Storage

Posted on 2008-07-15 by Nigel VH

If you’re a person like me you have a recurring problem in your life. Storage. Either a physical place to store your physical crap, or a physical place to store your digital crap. Hopefully, the latter is soon to be rectified.

Being in and out of the dorms, and in and out of my dad’s condo, it goes to show the extreme smallness of spaces that humans can become accustomed to living in. Unfortunately that doesn’t always dictate the amount of stuff we have. We as humans are also very smart, and find ways to fill EVERY NOOK AND CRANNY in a space with stuff. Then when you go to move, you finally realize how much was actually there.

I suppose we should be thankful that doesn’t apply as much to hard drive space. What’s there is what’s there. (Barring compression, which in most cases doesn’t help that much anyways.) On the unfortunate side of this, instead of just searching for a nook to store some stuff, we are forced to buy new, larger hard drives to store our stuff. This I have done.

Hopefully today or tomorrow my new drives will be arriving. After installation, including the drive I already have, my system will have a total of 1.32TB of HDD space. Yes, you read right. 1.32 Terabytes.

What I’m going to fill it with? I don’t know. What I do know is that I will. Invariably through the years, I have gotten progressively larger hard drives, and said, “I’ll never fill (insert number that was huge then but is now utterly mundane)!” Then, a year or two later it was full. Then I’d get a larger hard drive, or a new system, and the cycle would repeat.

This leaves me boggling at the concept that it wasn’t too long ago, I was happy and content with less that 200MB of hard drive space, and now I’m struggling to manage with 320GB of HDD space. I just wonder how long 1.32 TB will last me.

Hopefully, with HDD cooling fans, and dual-layer dvd backups, a long time.

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On Blowing Stuff Up

Posted on 2008-07-09 by Nigel VH

This blog post is hereby dedicated to the idea and practice of blowing stuff up. Namely the tradition of 4th of July, and the production of Hydrogen.

I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING YOU DO, NOR LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU CAUSE!

Recently, 4th of July happened. I had a wonderful time, and took well over 400 pictures of the fireworks. Unfortunately, Not may are actually good, due to the nature of the shots (Movement, dark, etc.) I did however pick out a select few that I thought to be good shots of the fireworks, or interesting permutations of them.

Also recently, I’ve finished constructing a much larger (than my previous attempts) hydrogen producing thingy. I had previously used two three inch tungsten rods as the elements. And before that, graphite sticks. These worked, but due to various factors, they’d either corrode, fall apart, or get strange insulatory films developing on them. This was obviously a problem. Thus, stainless steel. That’s what my new device is made of, and theoretically should be better. I have as of yet not tested it, so we’ll see. I’ve created a homepage for this project, and you can view it here: <NO LONGER AVAILABLE>. It is also linked to from the main projects page.

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Horrifyingly Unscheduled Downtime

Posted on 2008-05-13 by Nigel VH

As you may have noticed DigitalNigel.com underwent a little bit (almost a week) of unscheduled downtime. Needless to say, It wasn’t pleasant for any parties involved. I missed having access to all my stuff, for a little while I was worried about losing all of the data here on DN and on BrainSplosion. Luckily, all of my data has been saved and obviously, at least one of the sites is running properly again. With a few minor and temporary exceptions. I hope soon to have BS running properly again.

That being said, I have started a Twitter today, and plan to fill it with random thoughts I have or interesting quotes I hear while in my day to day escapades. I do plan on making full use of the API and creating a DN page do display my Twitter feed so that you won’t have to go to a separate site to see the updates.

Lastly to bring a little humor back to things, I arrived at work today to find a sticky-note pad with this printed on it:

A note from your friendly neighborhood IT department:
()Try CTRL-ALT-DELETE.
()Your new password is:
()You have something in your teeth.
And furthermore:

()I wouldn’t mention it unless I cared.

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Power Inversion

Posted on 2008-04-24 by Nigel VH

Yes, I’ve figured out a way to turn power upside down. It’s a brand new development in power distribution. Presently we have to use amperage to push power along the wires, but now it’ll just flow downhill like water does!

No, but really, quite a while ago, I picked up a power inverter at a yard sale. This is no ordinary power inverter, no, this is an RV sized one. 1000 Watts maintained, 2000 Watts peak. I got this quite nice piece of equipment for a mere three dollars. This was because the poor man who used to own it, believed that it only put out a measly 97 volts. Unfortunately, that is insufficient for normal usage in this type of scenario. I’ve since then plugged it in, and have found that it puts out a very stable 105, which is a very respectable and very workable number.

So what does this mean? It means that I have a fancy new part to install in my truck. Unfortunately it requires really big cables. Like jumper cable sized ones. It means that I’ll have to run new ones back there instead of just piggy backing off the ones I used for my amp. So, I’ll remove the ones I put in for my amp, and I’ll add the new lines, and piggyback the amp off of those.

Overall I’ll be much happier with that situation. I wasn’t completely happy with my original cabling anyways and this will make me much happier about it.

By the end of this, I’ll have 500 watts of stereo power, and another 1000 watts of AC power available and ready for the tapping all housed within the confines of my truck.

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CSS Escapades

Posted on 2008-04-09 by Nigel VH

Once again I bring you tales of my escapades into the world of some new programming language. This time it’s CSS. For those of you who don’t know, but still care, it stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It allows me to create one document that will govern how all of the pages on my website will look and how their layout is handled. This is an extremely handy feature. If you wanna change something, all you gotta do is change one file and all the pages will listen. It also has some very nice features which allow for the extensive shortening of your html documents.

Let’s say, for instance, that we have a bunch of tables in our html document. Every one of those is the same size, and has the same border characteristics (lots more than that too). Under standard html, you would have to type out all of the width, height, bordersize, etc, etc statements for every table. In CSS you can set up your stylesheet to say that anytime there is a table, it will automatically have these characteristics. Big time and space saving feature!

Now, some of you are thinking, “Ok, that’s great, but what if I want a different sized table?” That’s easy! That’s where the ‘C’ in CSS comes in handy. If you define the size at your table, it will override the previously defined characteristic from the CSS stylesheet.

Anyway, after long consideration, and getting pissed enough at fighting standard html to give me the layout features I wanted. I decided to convert the entire BrainSplosion site to use CSS. I think I like the new design a bit better, and future page implementations will be incredibly easier.

I do have one word of advice for those considering CSS. Do it. Do it BEFORE you make your site. Having your site all set up, and then having to go rewrite everything to work differently is a true pain in the arse. Do it from the get go, or at least while the site isn’t too big.

It can easily take several hours to get the basics of what you want from CSS down including the tinkering to get things just right. I’ve been working on it for quite a few hours now, and just finished.

Despite all the work, I think I will be happy with it, and am glad I’ve done it now, rather than later on when I’ve made my site just that much more complicated. Now I just wonder if I’ll ever get to changing over DigitalNigel.

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