I've had a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball for a couple of years, which is a piece of hardware I often gush about. Ergonomically, it's fantastic, not to mention programmable. Well, it got a little dented in transit from Spain, and the wrist rest has a growing crack in it... so I emailed support this morning (it has a 5 year warranty, although I don't have any of the paperwork on it) and got a response within six minutes: we just need your serial number and shipping address and we'll send a replacement. Not a replacement of the ball and wrist rest, mind you, of the whole thing.

Wow. It's on its way now. Go Kensington!

(the bonus here is that we can buy the $5.99 replacement ball and Chris can have an almost-like-new version!)

Well, after learning way more about spelunking through server logs than I really wanted to, iWeb finally agrees that the server-crashy problems I've been having as of late are actually hardware (as do ZOP/Spaz/people who know more about these things than I do). The good news is that I was planning on upgrading my server in the very near future, since the dedicated plan I'm on has improved significantly in the year and a half since I got the server, so I can get an upgrade to a shiny new box by renewing my contract. Kinda like cell carriers and hardware upgrades, eh?

So, expect some downtime which will probably not go as smoothly as I'd like, but ultimately needs to be done. Should be within the next few days. Hopefully well before Barcelona...

Speaking of cell phones, I'm so bloody annoyed by artificial limitations. My dream phone/PDA actually exists, yet is held back by the fact that it has the Euro 3G band instead of North America. I should just move to Europe :P

Okay, so my Linux knowledge has skyrocketed in the past week.

I now have Motion (most annoying software name to google for ever) running on a repurposed Dell Dimension 8200. By the way, if anyone has any RAM for one of these kicking around, you're sitting on a gold mine. I wanted to pick up 2x512s for it and it uses some bloody obscure and expensive RDRAM. At least it is significantly quieter than the box I have running the cams now. On which webcamXP hangs often.

Anyway. Motion is like the swiss army knife of webcams. I am SO excited that I can finally have something stable that does what I want it to. I've ditched the last two USB cameras I was relying on and have all network cameras now. But yeah, going from Windows to a command-line-only Linux program where you have to roll your own FTPing? Small learning curve.

And... dun dun dun... wrote my first shell script! Well, with a little help :) It's rather nice to be surrounded by Linux-y friends.

The most exciting news is that it actually does motion detection. So the cams are only updating when there's activity on a particular cam. It can also write events to a mysql db, so I will be able to use this for much more advanced tracking and home automation. It also creates timelapse videos at any interval. Have I mentioned how much I love Motion? I'm serving up the currently live camera at about 1FPS over Apache, and the others are FTPed (if changed) to the webserver at a more reasonable interval.

Gotta actually mount the new cams, tweak a couple of scripts, and the new (much more stable) system should be up in a few days on stephthegeek.tv!

PS. Anyone tried LinuxMCE? I watched the demo video and I'm totally in love. It even uses Motion itself for the automation stuff. And supports ZWave.

Welllll a long tangent tonight started with looking for my CD of album recordings without vocals as requested by Jay to include in the CamGirls documentary (by god they actually got an editor a couple of weeks ago -- updates in the blog there).  Which I still haven't found yet.

Which DID lead me to discover my grade nine CD-ROM yearbook (yep, that's 1998 folks).  Which, as you can imagine, led onto a massive tangent giggling at old photos (good lord Meagan, you really haven't changed much in a decade... well, except for the boobs... and your group with Martine!  And the squish-in-a-bug contest!  And Grease!  And old boyfriends!  And and... is that Candice in a Xena costume??) and hunting down people online.  I think that needs to be a post of its own.  Lurid stories and huge crushes and reminiscing, oh my.  In my photo I'm even wearing what I still call my favourite shirt to this day!

Which then led to looking for more album stuff, and remembering to check CDBaby, and discovering I have over $100 sitting in there that I hadn't cashed out.  Woohoo!

It's nifty to see my album's digital sales stats:

 

Anthem for the Perverted has the highest number of sales.  Pervs  ;) 

Oh and we spent five hours (!!) today re-running cables, including our new 5' power strip and big, sexy UPS.

 

The back of my desktop area now.  I swear it looked a lot worse before.

And Spaz, proving once again that he is my web god and I must one day clone and steal him, is writing a wonderful picture rotating script that will clinch my victory for having all the pieces necessary for a harmonious Flickr/Gallery/StephTheGeek.com integration for images.  I guess now I just have to implement it.  Pesky details.  Go admire his large DVD collection.

Psst, Marg:

 

Leela case