Here are some more Stargazer’s World Posts I wrote.
More Stargazer’s World Posts
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Category Archives: Tech
Some Posts I Wrote For DiceMonkey.net
I was pretty proud of myself when a few of my write ups where accepted over at Dice Monkey’s website. Enjoy
What’s in Spock’s scanner
I found this video of “What’s in Spock’s scanner” while watching a review of a Tricorder app for the Android on Youtube. I could not stop laughing. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.
Mortal Kombat 9
Last Tuesday I downloaded the Mortal Kombat 9 demo for PS3. I was a fan of the first to Mortal Kombat fighting games, but since then it seemed with every of the game got further and further away from what made the game so popular when it first game out.
With Mortal Kombat 9, which is being called just Mortal Kombat, the people behind the game are finally going back to what made the game so popular when it originally came out. The over the top blood and violence.
The trailer above does not include actual game play but shows off the fact that Kratos from Gods of War is a playable character in the new game.
The demo comes with four playable characters. Scorpion, Johnny Cage, Mileena, and Sub-Zero. I have beaten the demo using all the characters. I have to say that this game really has restored my faith in the Mortal Kombat franchise. I would say this version of Mortal Kombat is one of my all time favorit fighting games second only to Dead or Alive.
I collected the fatality codes for the for playable characters below.
Scorpion – Forward, Down, Forward, Triangle
Johnny Cage – Forward, Forward, Back, Down, X
Mileena – Back, Forward, Back, Forward, Triangle
Sub-Zero – Back, Forward, Down, Forward, Circle
Bob Iger Interview
Bob Iger is the current CEO of The Walt Disney Company. This guy is someone who caught my attention early on when he started working as CEO for Disney because he gave an interview in TIME magazine, I believe ( I still have the interview clipping) where he talked about his normal work day and how he manage to get things done. Little tips and tricks he shared with the Magazine. Things like how to make sure he had enough time to just get work processed that was sitting on his desk. How to properly thank people and to use history as a key to master the future. I guess you could say he is someone I respect and find inspiration in.
The other day I saw this video posted on hulu. I have no Idea how long the video will be available, but I wanted to share with anyone who is interested.
Power Outage
Last night around 9:30 when I should have been in bed, but was instead up watching a movie with Hannah on my Media Center, the power went out. We only pay some of the highest rates in the country for electricity so it stans to reason that it would go out ALL THE TIME. The two of us got up from the couch and lit some candles and got a flash light. Looking out the window I could see that the whole Juneau valley -with exception to the airport- was with out power.
Even without power I was still upbeat. As soon as the power went out I heard the beeping of my APC UPS that power my Qnap NAS going off every 15 seconds. “Is that thing going to be alright”. Hannah asked.
“Yeah. The NAS should power it’s self down in two minutes if power is not restored”.
“Oh, cool”. she said.
Qnap NAS
Sure enough at the two minute mark I heard the shut down signal of the Qnap Nas. Moments later it was off. Things like that make me smile. When things just work as they are supposed to.
After that Hannah and I crawled into bed and as most nights I proceeded to read to her. I no sooner got myself situated in bed when the power came back on.
Update from KINY News: Unknown cause spurs area wide outage
The city and borough suffered an area wide power outage last night.
Gail Wood of Alaska Electric Light and Power says the lights went out at about 9:45 with power restored around 11 p.m.
Wood says the outage location has been identified as the East Terminal where the lines transmit into the submarine cable that crosses Taku Inlet. A crew will go to the area at first light to investigate.
Wood says the outage lasted about an hour and a half for those who had power restored last.
In the meantime, AEL&P is running off backup diesel generators, and power from the Annex Creek and Salmon Creek hydro projects.
Update 2 [12:32pm]: Utility crew can’t pinpoint cause of area wide power outage
The city and borough suffered an area wide power outage last night.
Gail Wood of Alaska Electric Light and Power says the lights went out at about 9:45 with power restored around 11 p.m.
Wood says the outage location has been identified as the East Terminal where the lines transmit into the submarine cable that crosses Taku Inlet.
A crew went to the area this morning to investigate, but could not locate the cause of the problem.
AEL&P rann the system with backup diesel generators, and power from the Annex Creek and Salmon Creek hydro projects following the problem. The system was scheduled to be back on full hydro by mid-day today, according to Wood.
She says the outage lasted about an hour and a half for those who had power restored last
Conan O’Brien’s iPad 2 Spoof
I saw this and could not help but laugh.
I updated my Twitter name today. Rather than being @nicap, I am now @YousephTanha.
I was a little worried about making this change. I thought I might have to contact the people on my friends list and let them know they needed to update their contact information about me. That has turned out not to be the case. When I updated my name from @nicap to @YousephTanha, it seems twitter updated everything associated with @nicap on the backend. The result is that no one had to do a thing. The contact information just updated across the board for everyone. Pretty cool functionality. Thanks Twitter!
I also added a twitter widget to my sidebar on the right.
Mac Mini Media Center Project (Part 4)
One big reason behind wanting to do this media center project was to reduce clutter. Having nearly five hundred DVDs take up a bit of space. Since I was going to be encoding all my DVD movies and TV shows and storing them digitally; what was I going to do with all the original DVD disks? I wanted to keep them. I knew that much. I just needed to come up with a better way to store them. I finally settled on a high capacity DVD Album.
DVD ORGANIZATION.
Thanks to some help from a friend I was pointed to Meritline.com. An online store where I could purchase a cheap 520 Capacity DVD Album. The DVD Album looked sturdy, so I ordered two of them. A lot of the DVDs I owned where spechal additions that contained two disks. I also know that my original count was off as to how many DVDs I owned because of the TV shows I had collected. I figured two of the 520 capacity DVD albums could hold 1040 DVDs. I not only would have enough from for my existing DVDs, but I would have plenty of room for growth in the future.
The DVD albums shipped and arrived in Juneau in less than a week. Once they got here I proceeded to take the pile of DVDs I had already encoded and start inserting them into the DVD album. When I was done I had freed up a lot of space that the DVDs where taking up and I did not hesitate to throw out the DVD cases they where in. I bought these DVDs for the movies on them and not for the cases they came in.
I have yet to quite fill up one whole album with DVDs. I am close though. I still have plenty of movies and TV shows to encode. When The first case is full I plan to store it under my bed.
DIGITAL FILE ORGANIZATION
As I encode movies on my Mac Mini I transfer them over to my Qnap Nas. I set up an alphabetical file structor inside two main categories (‘Movies’ and ‘TV Shows’) to save my encoded movies in.
Sometimes a movie that is encoded with Handbrake needs to be renamed. For whatever reason the file name is often wrong. It is important to make sure you name the encoded movie correctly because it will cut down on time you might have to spend on finding the correct movie meta data for which ever media center software you end up using.
(I will be talking more about media center software in a future post)
I would say that since I started this project I have encoded a little less than half the movie I own. This is a long process, but I can already see how it is going to pay off when I am done.
To Be Continued…
Some More Posts I Wrote For Stargazer’s World
Here is another list of posts I have recently written for Stargazer’s World.
- Guillotine
- Free Stuff Friday: Mad Irishman Productions
- Free Stuff Friday: DinoPirates of Ninja Island
- Death & Traps
- Free Stuff Friday: DC Adventures Hero’s Handbook Errata
- Pandemic
- Zombies!!!
- Free Stuff Friday: Mutants & Masterminds Character Sheets
- Free Stuff Friday: Oldschool Hack
- Free Stuff Friday: Saturday Night Delves #1: Revenge of the Iron Lich