The update from when my plans went awry: I went digging through a bunch of boxes and found a USB wireless adapter, which I figured would let me connect the new computer to the network without having to move it next to the old computer and make that space all crowded and stuff ( Read more... )

So, I ran into the following problems with the new computer:

1. The plan was to just get a computer, no monitor, because I have a flat screen that I haven't been using. Connected computer to monitor ... oops, monitor can't turn on anymore; keeps flashing at me. Well, it was at least 9 years old, and had already lost a couple pixels. Should have ( Read more... )

I finished my PG Roget's Thesaurus conversion, even the part about recording the plan of the thesaurus in a scrolling browser using CamStudio. After using it a bit, I think I should have used the CamStudio trick for everything and not broken up the main thesaurus entries into so many groups; it's a little difficult to navigate. Maybe I shouldn't ( Read more... )

For those of you who scoffed at my madness, you'll be happy to know that I've split the Project Gutenberg version of Roget's Thesaurus into the individual text files I required, split the index in the same way, converted the main thesaurus text into images using eBook to Images, and used CamStudio to record a scrolling shot of Wikipedia's version ( Read more... )

I haven't yet started reading books using my portable DVD player yet. I did use it to read lists of verbs generated from the Moby Project parts of speech list, as part of a research project. The reason I haven't started reading is because I'm still collecting, classifying and converting texts to put on disc. I've converted pretty much all the ( Read more... )

When I was investigating how to implement The Plan So Crazy It Just Might Work, I saw that there were a couple commercial apps designed to convert PDFs for you, into JPEG and in one case AVI. However, I avoided them because I figured "why pay someone else to basically wrap a GUI around tools I already have ( Read more... )

So, I've had this plan I've hinted at, but kept secret while I researched it. First, the set-up: because of my impermanent residence, I can pretty much use the computer every day, but only for short bursts, and there's no guarantees of any kind. That makes it pretty much impossible to work on projects. I can in theory write, but only the old- ( Read more... )

vampyrecat and vajrabot will be happy to know that the weather has cooled down here, now that they've left. Because the weather cooled down when the Frankenfamily went up to Oregon, and heated up again when they returned, I can only conclude that the temperature in Sacramento is directly related to mass migrations ( Read more... )

So, who wants to go to the state fair September 3rd and see Weird Al?