This entry is targeted mostly towards my family, but if it helps others, great.

I’m writing this entry from my mother’s new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite C655. It was purchased to replace her Asus Eee Pc, which sadly has not lived up to the hype for us. The first Eee we got had critical hardware issues (graphical glitches and the like), and the replacement seemed to work but has had stability problems. I’ve already reinstalled WinXP on it once, but it has periodic blue screens during bootup and when sitting idle. Plus, the battery now holds zero charge whatsoever (as in, the computer sees the battery but says 0% charge, and if I disconnect the AC cord it will immediately lose all power). It’s only been maybe two years since she got it, so I hate to say, it’s been a lemon for us… and I was one of the people who recommended it.

Anyway, onto the topic of the replacement. The Toshiba was purchased from bestbuy.com for around $270 or $280. Immediately I thought “not again” because of the last cheap system we got for my mom. However, this system has fared much better.

On to the review…

[…]

Just a quick note. I recently moved my site to a new account. I think things are pretty much up and running as before, but if anything seems broken, please let me know.

Mostly this is documentation for myself. Not sure this will be helpful to others… Got Linux testing up on my laptop again. Running in Gnome 3, was getting some graphical glitches, so I made a video. (By the way, ctrl-alt-shift-R is Gnome 3’s built-in way of starting/stopping a screencast recording… very convenient, the video is Read more about Graphical glitches with nouveau driver on my laptop[…]

Last Saturday, I got up early and decided to whip up something quick yet useful. Roughly two hours later, I had released the first version of “Kanji”.

“Kanji” is a simple tool for reviewing Japanese characters or words. It reads in a UTF-8 encoded file and displays the entries within at random, showing a new entry every 30 seconds. It is intended to be run in “always on top” mode, in which case it can be used for passive studying of Japanese while working on other things.

This tool is minimalistic by design. There are no config files nor preferences. Everything is specified via the command line, after which, the program simply runs until closed.

[…]

I’ve been wanting to use xargs for a practical application for some time. I’ve read many articles that have mentioned it, but it was Ted Dziuba’s Taco Bell Programming which was the tipping point.

Here’s the situation: I want to convert my FLAC collection to an MP3 collection so that I can upload my CD collection to Amazon. Further, I’d like to store the MP3s in a different folder, while maintaining the original subfolder structure. Finally, I want to maintain the metadata in my FLAC files; the flac command line utility only seems to support decoding to .wav without metadata.

Finally, I have 8 virtual cores, and I want to use them all to convert everything as quickly as possible.

[…]