Last Thursday night/Friday morning we had some pretty powerful storm cells come through the area. I heard the next morning that at one point 85,000 people were without power overnight and that only 10,000 of them had been restored. I woke up around 1AM when one of the cells was passing and there was so much lightning back-to-back that it looked like fireworks going off or a paparazzi mob surrounding my house (as they often do).
The next morning the Internet/DSL connection appeared to be down. My best (quick) efforts to revive it were fruitless. Then I got a call from my wife a few hours later with some interesting news — she was noticing that only some of the computers couldn’t connect – not all of them. When I got home from work I started tracing through the system and discovered that the main hub/switch had gotten toasted, but a smaller secondary one was fine (which accounted for the small population of working systems). The Airport base station that serves as the router between DSL and home network was also flaky (periodically dropping connections). A quick trip to Best Buy after dinner got us re-switched and a new Airport Extreme in place.
The next outage uncovered was the strangest of all. The front speaker channels in the AV amplifier had gotten toasted — so a Dolby 5.1 DVD would only play out of the center, sub-woofer and back speaker channels. Fortunately, the AV unit allowed for 4 front speakers, so we were able to move over to the other speaker outputs without having to buy an entirely new unit.
This morning I discovered one of the iMacs shutting down spontaneously. After combing through the log files I unearthed this message: AppleSMU — shutdown cause = -122 . After some forensic work on the apple support site I found a note that indicated that a shutdown -122 is typically power related (source is fluctuation too much so the unit shuts down defensively). So, it looks like the UPS that the iMac is plugged into took the brunt of the surge, but is now unstable as a result and in need of replacement. It’s been an expensive weekend and I haven’t even bought anything new 
I guess the good news out of this is that the relatively inexpensive hubs took the hit, rather than the considerably more expensive computers and PVRs. I’ll count myself lucky.
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defective, gadgets, hubs, lightning, network
gadgets
This is an unbelievably cool time waster of a site! xtranormal lets you create your own animated short movies using a simple annotated text format that in and of itself is pretty clever. Some of the movies that have been produced already are pretty funny, some just stupid. Try it out and see for yourself.
Technorati Tags:
animation, fun, innovation, video, webtools
webtools
Twitcaps is one of a growing number of sites that have glommed onto the Twitter rocket. In this case, twitcaps allows you to view photos that people on twitter are uploading/sharing. The fascinating thing is the variety of crap stuff that is being generated.
Sure you have plenty of shots of plates of food or beers with the predictable ‘I am about to eat this/drink this’ captions, shots of bands performing, shots of people mugging for the camera, pictures of pets. But its the shots of ‘here is my daughter born 4 weeks premature…’ or ‘this is the window that my grandma used to look out of all day before she died’ that really grab you. The captions also remind you how much of the content is generated outside of the US (or at least in languages other than English).
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photography, twitter, webtools
misc
June is proving to be the hot month for new mobile phone introductions. Apple have announced the availability of a new iPhone model (the 3GS) as well as a 3.0 firmware upgrade on the 19th. Palm released the Pre earlier in the month, and Nokia a releasing the new flagship model N97 in the US on June 25th (though you can buy it now if you can get to one of the two Nokia retail stores in Chicago or New York City).
The Palm is a non-starter for me, just because their past products have always disappointed and the Treo was more of a PDA than a phone. I flirted briefly with the idea of jumping on the Jesus phone bandwagon, but my poor experience with an iPod Touch that I bought for my in-home music upgrade frustrated me enough to throw me that much further in favor of the Nokia N97.
I think it is going to be sweet to have the option of both touch interface and a full QWERTY keyboard in addition to being able to keep most all of the phone apps that I already have. The other bonus was I was able to pre-order the N97 from Amazon for a significant discount early in June — I now note that they are back to charging full price and the N97 is on backorder.
Technorati Tags:
apple, gadgets, iphone, mobile, n75, nokia, nseries, palmpre, upgrade
misc
