Burn Baby Burn…

I have two Pioneer 109 DVD burners (one white, one black) bought 3 months apart. Identical firmware. After making coasters of about 20 Memorex DL media the last couple months I finally clue in that the white one works 100% of the time for the Memorex media, the black one fails to verify the second layer 95% of the time.

??? They’re supposed to be identical burners.

All other media I’ve used, any brand, burned at any speed, work fine for both. I switched which burner I used as primary when I did some hardware upgrades, and never figured out that’s when the problem started.

So, I’ve tossed about $40 of good media in the trash the last few weeks, just because I didn’t look at the problem sooner. Bah!

How to meet the neighbors???

I live in a fairly high-density area: lots of apartment buildings. Looking out my window I can probably see a hundred other apartments facing me from several buildings on other streets. A perfect place for a community WiFi network? Apparently not:

WiFi Usage

I don’t know how you find other WiFi/computer enthusiasts when they’re all locked in other buildings with restricted access. With a street full of houses you could at least put some paper in the mailboxes to get the word out.

Maybe I’ll buy a couple hundred LED Xmas lights and punch them through a big square of cardboard to spell “802.11g” and put it up in my window for all to see.

Christmas spirit and all that.

Ho ho ho!

Free… sort of…

So, Sun has announced that pretty much their entire software stack is now “free”. Really, if you want to pick up the phone and yell at somebody when things break you still have to pay, but it does allow you to dabble with software you may have ignored before due to license costs, or start using some of the more basic infrastructure bits you simply couldn’t afford before for small projects.

Hopefully this helps SunMC adoption, as I often run into admins who would like some of its more advanced features, but don’t have the money to do so. Anything that gets it out there and more widely deployed has to be a good thing…