John Lamansky

15 seconds left in 2007…

Ten…

3… 2… 1…

Happy New Year!!

OK, time for bed.

Longtime readers may know that in my bio in the sidebar I used to say that I “hope to start a podcast or two someday.” Well, that “someday” is here! I have a few podcast projects I’ve been working on lately that I’d like to share with you: the Catholic Geek Podcast and the Tech News Podcast.

Okay, so this first one isn’t “new” because I’ve been running it for some time. However, I’m just now starting to promote it now that I feel it is of high enough quality. It’s my personal podcast known as the Catholic Geek Podcast, with the subtitle “An Eclectic Podcast by a Catholic Teenage Programmer.”

Of course, when I said “high enough quality” in the above paragraph, I didn’t mean top-notch quality, but high enough to the point that it isn’t a pain to listen to (except for the first three episodes; those weren’t very good). In my opinion it isn’t as high-quality as this blog; I’m good at writing, but I don’t have a very good radio voice (I’m hoping it’ll come with practice).

Although this blog has my name as its title, it seems that the podcast is the more personal of the two; I suppose it’s the nature of the podcasting medium.

The second podcast just started; it’s so new, in fact, that there’s only one episode up (ooh, aah). It’s called the Tech News Podcast, and I co-host it along with a friend of mine named Paul. What makes it particularly interesting, in my opinion, is that I’m a Windows person, and Paul happens to be a Mac person. And as many of you may know, when you mix together Windows and Mac people you’ll get quite interesting results indeed.

The first episode went quite well. (Well, the first public episode, that is. We tried another episode some time ago but didn’t publish it because of audio quality issues.) Here’s the shownotes for episode one:

In the premiere episode, John and Paul discuss Microsoft’s Zune player vs. the iPod, Mac security vs. Windows security, Firefox vs. Internet Explorer 7, Firefox add-ons, webcams that track your sleep patterns, phishing as a job, paper-based storage systems, and Wingdings codes.

Anyone interested in technology is probably drooling by now. I mean, who can resist a podcast about Wingdings codes? Joking aside, I highly recommend that you check it out. We’re planning to do episode 2 tomorrow; I’ll let you know when that’s up.

And as a side note, I’d also recommend you check out Paul’s blog. Paul and I are alike in many areas (except operating system allegiance), so if you like my blog, you’ll probably like his too (though Paul tends to talk more about politics whereas I tend to talk more about technology).

Please let me know what you think of the Catholic Geek Podcast, and please let Paul and me know what you think about the Tech News Podcast. We’d love to hear your feedback!

Yep, it happened. Much to my dismay, however, I was not present at the time (I was out helping some of my trick-or-treating younger siblings, who were in saint costumes, of course). This happened just a few minutes after we left.

So earlier this evening, our doorbell rang. Hmm. My mom opened the door, and lo and behold, there was a trick-or-treating boy, who happened to be on the local T-ball team this last summer along with two of my siblings.

As usual, our porch light was not on on Halloween (in our town, having your light on means you’re accepting trick-or-treaters). So my mom, not really knowing what to do, explained to him that only those houses with illuminated porch lights were offering candy. In sharp contrast to the rudeness of last year’s uninvited trick-or-treaters, he was very sweet about it; he said “okay,” and walked away.

A short while later my mom discovered the culprit: our garage light had turned on when the van, occupied by my dad, two of my siblings, and myself, pulled out of the driveway several minutes earlier.

First it was the paperboy, now the van. Ugh, those bothersome motion-sensitive lights!

Long-time readers will probably recall the post that I wrote on October 31, 2005 titled Uninvited Trick-or-Treaters concerning something that happened about 365 days and 10 minutes ago. This evening I’ve been keeping an eye out sequel material (The Return of the Uninvited Trick-or-Treaters!), but nothing so far yet.

When I wrote that post last year it was suggested to me that I “put it to tape,” that is, make a podcast about it. Hmm… I might just do that. I’ll see if I have time to do it later tonight.

On Wednesday, October 11, 2006, my maternal step-grandpa unexpectedly passed away while in the hospital for a chest cavity infection. It was a peaceful death, and it was time for him to go home; he had been through a lot. Please keep my grandpa’s soul and his family (especially my grandma) in your prayers.

(P.S. This is one of the reasons I haven’t been posting recently. So no, in case you’re wondering, this blog isn’t going to be another victim of “blog burnout,” if I can help it ; there have just been a lot of things going on around here lately. Thanks for staying subscribed! I hope to get back into routine posting soon.)

Tonight my computer froze. Windows itself was locked up. That, like, almost never happens.

But even more unusually, after several seconds of being locked up, suddenly a shrill tone came out of my Dell Dimension 8400 computer tower. It sounded like a prolonged BIOS beep. I turned off the computer right away. And then decided to turn it back on to see if it would boot successfully.

It booted up just fine, thankfully. I did some online research and I found an article that said the following:

Executives at Creative Technology Ltd. said they believe they’ve isolated the so-called “squeal of death” associated with the company’s Audigy sound cards, and that it’s not tied to the sound card itself.

The “squeal,” which consists of a shrill tone caused by an audio loopback after a PC locks up, has been tied to a specific PCI bridge chip used in at least one motherboard from Soyo Computer Inc. The same squeal has also been tied to a PCI glitch in PCs manufactured by Dell Computer Corp., according to Steve Erickson, vice-president of audio development at Creative Labs, Fremont, Calif.

[...]

Creative has worked to track down the source of the squeal. In one of the cases, Creative found the glitch was tied to the AT123S PCI arbitration chip from Attansic Technology Corp., often used to avoid system conflicts in motherboards with a large number of PCI devices. Under high bus loads, the chip locks up the sound, causing the squeal, Erickson said. The chip has been found on the Soyo SY-K7V Dragon Plus motherboard, which uses the Via KT266A chipset.

Hmm, that “under high bus loads, the chip locks up the sound, causing the squeal” sounds about right, considering I was “only” exporting an audio file, editing another, and opening Outlook 2003 at the same time, with a bunch of other programs open. Tsk tsk.

One thing though: it sounded like the tone was coming from inside the computer. The article didn’t say whether this squeal came through the speakers or whether it was internal, so unfortunately I don’t know for sure whether this is the problem.

But next time, I’ll think twice before I bog down my computer to that extent!

Ah finally, an afternoon to just relax. It has been very busy around here since the school year started; so much so that this is my first post of this month. Yikes!

Well anyway, I’m still here! I’ll try to squeeze in a post or two every once in a while. I’ll probably have more time to devote to blogging and my other projects once I’ve finished drivers’ ed next month.

See ya later! Thanks for reading.

If there is one place in our house that has the largest civilization of dust bunnies, it would have to be the insides of our computers.

So in anticipation of the “computer spring cleaning that’s not during spring” that my dad and I were going to do this week, my mom had purchased some “compressed air.” However, after finding that it wasn’t “compressed air” but rather a “compressed chemical concoction,” we returned it to Wal-Mart and decided that we would use my dad’s air compressor.

I got everything unplugged from the backs of the computers; my dad got the air compressor ready. I cleaned the dust caked on the back ports and opened the computers. My dad turned on the air compressor and blasted the air in there.

I wasn’t too sure… that air looked powerful enough to really damage something. This wasn’t air coming from a little can of compressed air; this was air coming from the big thing that you use to blow up tires.

The air compressor cleaned it out really good though. As I look out our porch window I still see the exiled dust bunnies on our porch, looking dejected and fluffless.

Anyway, I repluggified the computers, turned them on, and made sure that they booted up okay. Everything looked okey-dokey-dandy, so I went on to do some other non-computer things.

I came back to my computer after some time and noticed the HDD Health alerts on my desktop: hard drive over critical temperature. Uh-oh.

Continue Reading »

Yesterday morning I plugged in my computer. I reached for the power button on my Dell Dimension 8400, but then noticed that the tower’s power light was flashing orange. Hmm, deja vu.

Thankfully, after the last incident with orange lights I had decided to keep my Dell manual right next to my tower. I found the section about power light signals and read:

If the power light is blinking amber – The computer is receiving electrical power, but an internal power problem might exist.

Ensure that the voltage selection switch is set to match the AC power at your location (if applicable).

Ensure that the processor power cable is securely connected to the system board (see page 73).

Well, I was sure that the voltage selection switch was in the right place. And I found it highly unlikely that the processor power cable would suddenly unseat itself. Ugh.

Then I had an idea. I flipped off the surge protector and then flipped it back on.

Tada! No more orange lights. Weird.

The moral of the story: try the simple stuff first.

(Whew, for a moment there I thought there would be The Mystery of the Orange Light Part 4!)

Just yesterday I arrived back from a two-week family vacation in Colorado. (You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been posting for the last two weeks; that was why.)

The main reason we went to Colorado was because the Future Problem Solving Program International Conference was earlier this month at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. I competed along with three other homeschoolers in the team competition, which consists of packet and skit competitions. Out of about 60 teams or so, my team placed 15th in the packet competition and 6th in the skit competition.

After the FPSP IC, my family and I spent another week in Colorado doing vacation-ish stuff.

But now that I’m home, I finally have the first tastes of summer. Before the vacation, I was either doing school or working on getting ready for the vacation. But now, the at-home part of my summer vacation has started!

I’m planning to resume my usual try-to-post-something-every-day schedule re blog. I’ll also be working on the Disciples with Microphones website and a new feedreading/podcatching application. More on that later.