Plaidophile

I was at yet another pizza bar which was trying to cash in on the math craze. This one had "log pizza." The first slice was free, the second slice cost 69 cents, the third slice cost $1.10...

The pizza, incidentally, was terrible.

"Hey, the building's on fire."

"Yeah. Could you put it out?"

"Well, I don't have any water. I'm waiting for the fire department to arrive. Any idea when they might come?"

"Is there something else you could use?"

"Not really. Just the fire department."

"How about this vodka?"

"No, that will just make it worse."

"What about this bottle of Coke?"

"Well, that might put a small part out, but then we'd have a big sticky mess and it wouldn't really do much to the fire anyway."

"Well, keep plugging away at it, maybe something will turn up. I heard the fire department might be here in two days."

"Might be? Couldn't we get a firmer commitment than that?"

"No, not really. So just keep on using what water you find. This is a top priority, and I'm confident you can handle it."

So, I bought a Ryobi cordless drill a few years ago. The battery got completely drained since I don't use drills very often, and it won't hold a charge. So I looked at the battery, and the only indication of what it is was "Ryobi 9.6 volt." So I went online to buy a replacement, and there were plenty of "Ryobi 9.6 volt" batteries. There were absolutely no indications other than that for what sorts of batteries fit into which tools. So I bought one.

And of course, the one I got, which says "Ryobi 9.6 volt," has a completely different connector than what's on my charger or drill.

For $5 more I could have just bought a new damn drill. Ugh.

Of course, now I see that there's a "battery number" that I was supposed to match. GOOD THING THIS WAS OBVIOUS.

So, I've always had tinnitus, my whole life. Of course, sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse. But for the last few days I've thought it was getting really bad, especially when I'm at home alone in my living room where it's generally pretty quiet. But there was something not quite right about it: it had a direction to it.

Tonight I finally tracked down where it was coming from: the transformer on the cheap PS3 Move charging station I bought. Which was especially maddening since I had it unplugged from the charging station itself (to turn off the obnoxiously-bright obligatory blue LEDs) which only made it even louder. And it's at pretty much the exact same frequency as my tinnitus, making it really hard to track down or even tell if there's a difference between it on or off (because if I plug my ears, of course the tinnitus gets relatively-louder).

Also, as it turns out, when I have the Move controllers docked on it with it unplugged, it drains the Move controllers' batteries. So much for convenience.

Basically, I can't really recommend the CTA four-port Move charging station, especially if you have really good treble hearing, a case of tinnitus, and an aversion to REALLY BRIGHT LIGHTS.

Today I got the promotional Blu-Ray discs that came free (after registration) with my new TV. So far I'm just watching the promo disc, with clips from a bunch of movies. The various window violations are just as bad in the home as in the theater (only it's a bit worse due to the window being smaller), but then as I have also discovered, it's a bit counterintuitive to disable MotionFlow (240Hz motion interpolation) on my TV when there's a 3D signal, at least not when it's being played through my Blu-Ray player. As a result, animation looks like a cheap video game cut scene, and live action looks like a crappy soap opera.

I absolutely hate MotionFlow, and always turn it off whenever I can. Since it also increases lag, "game mode" generally disables it, so it might not be so bad if I play it through my PS3 — although the PS3 is also significantly louder than the dedicated Blu-Ray player. It merits further experimentation, at least.

Fortunately, there is a way to turn it off: put the system into "theater" mode, and then the sickeningly-smooth 240Hz drops down to the 24Hz that it should be. Unfortunately, that also does a lot of other things to the image, like making it a bit darker (I guess you're expected to have your lights off) and so on, and also screws with the sound (putting it into some sort of "cinema audio" mode). BUT: game mode also turns off MotionFlow (to decrease input lag) and also keeps the nice wide image dynamic range.

It's a bit annoying how I seem to have to fiddle with things more to undo all the "OMG WOW" features that are turned on by default though. Oh man I wish I had a lawn to tell people to get off of right about now.

It only took a bit over a year since the announcement, but OnLive quietly launched back in June, and then recently they dropped the monthly fee in favor of just charging for the games (what a concept). I installed the client, and at least from a graphics and sound point of view, the streaming audio and video are surprisingly high-quality.

I haven't played any games on it since there's nothing I want to pay money for (at least not the prices they're charging). Supposedly their menuing system is part of the same streaming video thing, though, and that was pretty responsive. It's hard to judge latency on something like that, though, and even then I did notice a bit of lag in spots.

Also, the reviews which say it looks just as good as local gaming are clearly colored by wishful thinking. The colors look washed out and the image looks fairly fuzzy. It's better than YouTube but it's still no local HDMI link (and things that move get smeared into oblivion). Also, it took quite a lot of bandwidth (7Mbps down, 100Kbps up), and also whenever I watched someone's game, it just played a short segment of it before pausing.

An interesting technological achievement to be sure, but it still seems like a little fish in a big desert. Out of place and probably going to dry up unless they figure out how to get some water.

Anyone have any idea where I should go about reporting an obvious, transparent, and possibly successful mortgage scammer? Unfortunately, the Internet is full of information about the scams (which are, again, obvious and transparent) but I can't find any information about who to report one to.

Why is it that when I watch a Blu-Ray disc on my Blu-Ray player, pretty much every single one starts out with an unskippable 10-minute sales pitch for how awesome Blu-Ray is? It's especially ludicrous when it's from a Sony Pictures film (for example, Moon) where I am watching it on a Sony Blu-Ray player on a brand-new Sony Bravia 3D TV. They can't get any more money from me on this!

I just want to be able to press "menu" and get right to the movie's menu, or better yet, just go straight to the movie, since it's not like Blu-Ray movies need any configuration most of the time (since it's not like the bad old days of DVD where the player didn't know what audio format to use or whatever, and some things were set up with the assumption that peoples' players didn't know how to downconvert 5.1 to 2.0 or whatever).

This is one of those things where it's gotten worse as the studios have gotten more format-savvy, and of course there's a visual aid. (Except it's even more ludicrous than that because the Blu-Ray ad is telling us how much better Blu-Ray is than DVD, which is why I have it on Blu-Ray already.)

I have an accumulation of Stuff that I should get rid of. In particular, my old TV, my old netbook, the XO I got from OLPC's "give one get one" program, and a few random perfectly-functional cellphones and iPods and such. Does anyone know of any good charities to which I could donate them?

My criteria:

• Must not be faith-based (or if it is faith-based, must not use their charity as a platform for espousing rubbish)
• Ideally would use the item directly rather than reselling it or recycling it for scrap or the like (so, for example, I'd rather donate my TV to a homeless shelter than to Goodwill, and cellphones to a charity which provides phones to the homeless than to the "cellphones for troops" things that just recycle the phones for pennies on the dollar)
• Should be tax-deductible
• For the TV, should be willing to pick it up themselves or be in San Francisco

Right now I'm leaning toward Compass, who I donated a bunch of stuff to last time I did this sort of cull, since I really like their mission and they satisfy all my criteria, but maybe someone else has better ideas? I don't think the TV or the XO are a good match for them, though, so I still need ideas specifically for those. (For the XO I did find Aspirnaut which is my first choice, if they get back to me.)

So for some reason I decided to spend a lot of money on another toy.

So, an online acquaintance recently posed the classic problem:

Use each of the digits 1-9 exactly once each to fill in the blanks in this equation:

_ _ _ _ _ - _ _ _ _ = 33333

Of course, instead of solving it myself, I wrote a simple program to brute-force the solution. My solution worked by very quickly generating permutations and then testing to see which permutations led to the desired answer. Maybe not the cleverest way of solving the problem, but it was a fun challenge anyway.

But then that got me thinking: what properties could I find in other possible solution values? 33333 is all well and good but there's actually 95063 possible numbers that could be solved for (12345-9876 thru 98765-1234).

(lack thereof)

I have a song up at Song Fight! this week. I'd appreciate people listening to the songs and voting for the ones they like, especially if they like Sockpuppet.