wiredfool

Mood: Calming Down.
Music: Burning Down the House (Talking Heads)

Well now. That was a nice little arc welding experiment in the oven just now. And me with a nicely heated stone and pretty well proofed bread. I was getting ready to stick a couple of loaves in, and I noticed quite a bright light from the bottom of the oven. Closer inspection told me that I didn’t really want to look directly at it. It was slowly spiraling the element fading in and out of view. Lots of sparks too. A couple of minutes after turning off the oven, I decided that I’d really rather have it stop. I wasn’t actually sure if it was an arc or just burning aluminum, but after putting a soaked cloth diaper on it and both not seeing it stop and half of the element still glowing red, I had Rose kill the breaker to the stove. That and the wet cloth stopped it. I was prepared to use the dry fire extinguisher, but I really didn’t want to coat the kitchen in the chemicals if I didn’t have to.

I know that we’ve fried the element, as it’s in a couple pieces. I suspect the controller’s dead, since it didn’t kill power to the element when I turned it off. And the bread is quite interrupted. Grrr. I wanted bread.

I doubt it’s going to be cheap to fix the controller, and I really don’t think that it’s going to be cheap to replace the whole stove.

Update — Replaced the main bake element, and things seem ok. The controller seems to work, the oven seems to heat up faster, and there’s no more scary arcing. For now anyway.

Dear Apple,

Apparently you’re considering dropping the mini from your lineup.

In the immortal words of some space hero: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!

Seriously. These are probably my favorite desktop Macs ever. I have two PPC minis, and I’ll get Intel ones when I get too annoyed at how much faster/shinier/better my MacBook is. They are absolutely the right size and quietness for my office.

But if you do drop the mini, please consider shipping a Mac Nano in its place. Or a shuffle. I’d totally dig a Mac Shuffle with Wifi and Bluetooth, and only USB, Power and Monitor connectors.

Sincerely,

wiredfool

Ooh, this looks interesting. Yet another firmware for the linksys/buffalo wrt series routers (I have two), this one named for a vegetable. (or fruit). (whatever). The Tomato Firmware looks more shiny and has interesting bandwidth graphs and other such things built in.

Like I need a router to be shiny. It needs to work. Must not install the shiny.

Got a Linksys SPA3102 box to add some VOIP capability to the home phone, mainly so that we can cut out most of the long distance costs here. Like calling down to Useless Bay, that’s 10c/minute. Ireland, on the other hand, is 8. Voip? about 1c/min each.

It a nice little box, one phone plug for the wall, one for the phone, one ethernet for the uplink, and one for anything that you might want to put down stream. If the power’s out, it routes the phone straight to the wall. I’ve got it setup that emergency, local, and 1800 numbers go through the phone system, and anything else goes through the internet.

There are still a few bugs to work out — there’s some static that comes and goes, I don’t know if it’s a bad cable or there is some interference somewhere. It only happens with the cordless phone, so I’m suspecting interference. There’s also a lot of echo when doing touch tones over the phone system, enough that it makes getting voicemail difficult. I’ve seen some echo cancellation settings as well as some dtmf ones, so there’s a bit of playing that I need to do.

Mini Dial Plan Link Dump: 1 Manual, pdf 3