My Slice Of Reality, Wandering thoughts on tech and anything else

Its rare but sometimes companies just blow me away with their service. I first ordered from Crutchfield back in 2000 for a new head unit for my car. A blaupunkt that I still have sitting in my garage. While it was a bit more expensive than I could have gotten from say, ebay or other sites, they included full out instructions and wiring kits to hook it up. I tried myself, couldn’t get it to work so had a shop do it.

A few months later, I wanted some new speakers so I again I ordered from Crutchfield. Again, paid a bit more than I could have gotten online (but alot less than they wanted locally) but they got there fairly quickly and with instructions and cabling I needed. The install went great and a few hours later I was driving around town annoying the hell out of my neighbors with my “thumpin junkin.”

It’s been a little over eight years since my last order with them but Laura wanted new speakers for her car so I directed her there. We price shopped and their prices were good, pretty comparable to the bargain shopping we were doing. Nothing high end, just upgraded speakers to replacing failing ones in her Outback. Even found a free shipping coupon (Retailmenot rules too btw). So, we placed the order at 6pm on Sunday the 12th.

On Monday morning, the 13th, UPS tosses a package onto our front porch. Roughly sixteen hours after we placed the order (on a sunday no less!) we had our speakers. Granted, we’re pretty close apparently to their warehouse but thats still an amazing turn around time. Especially for ground shipping! Of course, I tweet about it. A day later I get a reply from #CrutchfieldHelp hoping I enjoy them.

Seriously, customer for life

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tagged: Crutchfield • Customer Service • speakers • Subaru Outback

Sunday I installed the latest beta of

Ubuntu

9.04 to see how far its gone. At first glance, its their best release yet but I did run into one bug. My HP Laserjet 1018 wouldn’t work. Ubuntu detected it, set it up and then hung when attempting to download a necessary file. Under 8.04 and 8.10 I had no problems getting the printer to work automatically. It appears that 9.04’s printer interface does not automatically download the firmware required by this series of printer to work. Its fairly easy to setup though.

After connecting your HP Laserjet 10xx series and turning it on load a terminal window and run:
chris@anduril:~$ sudo hp-setup -i
Thats it, follow the prompts (pretty much yes, yes yes, etc.) and when it asks if you’d like to setup a print queue for this device, agree. If however you already attempted to set it up through the printer interface (CUPs) choose no.

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tagged: CUPS • HPLIP • Laserjet 1018 • Ubuntu 9.04

So I was browsing Evga’s website tonight and couldnt help but be suprised by the release date for the chipset driver on their new X58 board. Seems EVGA’s been building boards and drivers for quite a while…Benjamin Button style?

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tagged: 1900 • EVGA • Intel

I’ve spent most of this afternoon so far attempting to install XP on my HP dv6745us and have run into a few fun areas. The worst by far has been finding a correct driver for my wireless card which I learned from my Ubuntu fiasco’s as being an Ar5007 Atheros card. It took forever to track down a correct driver but here it is http://www.mediafire.com/?cfdzj3eaizt

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tagged: AR5007 • atheros • dv6745us • Windows XP

Ahem, well you can see I’ve made a few changes to the site in terms of look. Basically, borrowed Sam’s theme and have made some modifications but the most hardcore ones will have to wait for another day. Slowly tweaking it to the way I’d like it to look — maybe a nice terminal type theme.

Also added fairly prominant links to my DA and Flickr pages. Partially as a motivation to actually start updating those as well as here. Well, I guess we can only hope.

Otherwise, I also integrated in the Askimet spam blocking and Wordpress.com stat tracking package.

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tagged: Personal • Site Updates • themes

So we’re coming up on a month at the new place and I’m left with a strange feeling of disconnect - it’s not home. I come here every day from work, or from a side job and I just sit here. Or sleep. Or watch TV. There’s no real feeling of completeness, of being home.

Maybe it’s because we still have stuff in boxes, a ton of items looking for their own home and it carries over to me. Maybe once I get all my little nicknacks and cables put away in their own spaces I’ll start to feel that sense of being. Or maybe I never will, maybe this place will always be transient; always have a sense of elsewhere.

I’ve lived in alot of places in the past six years, alot of different and disconnected spaces. The only real connection they all shared was the one made by digital signals. I’ve always had my computers, my interwebs and maybe thats what causes the lack of that feeling, the lack of being “home.”

Or maybe it just takes alot of time. I don’t know. I just know I feel angsty, emo, wishing to blast some cheesy Simple Plan or Good Charlotte. Lord, do I need help

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I’ve played around with Ubuntu alot since it first came onto the scene a few years ago. I even went so far as to use it as my main operating system on my desktop for over six months. However, there was always some silly little issue that drove me away from it (whether fit and polish, incompatibility with some app I required at the time or just general boredom) but I keep coming back like some crack addict.

Until release 8.04.My, what a clusterfuck.

ウィークリーホテルなら

Site Map I tried Ubuntu, I really did. I installed you, I spent three days troubleshooting my problems. From the pulse audio bullshit, to the eating of my external drive (are you serious? An operating system should NEVER “delete” a hard drive, even if I was able to recover the partition table later on with the help of some friends) you were one troubled bastard. Apparently, I wasn’t alone either. It was by far the least polished and press ready release I’d yet seen from the guys at Canonical. Suffice to say I dropped that release like a cheap, two dollar bottle of whiskey.

And I must seriously be a glutton for punishment. I decided to install it again. On my laptop. The machine I’ve been using every day. For work.

This second time has been a surprise. The install went quickly, with no errors or issues. So far, it appears that the wireless card was correctly detected and setup. Wait, scratch that. Its detected but apparently I have no way to join a wireless network.

There’s no obvious method to detect or join. Perfect. The screen resolution is also massively off (seriously, you still cant work properly with an Nvidia 7150 Go chipset yet?) but hell…bluetooth works.

Yea, cause thats important right now.

Atleast it properly detected my wireless Logitech mouse. Most likely the forward and back buttons don’t function properly (to be tested) but thats always been the case.

Thankfully, sharing an internet connection through Vista is pretty easy and the laptop’s now setup with atleast a wired connection through the wireless. Not ideal, but it’ll work till I figure out the mess that is wireless on linux. Lord is this piggy backing slow though.

Expect updates soon if I run into more bugs or issues (and Im sure I will)

EDIT:EnvyNG to the rescue. In two clicks through Synaptic and then two clicks through Envy’s interface I have the correct Nvidia drivers installed and running. Ahhhh…1440×900 how we’ve missed you

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tagged: geekery • linux • ubuntu • vista

What a world wind the past three weeks have been. We finally signed the lease for our new apartment and got everything moved in on the 11th of this month.

Its a decent enough place. Smallish, but two bedrooms, bath, a large kitchen and a washer and dryer make it worth it. The fact that it has a/c (even if only downstairs and not the bedrooms) was even more of a plus.

The downside was that the previous tenant must have been an idiot. She was moved out by the 20th of march but never called to have her Comcast tv and internet service disconnected. This made it rather…difficult to get Comcast do a damn thing in regards to getting us setup and running.

Finally, as of today we have TV and internet. Its like a breath of fresh air. The past two plus weeks or so have been the longest I’ve gone without a net connection in ages. I huggles my internet. Its good to be back.

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The quest has finally ended, we’ve found an apartment. While it’s a bit more expensive than we’d like it’s within the maximum we figured we could afford right now. Hopefully, it’ll become even more affordable in the near future when I can find a better job and she starts working full time as well.

What makes the place so nice? Two bedrooms, two full baths. About 1,100 square feet in total that was recently renovated with new carpeting, painting, etc. It also has quite new appliances and central A/C and gas heating.

We’re both looking forward to moving in (hopefully the 19th if the landlord gets back to us on that) and getting out of our respective living situations since neither one is all that optimal right now. Either way, it should be an interesting time in a new household

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While attempting to show Laura the wonders of Launchy we ran into an interesting…issue. Apparently its a bit confused by common American slang.

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