After nearly 3 years of idle, I’ve started blogging again.

I haven’t been blogging for the longest time. For the most part, it was simply that I didn’t have anything that I wanted to say badly enough to go to the effort of writing it. In simpler terms, I couldn’t be arsed.

I still can barely be arsed even now, but there’s a couple things that inspired me to write something.

Recently I’ve gotten a side job doing web design work for a real estate company in Texas. Although, calling it ‘design’ is perhaps a bit generous, as what I’m working on right now is more ‘maintenance of existing site’ than actual ‘design’. But it’s the same basic idea; building pages and adding new features to a web site.

In the process of sharpening my CSS skills for this job, I’ve learned about responsive design. This is a fancy term for a web page that reformats itself to match whatever device it’s being viewed on. Mainly this involves reformatting and/or resizing elements to accommodate the narrower screens of phones and tablets, though there are other device features that can be taken advantage of as well.

As an experiment in basic responsive design, I’ve retrofitted the Tardis Labs blog to be slightly more ‘responsive’ than before. Ignoring this post, if you looked at this blog on a desktop computer today, it would look identical to what it’s looked like for the last 3 years. However, if you resize your browser window, the difference quickly becomes apparent.

The design of this site is fairly simple to begin with, but I made a few changes to make it display properly on narrow screens. For starters, the width of the content area is no longer fixed to 540 pixels wide. On larger screens, the content is still restricted to that width — long lines of text are hard to read. But as the window shrinks below that size, the content pane resizes itself to match. Images that are too wide to fit are automatically scaled down. Below 480 pixels wide (the width of a tablet), the padding is tightened up, to take better advantage of the limited screen real estate. Also, the tag list and time / comment links, which are normally on the same line, become separated to keep them from crowding together on small screens.

As a result, the blog will render in a fairly sensible fashion all the way down to about 200 pixels wide — smaller than even the smallest phone screens.

In the process of doing all this, I removed the old image hacks I was using to give the blog its rounded borders, and the IE conditionals that went with them. The same effect is now accomplished with CSS alone. And, just because, images now have rounded edges as well, which I think matches well with the rounded borders on the post boxes.

After going to all this trouble, it seemed to me fairly silly to update the theme to a blog that I never use.

So here we are.

Despite the wall of text above, I still don’t have terribly much to say. But I do have one asphalt plan (it’s not quite solid enough to call ‘concrete’) for the blog: Culinary Experiments for the Helpless Bachelor. The plan is to write an ongoing series of posts documenting the process of not relying on takeout and packaged food. Food that’s simple enough to make, it’s downright Nathan-proof.

Because when you’re Nathan, everything is a mad science experiment.

You know what’s really sad?

Website adverts that pop up over the site you’re trying to read.

Are there people out there that actually respond to these things? Do people even actually get a chance to see what’s being advertised? Because my immediate response is invariably “WHERE’S THE FUCKING CLOSE BUTTON ON THIS THING SO I CAN GO BACK TO THE THING I WAS TRYING TO READ!!!”

You can pick your friends. And you can pick your nose. But you can’t pick your friend’s nose.

However, you can pick your friend’s brain.

Pollen everywhere

*sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze*

I went out and bought a stereo receiver today.

In this case, ‘receiver’ means, ‘amplifier, tuner, and switcher.’ It’s the box you plug your audio sources into, amplifies the audio and sends it out ot speakers, and has a built-in AM/FM tuner.

This one was a Sony brand. It cost about $165. I was considering a slightly cheaper one for $150 (also a Sony) but I decided on the upgrade since it was only $15 more, and the better one had support for 5.1. 5.1 being a fancy term for ‘surround sound’. (The 5 refers to the 5 ‘surround’ speakers — left/right/center in the front, and left/right in the rear — the 1 refers to the single subwoofer.) I’m not even set up for surround at the moment — I only have the standard 2 speakers connected, but it gives me the ability to upgrade later.

Right now I have my DVD player (which doubles as a CD player) and XBox (which doubles as a media center) connected up. The trick was getting everything working together smoothly.

First was to get both the XBox and DVD player connected to the television. Since I have an older TV that doesn’t have ‘Line’ inputs, only the old coax-style connection, I needed an adapter box to plug in the RCA-plug line inputs that everything uses nowadays. Simple enough device, it takes the line inputs in one end, and a coax on the other end, and the coax goes into the TV, which you tune to channel 4.

It also has a coax input, which you plug your antenna or cable TV input into. The box turns on automatically when the connected device (DVD player or whatever) is turned on. So you can go between watching your cable TV and your DVD player without having to manually switch anything — you just turn on the DVD and the adapter kicks in. This feature is important for another reason…

The adapter box only has inputs for one device. So in order to connect both the DVD and the XBox to the TV, I needed either a switchbox or another adapter box. The adapter box turned out to be cheaper (if I had more than 2 devices the switch would have been cheaper), and it had the advantage of being automatic, unlike the switch. So I plugged the DVD into one box, the XBox into the other, and daisy-chained them together by plugging the coax output from one into the coax input of the other. This way, when I turn on either device the appropriate adapter automatically comes on. (If I turn both on, one will override the other.) If both are off, I could watch cable TV normally, if I had cable.

Now that the video side of things is set up, I could tackle the audio.

I’ll start with the XBox, since it’s a little more complicated. I want to be able to run the XBox with audio running to both the stereo and TV (so I could, say, use the XBox without having to turn on the stereo too). So I split the audio signals so that one set of cables went to the adapter box (and ultimately to the TV), and another went to the stereo.

The XBox has Media Center abilities as well. (Not the greatest in the world, but passable.) It has USB ports, and can play music off of a removable device, so I took a large external hard drive that I had lying around disused, dumped my entire music collection onto it, and plugged it into the XBox.

Now I can turn on the XBox, select the music I want, then turn off the TV and just let it play through the stereo. Or I could just turn on the XBox and TV to play a game or something, without turning on the stereo.

Now for the DVD player. I faced a similar issue with the setup — I wanted to be able to turn on the DVD and TV to play a video without involving the stereo, or turn on the DVD and stereo and play a CD without involving the TV. This turned out to be simpler than the XBox, as the DVD player has a second audio output — a digital output — so there was no need to use a splitter. I could simply plug the analog outputs into the adapter for the TV, and the digital output into the stereo. Now I can use the DVD player with either the stereo or TV, independent of the other.

The final part is the part I’m still struggling with — getting it all working without a army of remote controls.

The XBox doesn’t come with a remote at all, though it’s capable of using one. Microsoft expects you to buy one separately — theirs, of course. However, any number of universal remotes can control the XBox. Finding one that does a good job of it is the trick.

The first one I tried — a cell-phone style flip-open remote that I had been using for the TV for some time now — had a code listed for the XBox, but it didn’t work. I suspect it was for the original XBox, while the 360 (which is what I have) requires a different one. However, by using a code search, I was able to find a code that could control the 360 — an unlisted code at that; the code I found isn’t on the list of codes anywhere, for any device.

This remote had two issues. First was the usual problem with universal remotes: Since every remote has a slightly different set of functions, a universal will almost always (a) be missing some functions, or (b) have functions labelled in a less than meaningful way.

For example, programming this remote to control the stereo results in the ‘obvious’ functions, such as volume control, working as expected. It has other functions that work but are labelled in a somewhat non-intuitive way, for example the radio tuning function are assigned to the next/previous chapter buttons (intended for DVDs) — a reasonably sensible choice, given the options.

However, some essential functions are assigned completely arbitrarily, such as the input selection being controlled by the number buttons; 1 for CD, 3 for radio, 4 for DVD, and suchlike. This is the result of the universal remote having to support the ‘lowest common denominator’ of functionality. It can’t have individual buttons dedicated to input sources (as the original stereo remote has); there are just too many possibilities. So the functions have to be stuffed into whatever pigeon-holes are available.

The second issue is more specific to this particular remote. It’s designed to be compact, so it has fewer buttons on it. To access most of the possible functions on any given device, it has a ‘shift’ key which, when active, changes the meanings of many of the buttons on the remote. It has, for instance, a set of Channel Up/Down and Volume Up/Down buttons, arranged in a directional-pad. When the shift key is active, these buttons become selection buttons for things like DVD menus, moving the on-screen selection up, down, left or right. This multiple-mode setup makes the remote less intuitive to use.

This remote has other screwball assignments as well. It has no Next/Prev track button, for, say, jumping back and forth between chapters on a video, or tracks on a CD. So the answer to that was for Next/Prev track to be assigned to Shift+Play and Shift+Stop. Very unintuitive for someone that’s used to a CD player, and trying to use the DVD player as such.

While I can deal with this issue with the DVD player by simply using the original DVD remote, I can’t do so with the XBox, because it has no original remote. So I bought another universal remote, hoping for something that worked better.

The second one was better, somewhat. It had more obviously-labelled buttons. However, it still had the “shift key” style setup that the previous remote had, at least for the Channel/Volume/Selection buttons. To use the selection buttons, you first had to press either the “Guide” or “Menu” button, and the remote would change modes. Unfortunately, pressing Guide or Menu in itself will activate a function on the remote, sometimes undesired. Pressing Menu for example will bring up the XBox menu, which is not what you want if all you’re trying to do is activate the selection buttons for the screen you’re already at.

So I tried another remote. This one has both dedicated volume/channel and selection keys, so you doesn’t have to switch modes to switch from one to another. It also seems to control most of the important functions on the XBox. However, it has one glaring omission: there are no buttons for skipping to the next or previous track! This makes it impossible to change music tracks without turning the TV on and selecting a track from the on-screen interface.

So overall, the setup is working pretty well, except that I’m still on the hunt for a remote that satisfactorily controls the XBox.

I bought a GPS today.

While it will certainly be useful to me, seeing as I have a natural talent for getting lost, I got it mainly for its hobbyist uses.

Geocaching is a game where someone hides a box, then posts its coordinates online, where others can hunt for it. The box will typically contain a logbook and pen for finders to sign. It might also contain various low-value items that might be exchanged for similar-valued items by finders.

Today I found my first geocache.

It was an ammo box, hidden in a little itty bitty park near downtown Martinez. It was semi-embedded in the dirt behind a tree, partially covered with dead leaves. Inside was the ubiquitous logbook and pen (which I signed), along with other little bits and piece of stuff, including things like a slinky, a rubber bouncy ball, a plastic fly, stickers, some business cards for a club of some sort, and similar effects. I didn’t take or leave anything; the main purpose of the exercise was just to find the box.

The logbook must have had a good hundred or so messages left by finder, so it’s been discovered pretty frequently in the (according to its entry on the web) 6 years since it was placed.

I’m considering going to the post office and buying a cheap book of stamps with a $20 bill, just to get some dollar coins from the machines, hopefully getting some presidential dollar coins back to use for exchanging.

My trusty old iPod died. It went through the wash. RIP.

I bought a Philips GoGear Vibe to replace it.

It’s about the size of a box of matches.

It’s half the cost of the equivalent iPod, but does the job almost as well. It’s easy to use, the UI is clear and simple. It comes with its own media player software for transferring files, but it’s some fly-by-night operation I’ve never heard of. (Rhapsody Media Player.) I’ve been using WinAmp to copy music to it, which works out-of-the-box.

It has some quirks. If you’ve got a long list of items (artists, albums, songs) to search through, scrolling through them is somewhat slow; there’s not a way to quickly jump through the list like there is with the iPod.

Any metadata (the information that contains things like artist, album and title for a particular file) that contains certain characters, such as slashes or colons, get quietly changed when getting copied to the player, which confuses WinAmp when I try to sync it again later. As a result, I’ve had to go through and massage all my metadata so it doesn’t contain any characters that the player doesn’t like. The media player that came with it might handle it more intelligently.

I’ve had it crash once already; I had to do a restore on it to get it working again, which erased everything on it, and I had to sync all my music again.

Overall rating (on the binary scale, natch): 1