You're not rich!!!!

Unless you are, then you really really are. Im sorry but if you make more than 250K a year you are part of the upper echelon. Tim Noah at Slate wrote a 10 part series and this follow up on the subject of income and wealth disparity in the US. (http://www.slate.com/id/2268872/ )

In particular his latest article confirmed what I suspected: no one knows just how rich the rich and by extension poor they are.










So if you are getting fed up with it I have a poorly xeroxed socialist newsletter for you.

Clone Amarok (1.2 of course) on OSX

Above is a screen shot of thje windows I have cobbled together to simulate the music listening experience of Amarok 1.2. Upper Left is of course the iTunes Window. It is on top of the album art viewer window also a part of itunes. That covers the boring bit of the Last.Fm application which loads artist info. Finally i have the tunesTEXT widget to retrieve and display lyrics.

To get the widget to stay on your desktop you have to put the Dashboard in developer mode. Which is done with the terminal.

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

type that in terminal and you can drag widgets out from your dashboard to your desktop. just click and holding the widget while you press f12.

You can customize how itunes displays your track listing of course or ditch it altogether and use the visualizer instead of the Album art window. Here is an example using the iVisulize plugin.



PS. By the way if you use two monitors you may not be able to get visualizations to start on the secondary display. This happens to me when their default setting is full screen. I have to start the visualizer with the iTunes window on the primary display (it has the Apple Menu Bar) and then escaping from full screen. Once the visualizer is windowed you can move itunes back to the secondary display.

Kentucky Go-Fast

I spent some money on my car this spring. I broke a bolt on my car taking the resonator off my intake, so I bought some flexible intake duct ($15) and created a cold air intake for my car. It already has a K&N filter in the stock airbox. Later I was on craigslist and some one was selling some wheels. They came off a 98 neon l that had been sitting in his garage since 2006 when he tore the transmission out of it. They fit both my hubs and the exisiting tires on the car so i bought them for $35 per wheel. They are 5 spoke borbet wheels that are 15x7, the exisitng tires are 205/60 Nokian i3. Another $100 in mounting balancing and lug nuts resulted in this:






The air intake sits behind that black inlet in the bumper. The wheels increased the track width such that the tires are flush with the fenders at the top of the arch where before there were flush with the fenders at the bottom of the arch.




The air intake made the car louder, and resulted in a increase in mileage 30 mpg over my previous 28 mpg.

Halfway there

The Recovery Website reported new numbers on April 30th, an uptick in spending means the alloted money is now half spent.

itunes 9.1 ipod wont sync fix

I have a second generation Ipod, and after updating to itunes 9.1 it would not sync without timing out, or crashing itunes. There were several file in use errors. To rectify this follow these steps:

OPen Itunes and goto Preferences->Devices

Check Prevent Syncing Automatically

Plug in your iPod.

Deselect any dynamic playlists.

Hit Apply

That worked for me and i hope it works for you

Recovery Act Spending One Year Out

Its been a while since I checked the recovery act website the most current spending totals there were updated march 5th toaling 291 billion.

Interpolating over the period when I last checked and the current reported total 63% of the allocated funds have yet to be spent. A linear interpolation also shows a slow down in the money spent per month but the spending probably is not linear. For example the Holidays would makes December/January slow months.

According to their timeline accounting work for the period of november thru february is due soon which may alter the totals. If anyone has a place on the web with more detail on the month to month spending let me know in a comment.

Its whacking day

Jules Vernes, to borrow a joke, predicted the stately walnut paneled submarines we all travel in today. If his reputation were examined with scrutiny it would pale in comparison to the prescient powers of the collected wisdom of the Simpsons writers.

The florida everglades are wrought with Pythons. The proposed solution is whacking day.

There is a slideshow article about the proposal at the daily beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-26/the-giant-python-hunt/

Helping Haiti with Credit Card Points

One of the charities acting in Haiti i am familar with is Zamni Lasante ( Partners in Health ) founded by Paul Farmer. He came to speak at at VT.

http://www.pih.org/where/Haiti/Haiti.html

If you have capital one rewards you can use the site

https://www.capitalone.com/give/faq/

to donate to PIH as well as other charities.

Both cash and reward points can be redeemed.

Recent Wins

Number 1:

On a local trash night a few friends and I discovered a air hockey table. Realistically who needs an air hockey table so we didn't pick it up. One of my friends was wise enough to go back and grab the AC fan off of it. I took the fan, splice a dimmer switch in, attached onto a caterer's style coffee box and ran a piece of channel out the other side. The results is a pretty decent laptop cooling stand. With the voltage cranked down the fan is quiet buts its large enough to move a fair bit of air under the laptop. Placing a re-freezable ice pack in the coffee box help the fan cool my laptop cpu 10 degrees celsius in both normal uses and under load while compiling.

Number 2:

My Check Engine Light came on while I was driving out of town over the break. I pulled into an Autozone (or Advanced) and had them read the code. It was p0065 which on my Subaru correlates to a malfunction in the "Valve assembly-air assist injector solenoid". After some googling I decided I could fix it myself. It was easy to get at, held on by two bolts and from what I read probably only required cleaning.

I disconnected the battery ground, unplugged the electrical connector to the solenoid, unbolted it and wiggled it free from its hoses. Blowing through both hoses demonstrated they were unobstructed. Finally I shot the valve with some carburetor cleaning spray and a whole bunch of nasty black deposits came out.

I hooked all back up and started the car and the CEL was off. I thought I would have to have my oil change mechanic clear it next time i went in but the battery was disconnected long enough for the memory on the ECU to reset. So far the thing hasn't thrown a code so I think the cleaning did the trick.