest of my site. I suppose if I really cared I could hack it a bit to make it suit my style a bit better, but then I’d have to make those changes again whenever I upgrade, which would just be a pain.

Maybe I should check out Gallery 2.x, maybe they improved the skinning a bit.

It’s been a fairly geeky weekend for me so far. Friday night I helped Jason get Hindenburg back on it’s feet after an OS upgrade, which allowed us to finally start using the two 250GB Serial ATA drives in it. So far we’re only using one, the idea being to mirror the drives for a bit of data redundancy. It seems to be mostly working again, though some people are having minor issues with various web things. It was a fairly major upgrade, so I guess this is to be expected.

Yesterday I ended up taking my gaming system apart, originally to just put another hard drive in it, but I ended up spending some time to get the cabling a little bit neater, and I think it looks a lot better now. The downside is that it doesn’t seem to have enough power to spin both hard drives when I start playing a 3D heavy game, so I think I’m going to need to throw a bigger power supply into it.

That got me thinking about all the other hardware I’ve got lying around here, and I started coming up with a plan to reallocate some stuff so everybody is happier. I figure I’ll take the guts of the HTPC and make a new computer for Delia, since it’s faster than both her current comps, then we can move her old Dell back to her office. I’ve got an older Shuttle box from work that I think I’ll put the PVR card in, and use that as an HTPC for a bit. Not sure what I’ll do with all the leftovers at that point. I’ve been meaning to build a home storage/print server, so maybe I’ll throw some stuff toward that. I should still have enough parts after that to build one more system, maybe I’ll build it and donate it to someplace for Christmas.

Still haven’t gotten the OpenBSD box in place as a router, and now that there’s a new version of OpenBSD out, I think I’ll redo the box from scratch again. It wasn’t that hard to get stuff installed on it. Just need to actually get it done, since I’m sick of the Netgear thing crashing all the time, and I’d like to be able to do some bandwidth management for the VoIP line and whatnot.

Hmm… I meant to write about the weekend back on Monday or Tuesday, but I think my SSH session died and I never bothered to start writing it again.

Last Friday was the Fusion Fest LAN, which I went to along with Slappy, Obs, and Raven.Fish (fellow Fists of Ra) though Raven didn’t stay for long, because he only had his laptop, and didn’t have the power adapter for it. There were a bunch of X-Boxes set to play Halo 2, which I didn’t go anywhere near, and a few people playing DDR. We were mostly there for the PC gaming though, and ended up playing a lot of UT2k4. The actual competition wasn’t very fair, probably because it wasn’t really organized at all, but we had fun anyway, and kicked a lot of ass in Onslaught mode. I don’t understand how these people could be playing UT2k4 without knowning about Onslaught, it’s kindof the whole point of the game. Vehicles are fun! (Also, hitting unsuspecting newbies with the Leviathan’s main gun is fun.)

On Saturday, Delia and I met up with angry_amy and dork_jedi for lunch, probably the last time I’ll see Amy for a while, as she’s now living down in Florida. After that, we wandered down into Mass to fairoriana’s house for Mocksgiving. Apparently it’s a tradition with them to have a Thanksgiving get together with friends before the normal family dinner. There’s was a ton of food and it was all extremely tasty. Lots of people there I didn’t know though, but they all seems like cool (well, cool from my perspective, which means geeky or dorky) people, and I had a good time.

Sunday was Delia’s Women’s Spirit Song concert. Met up with anuttycoffee, Leslie, and Odd Dave for it, along with some friend’s of Amy’s who took over her tickets (since she was on her way to Florida at this point.) I had a good time, and I’m looking forward to Delia’s next performance. Afterward we grabbed dinner with Odd Dave at Margarita’s, then I wanderd down to my D&D game and Delia went to her SFS rehersal.

Later that night, when we normally meet up for Denny’s after game/rehersal, I got a call from Delia. Her car had died just north of the Bedford tolls. Turned out her alternator had died, so I had to run up to Manchester to get her and kittybrat to bring them down to Denny’s. I was greeted with brownies though, so it was all good. Mmmm tasty brownies. The weekend wrecked my newly restarted diet, but I’ve been good all week, and seem to be losing weight again.

In other news, I’ve become addicted to World of Warcraft, though the open beta just ended, so I can’t play again until Tuesday, when the game is released. A bunch of FoR and a lot of non-FoR have grouped together to form a WoW guild, called Solstice Aeternus, and I think this game is going to be a lot of fun once things get going. So far I’m enjoying the gameplay a lot more than Shadowbane, as the levelling is all quest based, rather than standing around killing mobs constantly. Can’t wait for release day…