YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

The stylish yo-yo power adapter that accompanied the old G3 powerbook I acquired off ebay broke. It was obviously heavily used before I got it but the fault lies with the lousy mechanical design. When the wire is retracted into the yo-yo housing, the plug head is under tension. That might be okay, except that the strain-relief on the head is flexible and does not anchor the wire which moves within its soft, translucent plastic insulation. Eventually, the flexing of the wires fatigues them and they short- rather spectacularly, too. I saw a bright blue spark when I moved the cord and noticed that the wire was a little charred inside. That’s bad.

I’ve replaced it with a traditional black brick power adapter made by Samsung. It’s not fancy or good-looking but it has an extended strain-relief moulding where the wires attach to the plug. Given that one doesn’t yank on the plug or keep tension on it when retracted like the yo-yo design, it should last a good while. At $25 plus shipping off ebay, I’m unconcerned if I need a replacement in a few years.

I may make an attempt to fix the yo-yo adapter. I plan to cut the head off the wire and solder on a standard 3.5mm stereo jack. These go for about $0.68 from electronics supply houses. The barrel shield, which I’ll ignore, is just there to prevent someone from plugging the 24VDC adapter into a piece of audio equipment.

Remember my comments on blog spam and that I applied a simple CAPTCHA to stop the automated abuse? At the time I remarked that it would stop a bot but not the average turnip-head. It looks like I’ve underestimated the number of turnip-heads out on the Internet and the determination of these cretins to make links. Canada and Bulgaria are unusually represented in the IP addresses of the postings. I delete the irrelevant messages as they appear but I’m contemplating a userid/password registration scheme to thwart crap comments. That would ruin what little- and there is very little- interactivity exists on this site but would also free me of having to clean up.

A bit late getting to this…

This past Sunday our friend Gary invited us to see a play developed by his brother and the fluid circle of members that compose the National Theater of the United States. Occupying an industrial space in DUMBO called The Nest, they presented What’s that on my head!?!. I can only describe the performance as an Absurdist survey of moments in U.S. history against a backdrop theme of an eternal game show. Some of it was dissonant, other parts emotionally affective, some was funny and some of it, frankly, I just didn’t get but neither did I mind. Particularly interesting was the interactive use of the space- wheeling the entire audience on fixed seats on a platform through the scenes- and the incorporation of genuine first person historical accounts into the dialogue. The wacky conclusion in a war room reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove with a break away to the repetitive bars of a torch song was both derivative and inspired.

Thanks to NEDoD I’ve shot most of an afternoon. Please don’t send any more links to The Best of Craig’s List. I weaned myself off it a while ago but now that I’ve once again tasted the C.L. juice I’m going to end up going back and pissing away more time. I somehow managed to tear myself away from the bizarre overwrought MC stories, vicious commentary and self-concious posturing long enough this morning to go for a jog and clean the apartment but I can’t resist reading this crap. Figure in the Saturday morning time already spent on Slashdot and Memepool and I killed half a day. I hate you.

This evening I had three crashes with Mozilla Firebird 0.7.1 on OSX in the span of two hours. That gets annoying fast. I ran the Software Update and picked up the latest Safari. I still hate it. It’s improved and I still irrationally hate it. Hoping I might get lucky, I went to the Mozilla site and oooooh, shiny new release of Firefox (formerly Firebird, formerly Phoenix, whatever the Mozilla browser based on the Gecko engine is called today). What the hell, I said to myself, and installed it. Nice. No crashing. Try a couple of sites that were tying Firebird in knots, render okay. All my favorite extensions still work. Really nice. I’ll give it another day or two but so far it looks like an improvement.