Brian's Blog

When I was really into Magic the Gathering (MTG) a few years ago there were a fair number of local gaming stores. One of my favorites of the time was The Encounter in Allentown. I used to go to their MTG tournament on weekends and just hang out there for some fun and games on weekends. Back then the store was reasonably well kept, organized, and clean. And even if it wasn't all that clean and organized the people were nice, both the other customers and the people who worked there. That seems to have changed though.

I introduced a co-worker to MTG a month or so ago and he wanted to know where he could look at cards. Of course, my first thought was of The Encounter. We headed over with me expecting to find it much as I remembered it. Instead what I found was a bit of a dive. There was so much stuff on the counter I couldn't see through the top of the glass at it's contents. Everything on the shelves struck me as dirty and almost dusty. Additionally, the back gaming room was a sty even by my standards, and I'm pretty messy. Let's face it, most gamers aren't exactly known for their organization and cleanliness so it's not like I'm holding them to a high standard. There were also giant piles of stuff in the main part of the store.

Let me say though, this may not be the way they normally are. I understand that they had just come back from two back to back comic/gaming shows which may account for the disorganization. Still, it leaves a bad impression. Especially if a new customer walks in.

I know I've gone on about organization and cleanliness a bit now but that's not really the deal breaker. A place can be cleaned, no biggy. And they did just come off of those shows, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt in that regards. What has turned me mist off is the customer service. My co-worker, Mike, decided he wanted to call them to see if they had a few singles rather than driving over to ask. He called both the Allentown store and the Stroudsburg store asking if they had any Blightning in stock. A few examples of the replied received were:

"I'm 14 hours behind! I don't have time to look up singles!"

"I'm not supposed to look up singles!"

"There's no such card."

That last one was given after we provided the MTG Card set and name. According to Gatherer the card sure as hell does exist.

My first thought is that there was a bad apple employee who answered. That thought was dashed when he got a similar reply from both the Allentown store and the Stroudsburg stores telling me the problem is systemic rather than an individual.

I'm not going to totally discount The Encounter yet. I think I'll give them a visit in a month or two and see how they are doing. Until then, the preferred alternative is The Portal Comics and Gaming. If the Encounter doesn't shape up The Portal may end up being my go to place for geeky games.

For those of us who are unfortunate enough to have to use Windows Vista for work this may be useful. One feature that is nice in Vista is that it can automagically group similar windows into a single spot on your taskbar. I don't know the exact number where it actually start grouping but it seems to be somewhere around 5 or 6 by default. For me this caused more clutter on the taskbar then I wanted. I wanted it to start grouping at around 3. Unfortunately this isn't as easy as it should be and requires a quick registry edit.

Here's how I did it:

1. Run Regedit.exe
2. In regedit navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
3. Create a new DWORD key called TaskbarGroupSize
4. Assigned TaskbarGroupSize the value that you want it to start grouping at.

It seemed to not work at first when I did it but logging off and back in worked to have it re-read the registry settings.

I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. As I usually do I went and started experimenting which usually gets me into trouble. This time I was turning settings on for Compiz to see what they do. Let's just say my laptop doesn't like the blur option at all. My screen was totally useless and blank except for the window borders. I thought, "Hey! No biggie, I'll just find the Compiz config file and turn of blur in there!" That was when I discovered that Compiz was putting it's settings in gconf rather then a text file. The problem being that I know zero about gconf and even less on how to edit it from a command line.

So, the situation was my laptop w/o a usable GUI and me not knowing how to fix it. From running Slackware on my main system I'm used to everything being in a nice, easy (usually) to edit config file. I did find some info on editing gconf at the command line but those didn't work easily so I gave up on them.

I don't want to belabor the point here but the long and short of it is that I installed something called Compiz-Switch and had to fly blind and click where I remembered the terminal icon to be on my desktop and blindly run compiz-switch to turn off Compiz so I could get to the GUI and turn of blur.

That was sort of a PITA to deal with and would have been fixed in about 2 seconds had the config been stored in a flat file. Maybe I'm missing something about the advantages of gconf but I much prefer flat config files. Maybe someone can fill me in on the advantages?

Compiz does have an option to change where it stores it's config settings. In the advanced options of the Compiz Configuration Manager just choose "Flat File" for where to store it and it will then put the settings in ~/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini which can be easily editing with any text editor.

I just had an unusual experience in customer support from a technology company. The reason it's unusual is that I am actually satisfied so far. My Nintendo DS Lite's R button has decided to stop working so I called support up. They are sending a new DS advanced replacement style with the only cost to me being $5 for shipping as long as I return the busted DS on time. There were no arguments or extra troubleshooting. They simply took me on my word that the button doesn't work (which is the truth).

I guess I'm just so used to the crap I get from HP/Dell/Microsoft support that when it happens as it should it's ranked as "unusual".

Well, I finally gave in and joined Facebook. I've been resistant to nearly all forms of social networking because they generally seemed stupid but I guess I was at least partially wrong. I am a member of Linkedin but that is with the purpose of keeping professional contacts in the event that I need to look for employment. I never saw what else I could get out of social networks until now.

It's kind of amazing how many people came out of the woodwork that I lost contact with. It's kind of cool.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday it was "despicable" for AIG to send its executives on a $440,000 retreat at the posh St. Regis resort, south of Los Angeles, days after getting federal bailout assistance.

I'm not really all that surprised that something like this happened. At the very least the White House is making noise that they are highly displeased AIG did this. Hopefully they will put some bite behind the words and demand that AIG return the frivolously spent cash. Call me a pessimist but I have little faith that will happen.

A small part of me wants to say that $440,00 isn't that much out of the $85 bailout loan. Still, it's the principle of the matter. They got the tax payers money (read that as our money) to help them out of bankruptcy and supposedly help avoid a larger economic crisis. Not to play in a fancy resort.

A short post after ages of blog neglect.

After watching the VP Debate last night I have to say Palin did a better job in the debate forum than I thought she would having seen her previous performances in the media. Of course, my expectations were so low that just the simple fact that she was able to form complete sentences made it look good. Even though the debate went better for her I think she is in way over her head.

Biden of course handled himself well. He's been in the Federal government for years so he knows how to handle himself. Even so there have been things I've heard on him that don't get me totally excited either.

To avoid going into along post making me look up sources and check my accuracy I'm just going to say neither of the VP candidates gets me excited. Palin down right scares me and Biden has made choices in the past that I don't agree with. Between the two I'd have to go for Biden, not because I like him but because he is truly the lesser of two evils.

Recently on HPR Episode 85, deepgeek spoke about a pretty cool backup utility called faubackup. Up until I heard of this little utility I had been running a script with a string of tar commands which worked sufficiently but seemed somewhat limited. I wanted to keep several copies of the backup to keep a history in case I needed to go back farther than just the last couple of backup. This meant I needed gobs more space than I had, and that I had to write a script to rotate around the actual tar files. I had this working sort of but never felt like I could just stick it in cron and let it do it's thing. Thus my backups were being run only every so often which is just asking for trouble. Months old backups are just a tad better than no backups at all. Faubackup so far seems to be picking up the slack in my horrible scripting skills quite nicely.

Faubackup is just an apt-get away in (k)ubuntu but in Slackware I had to build a slackbuild script. For some reason the standard ./configure && make && make install didn't put all the files in where they needed to be. The default /etc/faubackup.conf file is pretty good. The only change I made was to change the default location of where backups should be put. The default number of backups it keeps are 2 yearly backups, 12 monthly backups, 4 weekly backups, and 7 daily backups. Initially this seems like it would take a huge amount of space but the cool thing about faubackup (and other similar file backup solutions I'm sure) is that it will hardlink to the original file rather than making a new copy if it hasn't changed. This saves tons of hard drive space.

Since it's a command line utility it's easy to automate via cron. I just put a script with the faubackup commands in it that I want and call that from roots crontab. To make this all a better backup solution I should really periodically tar up one of the backups made by faubackup and store it on tape or DVD somewhere off site.

One last thing faubackup can do is remote backups via rsh or ssh. To do this you have to install faubackup on both the system being backed up and the system doing the backup. To do the backup via ssh just changed the rsh in the conf file to ssh. The only thing with this is you have to provide a password every time you run the remote backup unless you setup ssh keys with out a pass phrase which is a potential security risk.

So far I like faubackup. You should check it out.

The new battery came in today for my iAudio M5. Replacing original should be super easy for anyone who feels comfortable with a soldering iron. I was thinking of putting together a series of pictures of the replacement steps to post but being that my digital camera is dead that won't be possible. Besides, someone already did it for the X5 which is physically identical to the M5 anyway.

In short these are the steps.

1. Take the 4 screws out of the back and take the back plate off. The screws are really tiny so be careful not to loose them.
2. Carefully remove the bit of tape at the top holding the wires down.
3. Gently move the wires out of the way and pull out the data cable to the hard drive at the top of the player near the circuit board just under where you took the tape off. You have to lift the top of the drive out a bit to be able to pull the cable. One the data cable it out the drive will just slide out.
4. The out the black rubber gasket thingy under the drive. This just sits there and isn't attached to anything or at least it wasn't in my player. The battery is under the gasket. In my case it was a green flat block with two wires, one red and one black.
5. Use your soldering iron to carefully desolder the wires battery wires from the board. It's small in there so watch you don't touch anything else with the iron and damage it. Make a note of what color wire is where so you can put them in the right place with the new battery.
6. Solder the new battery in place.
7. Put it all back together in reverse and test it.

And that was that. This is was worked for me so YMMV. Oh...If you kill your player doing what I did then it's not my fault.