Brighter Fusion Blog

Today I got on the bike and rode for hours around Boulder, just exploring the streets and paths like a kid. Awesome.

And his love letter to the town:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/04/the_leisure_of_the_theory_clas.html

Welcome back, Roger. You were missed, and in our thoughts.

Now, how do I buy that Rice Cooker book? Is it out yet? I’m still in the first few weeks of a happy relationship with a Zojirushi which plays “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” every time I start cooking my oatmeal.

With “updated” hairstyles.

At least Gene looks relatively normal.

Here’s a preview!

Courtesy of Nordstrom’s email list.

Here’s the YouTube clip that Jon was sourcing:

Philip Glenister says the second season of A2A will begin next month.

Interesting article/teaser at the Life of Wylie blog.

BBC America will be airing both seasons back-to-back, albeit in neutered form.

(BBC America has chosen to clean up his juicily phrased, almost poetically off-color outbursts.)

Pooh. They’re making the retro-racist, homophobic, misogynistic, fat, drunk, fascist dinosaur into a politically correct (and anachronistic and literarily inappropriate) shadow of himself? Where’s the entertainment in that? I love this country, and I love Barack Obama, but can I just say that Americans are stoopid?

Make that American TV execs.

Since we’re on the subject of ambiguously gay tough guys, enjoy this fanvid of Casey from CHUCK. The longer that show goes, the lamer it gets, but the brighter Adam Baldwin shines in it. Very, very shiny!

Like many of you out there, I enjoy a hot beverage close at hand when I’m working on the computer. (Specifically, I like a stainless steel carafe of ginger tea brewing, but that detail isn’t too important.)

I’ve spent a bit of time shopping around for an alternative to the 1960s Salton “Hotray” that I had been using. It was big enough to fit my carafe and mug together, and it worked great, but I felt bad burning up that much juice for hours on end when a smaller, round hot plate of less than half the surface area would have been just fine.

So, first off, I tried a normal mug warmer (Rival brand) which plugs into the wall. I didn’t even bother with the USB powered ones, which run from 20 to 30 watts, hardly enough power to read by. The ordinary mug warmers go from 30 to 60 watts, depending on the model, but I couldn’t get any decent heat out of even the top of that range.

Next, I bought a Bunn decanter warmer from Amazon, 85 watts, which has great reviews. Although it had a bigger footprint than I would have preferred, I was excited to get a product that was reported to be effective. Unfortunately, even after 45 minutes, it only seemed to achieve a temperature just short of potability (which surprisingly enough, turns out to be the #1 most disgusting temperature). Actual consumption was average 60 watts. It also gave off a terrible burning plastic stink that made me ill. So back it went.

I was about to give up and return to my Hotray (120 watts) when I stumbled across this blog entry relating to Asian travel cookers. The Sanyo Multivolt Travel Cooker RN-38 NF (purportedly “easy to tourists in hotel rooms” and “useful to tired to eat supper and when making local and rice or noodles”) has plenty of juice (runs at 360 watts on US current) but lacks a knob to control the temp. It’s also pricey and hard to find in the US, and if you look at the measurements, it’s not as small as the cute picture would suggest. The square burner is 5 inches across (128 mm) and it weighs 1050 grams. I don’t know why anybody would think it was appropriate for light travel. I didn’t buy one.

Finally, I stumbled upon the World’s Greatest Mug Warmer on an eBay hot plate search. The Thermolyne HP2305B, also referenced in places as simply the 2300 series, is a 3.5 inch diameter laboratory burner with a knob and a max draw of 325 watts. In a flat-bottomed metal container, I can achieve boiling at the halfway mark. In a stoneware mug which has very poor contact from the bottom of the mug to the hot plate, I can do it at full power.

That pic is almost life size!

This thing weighs about a pound and a half (~700 grams), including the long, heavy duty power cord, which incidentally makes it a nice choice for travel cooking (though not outside 120V regions). I bought mine lightly used on eBay for $65.

For safety, I have it plugged into a lighted rocker switch, so I won’t have to worry about the knob getting bumped when it’s supposed to be off.

It’s tiny, it’s hot, it’s adjustable, and it’s rockin’ that Bunsen Honeydew style. It’s the World’s Greatest Mug Warmer.

if I went in for that kind of thing. It seems like old friends, flames, and crushes are coming out of the woodwork for me and people close to me, all in the last couple days.

I’m happy that a guy who used to be my friend (or something like that) finally came out on the ‘net. He’s fat and happy and the perfect dad, just like I knew he would be. I’m so relieved to know he’s safe and sound, and he looks like he got it right.

Plus, how nice is he to put pics of himself up from back when I knew him? I haven’t seen him in around 12 years, but OMG! No wonder he scrambled my brain. I’d like to show you, but I guess that would probably be pretty invasive of his privacy, so I won’t.

I wonder whatever happened to the guy who used to play with the Christians and had zero electric cats?

This is a FABULOUS idea! I just read a reference to it in my newly arrived issue of ReadyMade magazine.

http://www.airbedandbreakfast.com

I will say right now that as soon as I get a neat and tidy household with a guest bedroom available, I’ll be signing up for that.

Make $50 to $100 extra income PER NIGHT for hosting a guest!

Hi again!

So, you bought a new Vista Home Premium notebook and just tried Remote Desktoping into your old XP Pro SP3 notebook. What? It didn’t work? Are you sure?

Well, no worries. Just try some of these quick ‘n’ easy fixes:

Let’s start by firing up the Remote Desktop program on Vista and pulling down the Computer field — “Browse for more.” Hey, there’s your WORKGROUP work group! Great!

It says the workgroup does not contain any terminal servers.

Yeah, that would be because the default workgroup name for XP is “MSHOME”. Go rename the workgroup on the XP machine to WORKGROUP. Reboot, of course. You’ve got nothing better going on anyway.

Now let’s go back to Vista to make sure it sees the XP machine on the same workgroup. Not there? Maybe that’s because Vista uses a newfangled protocol — Link Layer Topology Discovery or LLTD — to determine who else is on the local network. The problem is only other Vista machines send out that kind of signal.

Not to worry! There’s a patch for XP. Go ahead and try it. Oh, it won’t install? That’s because that patch is for SP2 only. LLTD is already built into SP3…officially.

What? They forgot to include it in there? Then you’re going to need the rumored sixth version of the patch, but Windows doesn’t give that out to just anybody. You have to write them a nice letter asking for it. Or go get it from this guy.

Now try it again. What, it’s still not in there? That’s because XP doesn’t normally advertise that it’s a terminal service. You need to go into the registry and change the value of the TSAdvertise DWORD from 0 to 1. Rebooting again isn’t going to kill you.

Next up, force Vista to stop using it’s newer encryption methods in order to let it talk to older devices on the local net (including Network Attached Storage disks). Try opening the Security Policies editor (secpol.msc) to change the setting. Oh wait! Secpol.msc doesn’t exist on Vista Home Premium, only all the other versions of Vista. Psych! Set LmCompatibilityLevel to 1 in the registry, then.

This would be a good time to deactivate IPv6 and enable network sharing and discovery. Check your node type too.

Now let’s check that local network again. Try pinging XP from Vista. (Don’t forget that Windows Firewall blocks pings by default!)

Pinging times out or resource cannot be found? Turning on RD in the System Properties may have automatically reconfigured your Windows Firewall, so you now have Windows and third-party firewalls running concurrently, causing unpredictable side effects. Go shut off Windows Firewall again, and open up pinging in the third-party firewall.

Please tell me that you can see the XP machine name when you “Browse for more” in the RD client on Vista.

Great! With the simple preliminaries out of the way, let’s get to business.

XP has RDP turned off by default. To start up the host, go into the “Remote” tab under System Properties and hit the checkbox. Assign a user to have RDP access. Oh yeah, something you should know — you can only assign a user which has a password set, so if you need to, take a side trip into XP’s users control panel and set up a new user or add a password to an existing one.

Now you need to configure your firewall to let TCP Port 3389 through on the XP machine. Set up port forwarding as well on the router if you’ll be remoting in from outside your LAN.

So now if you’re lucky at all, it’s working, but when you connect it says that the other computer is unsafe and not to be trusted. Just ignore that and tell it to shut up. You’re golden.

I’m sorry, you wanted it work in the other direction too? Unfortunately, Vista Home Premium doesn’t support Remote Desktop as a host, only as a client, so run, don’t walk, to this page to give Microsoft $150 to upgrade. Or, you can hack that, and concurrent sessions too. Simply download that zip, go find a termsrv.dll file that actually works on 64-bit switch that one for the one that came in the zip, right click and run the premium.bat file as Administrator, click that .reg file, check your termmgr.dll version, and then run through everything in this post again from the top.

Satisfied? Great. If you’re happy, I’m happy. If you’re not happy, Microsoft is happy to recommend a MCSE certified professional who can help you out.

Now go to the rec center for God’s sake. You’ve been working on this stuff for two days straight!