Schinckel.net

I recently had cause to download something via bit-torrent: it’s immaterial if the something was legal or not, but I did notice, sometime after starting the 710Mb download, that the torrent had a series of files inside of it:

filename.nfo filename.part01.rar filename.part02.rar … filename.part51.rar filename.sfv

Thankfully, The Unarchiver.app was able to decompress this multi-part RAR archive. However, the file that was created, filename.ext, was 700.2Mb. That’s right, the compressed version of the file was larger than the original. There really is no need to do something silly like compress MP3, AAC, AVI or other already compressed media files. If the compression scheme that was used to create the file from uncompressed data (i.e., WAV audio file, .DV movie) is worth it’s salt, it will already be much smaller than the same file compressed using RAR, ZIP or whatever. Files that are compressed are reduced using an algorithm that looks for patterns in the data, and replaces duplicates with an alternative. Data that has already been compressed will be effectively random, as any duplicate patterns will already have been removed. Thus, you are wasting CPU time in compressing the files further, and in fact, in many cases, will end up with files that are larger. This is due to the inherent overheads in compressed archives. So, whoever created that .torrent, you wasted a bit of my time, and everyone who has read this since…

Make It Easy On Yourself • The Walker Brothers • The Love Songs Of Burt Bacharach ★★

I converted this theme, Connections, to the Blogsome format. I also put a credit to myself (and another to the original theme author) into the template file. I noticed today a whole heap of new links to me via technorati. It turns out that lots of people have put this theme into their blogs, and left the credit as it is down the bottom:

Blogsome conversion and all content © Matt Schinckel, unless otherwise indicated.

I’ve changed that, so it now says:

Blogsome conversion © Matt Schinckel, content © {authors} unless otherwise indicated.

I’d love people to update their template - it makes me feel bad, taking all that credit for the content. In my template it has a bit more code, that automatically puts all of the blog’s authors in as links. The more automation the better, I always say. Also, if you use Connections, you don’t need to keep the chinese characters, they say “Tiger Paint” (or something similar). You can put whatever you want in there.

Saw a Google Ad today: Get Paid to do Surveys. Went to the site: here is an excerpt…

Sit Back, Relax, and Get Paid for What You Think!!

• Online Companies will pay YOU from $5 to $125 for Each Survey!
• Get paid to participate in online focus groups $50 to $150 per hour!

It went on a bit like this for a while, and then…

** Just one hour online can pay for your registration! ** Normally $59.95 Today’s Special Registration Price ONLY $34.95! This low price will be ending soon so hurry and take advantage of this special offer!

So, you are telling me I need to pay $35 (US, I assume) to register to do some surveys, and then I’ll get paid. I don’t really trust you, you know…

I’m running my NSLU2 as a file server, torrent client and kaid server. With 6 torrents running, it runs out of memory, and starts killing processes willy-nilly. Took me a while to figure out this was why my script to auto-start a new torrent was being “Terminated.” Not sure how it works out which processes to kill, or if there’s a way to reduce memory use. Then I came across a HOWTO: Add Additional Swap Space. Should fix stuff a bit. Just a note: it takes ages for the file to be created, apparently.

Kissing A Fool • George Michael • Ladies & Gentlemen : The Best Of George Michael ★★

Edit: using ps x o %mem 0 command, I can see that each enhanced-ctorrent process grabs about 5 meg, while the 10 or so kaid processes each use up 2.1Mb. Since I haven’t started using kaid yet, maybe I should stop it auto-starting…

I’m in school holidays at the moment, and I’ve been rather busy doings some more of my house renovations. The floors are all oiled, and just awaiting the oil to harden before it’s possible to put furniture on them. They look great, Jaq did a really good job doing the oiling. I also bought a heap of timber for the architraves and skirting boards - 90x12 meranti. This is thinner than normal skirting boards, which tend to be 19mm. Before I started putting them in, I had a bit of wiring to drop. Because we are having an island computer and work bench, all of the cables need to come up through a trapdoor in the floor. There was already a power point installed there, but I needed to pull some ethernet, phone and USB cables through a conduit. These then needed to be terminated at either end with sockets, which has all been done. With the cabling done, including dropping cable from the ceiling for the telephone connections, I was able to start on the skirtings and architraves. I began by cutting some skirtings for the front corner of the lounge, where there were some fiddly bits that needed to be cut, before I discovered that I am much better off doing all of the architraves first, and then measuring the skirtings to fit. Thus, the major part of today was spend cutting, sanding and priming the upright portions of the architraves for almost all of the doorways in the house. Excluding internal doorways on rooms that haven’t been sanded, or finished yet. I’ve been using an airless spray-gun, and have had fantastic results. Tomorrow I plan to finish painting these, and put them up. Measuring and cutting the top sections of these will be much easier with the uprights in position. Then it will be skirting time again!

Anybody’s War • Icehouse • Man of Colours ★★½

Note to self: here are the FTP details for xbmc downloading… Host = xbmp.uk.xbins.org Port = 21 Username = xbins Password = homebrew

I’ll continue my service of linking to the best of xkcd’s comics: (This comic can be found at http://xkcd.com/c166.html) (Updated: Missing title.)

I’ve had some DNS issues with my ADSL connection, but it took me a while to work out that’s what they were. Basically, sometimes viewing a page would fail, but it would generally work the second time you refreshed. So, I checked out some settings. I was using the DNS addresses given by my upstream DHCP server, and these are either overloaded, or not working properly, or both. So, now I’m using alternate addresses, and haven’t had a lookup failure as yet.

How to Make a RJ45 Cable Tester Note to self: make one of these. Second Note to self: make one better, that cycles through each of the lines…and does bi-directional display.

I was having continual problems keeping my Wireless connection working, and just happened to disable 802.1x Authentication, which fixed pretty much all of the issues. I don’t even remember turning it on, but I think I must have. This is a Windows setting: you change it for each wireless network you connect to in the Wireless Networks tab of the Wireless Network Adaptor config applet.