Hurray for frilly dresses*

My husband and I are expecting our third child at the end of May. Yesterday we went and had an ultrasound done. Everything looks great: brain, spine, heart, kidneys... and we found out the baby's gender. It's a girl. This means I can start shopping for something cute and extremely useless for the baby to wear. (Not that I don't still have a huge amount of clothes from when Sarah was a baby, but I want this one to have a few new things.)

* Not that I wouldn't have been just as thrilled had it been a boy.

Ultra Compact Digital Cameras for a busy, cheap mom

I've been wanting a little camera to take places with me. My husband has a great camera that takes very nice pictures, but it is larger than I want to deal with. Here is my feature set:

• Small -When I'm out with my kids with my purse and a diaperbag I don't want to have to haul a third bag for the camera. I want something that will fit in my purse or pocket and not add a lot of weight.
• Decent movie mode - I want something that takes at least 30 fps at 640 X480 (this is TV resolution so it will look good (instead of blurry and shaky) on the family DVDs I make). Our camcorder uses minDv and it is a pain to capture the video to the computer. Basically it takes as long to capture as it does to play and I have to babysit the capture program to make sure it doesn't suddenly start not capturing. With a digital camera, the movies are copied much faster.
  
• Image stabilized - I blur photos in low-light situations because I can't hold the camera still. Also, this is great for movies so they aren't bouncing. Unfortunately, this requirement threw out a majority of small cameras. The choices were Canon and Panasonic. (I think Sony had one too, but cost way too much.)
  
• Not way expensive - I know this is relative, but I have kids and I will be sticking this camera in my pocket. I don't want something that costs so much that I'm scared to take it with me or totally depressed if it gets scratched.
• Fast - I want to have it up and running quickly to catch my kids being cute.
  

The contenders

• Panasonic dcs-fx01 - price $200 , ultra compact
  
• Canon SD700 - price $300, cute elph
  
• Canon a710 - not compact, but good movies and zoom, $320, compact, about the size of a regular point 'n shoot
  
• Canon S2 - this thing is the size of my camcorder, but it kicks butt in taking cool pictures and good movies. It also has a 10x zoom. (most regular cameras have a 3x zoom.) Cost $270. A lot of people who have a dSLR get this camera so they have something more portable, but the thing weighs over a pound. It does zoom during movies, unlike most other digital cameras.
  

I ended up choosing the Panasonic fx01. It had the features I was looking for and the price was what I was willing to pay. I wish the S2 was smaller, because that is a cool camera, but I really didn't want to lug a large camera bag around.

So here are the pros and cons of the FX01:
Pro

• price
• image stabilized
• good movies
• small
• will do long exposures (up to 1 min) (This is a feature my husband would like)
  

Cons

• Image quality (some lowlight pictures just look noisy. Check out some of the reviews to see if this bothers you.) To me, it seems this would only become a problem if I wanted to print an 8X10 of a picture, which I don't usually do. I print 4X6s or watch them on TV.
• Movie sound is mono, it will not sound as good as a camcorder, although I didn't think it sounded bad.
• Movies are stored in QuickTime (.mov) format. This means that Windows Movie Maker will NOT handle these files. I own Nero 6 which will grudgingly handle .mov , so I'm OK.
• proprietary battery - (all ultra compacts do) this means if your batteries die while you are out, tough luck. The battery from Panasonic costs around $35, but I can get ones on eBay for $20 if I need to.
  

So the camera is now on order and should ship today. I'll review it after I get it.

If I didn't care about the image stabilization, I would have probably gotten either a canon SD600 or one of the Casio Exillims. (Exillims are very cute cameras.) If I didn't care about size, S2. If I didn't care about price, SD700.

Resources:
http://www.dpreview.com
http://www.dcresource.com

A Philosophical dilemma

I love shopping on the Internet. I can get great deals, check out features, read the user's manual in advance, etc. Here's where my dilemma comes in. One day I ordered something from an e-tailer on Saturday and they packaged and shipped it on Sunday. Now, because of my religious convictions, I believe in keeping the Sabbath day holy and that includes not shopping on Sunday. I don't want to do anything that would encourage companies to make their employees work on Sunday, so I've tried to avoid ordering anything late Saturday.

Here is where the dilemma comes in: I ordered from a store that said they ship Mon, Tues, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sun. They don't ship Saturday which implies someone is perhaps Jewish and is keeping their Sabbath holy by not working. So the issue is, if I order from them and they fulfill the order on Sunday, but had Saturday off, have I broken the spirit of the Sabbath?

(This isn't really a huge deal to me, but it is interesting to think about.)

(Another thing about this store is that they take 24-72 hours to process the order, so even if I order on Thursday there is no guarantee it won't go out Sunday. Prices are great though.)

Hurray for the Holidays

I'm excited for Christmas. Right now, I've got all my Christmas shopping done. I got my husband the most random, cool gift, of course I can't say what it is. I'm just excited for Christmas not only for the family and traditions, but also because I get to play with my children's new toys.

Crying Wolf

So with in the past few months, there was a news story about how some US Forest Service employees called to be evacuated after hearing wolves. Most of the story then goes on to ridicule their fear. Basically the consensus among experts is: "Wolves don't kill people." I don't believe them. Experts also said that mountain lions don't eat people. Until they ate several people in Colorado. Hmm... let's list top predators, cougars kill people, bears kill people, dogs kill people (not exactly a top predator, but similar to a wolf) but wolves just don't? It doesn't make sense to me.

The issue is that aren't enough wolves yet. Once the population gets big enough, younger wolves will get pushed into areas where there are people. Already the rather small population of wolves gets press for killing ranchers' stock. This means wolves are in contact with people. Fortunately (in terms of wolves eating people), this type of contact tends to be fatal for the wolf which means wolves retain their fear of people. The problem comes in when the wolves are protected and loose their fear of humans. Of course a wolf would prefer a nice fat deer, but if deer are in short supply, why not start scavaging people's garbage? And what if deer are in high supply, but in the suburbs where there are lots of people who don't hurt the wolves? Any animal will attack if it feels cornered. All it takes is a wolf stuck in a back yard or some hiker coming too close to some pups, and people will get hurt.

Now, I'm not saying kill all the wolves, but people killed the wolves in history for a reason, mostly that they didn't want to compete with them. Once there gets to be enough wolves, the problems will resurface. Of course, I think the forest service employees might have overreacted. Wolves far from people making a kill are well fed and probably still fearful of people, so not a real danger. But then, I wouldn't have waited around to find out either.

(More wolves might solve the cougar problem. Historical evidence suggests cougars and wolves don't get a long well, so they'd probably keep each other in check.)

FoodThinger is feature complete

I have finished up the last of the obvious code for FoodThinger. Now I have to go inventory my food storage and see how it works. Then I get to write documentation and create an installer. Fun times to be had by all.

note(added 6/2008): FoodThinger is now released. Go to http://www.foodthinger.com

Spinach artichoke dip

I found a great recipe for cheese spinach artichoke dip. It's great, and I didn't have to go to restaurant. My two kids loved it.

Lesson learned: canned artichokes are expensive.

FoodThinger is almost code complete

FoodThinger, my free food storage tracking/management software is almost code complete. (For non-programmers, that means I'm almost done writing it.) I'm sure I'll still have plenty of bugs to work out, but the bulk of the coding and database creation is almost done. Currently it runs on windows xp/2000, but should run on Linux since it's written in java on top of sqlite.

In case anyone is interested, I will need alpha/beta testers to try out the software and give suggestions. If you are interested, go to http://www.pingerthinger.com and send me an email from the contact page. (Sorry to make that a little complicated, but I've been having spam trouble lately.)

I would welcome help coding, although there isn't much left to do at least before alpha. I could use help designing a component to display a series of bar graphs, and if anyone really understands swing, I have a few questions there too... I hope to get this up on source forge after alpha, so collaboration should be easy at that point.

Current Features:

• add the foods you bought for your food storage
  
• automatically knows expiration dates for common food storage items
• automatically knows how much is in a #10 can for common food storage items (weight)
  
• creates a food storage plan based on your family
  
• Reports: what is expiring in the next N months, how close you are to meeting your food storage goals, how much of each food you have left to buy
• add new foods to the database
• Export to file what you have in your food storage (this way if someone decides a spreadsheet is more to his or her liking he can "get his information back out")
  

Features still to come before alpha:

• printing- print reports mentioned above, print list of where various foods are stored
• bar graph- visually showing how far you have to go before you reach the goal. A graph lets me have a better idea of how well I'm doing than seeing that I have 24% of my grains. (If I can't get this working reasonably soon, I might just start testing without it.)
• Installer - I'm sure most people do not want to be messing with jar files themselves
  
• Documentation - I'd like to think my program is intuitive and it is, to me :)

The database creation was the biggest pain, so if someone just wants the database, I'm glad to share it.

Blessings and pyracantha

My neighbors have a pyracantha. I have always disliked that tree. It is right by the property line, so half of the tree is always hanging into my yard dropping the orange (inedible and possibly poisonous) berries where my kids can reach them. Today I have reason to bless that tree. Because I thought its berries were poisonous, I've taught my kids not to eat them. We call them bird berries and I tell them they are for the birds.

A few months ago in my front yard I had a volunteer vine start to grow. It was very pretty, with purple flowers with yellow centers and bright red berries (bird berries I told my kids). I decided to prune it back and try and identify it. Well, I found it here. Yes, you guessed it, bittersweet nightshade. The berries don't taste bad, so kids might keep eating them and they can be deadly. (On a side note, I kept thinking to myself, I'd better identify that plant in case it turns out to be something like nightshade.) So I put on gloves and went and pulled it out.

Now I'm grateful for that pyracantha tree that forced me to teach my kids that not everything in our yard is edible. (Especially my son who still insists on putting everything in his mouth.)

Mythtv .20

Yesterday I upgraded to MythTv .20 on my fedora core 5 machine. It has one feature I really want, the ability to seamlessly burn DVDs from the shows I've recorded. The installation went reasonably well considering I had a bunch of library conflicts between livna and atrpms. I had to reinstall Xine due to the problem. I like .20 so far. It actually seemed to crash less while watching live tv. My only gripe right now is that the DVDs it burns have broken menus. It doesn't highlight when I try to make a menu selection. (discussions here and here.) Also, pushing the menu button doesn't return to the menu. The first problem seems to be caused by the version the mjpg library available on atrpms. I guess the version from freshrpms works better. I haven't been brave enough to try it though. I'll give it a few days and if no other solution comes up, I'll try it out.

Update (10/14/2006): got the menus working. I went to the mjpg homepage, downloaded the source, made it, but did NOT install it. Then I changed all the mythtv commands to use these local versions. Worked like a charm. (Why didn't I just get the lib from somewhere else? I had a bunch of programs dependent on the version I had that I didn't feel like reinstalling.)

The not returning to the root menu problem was my misunderstanding. Most DVD remotes have 2 menu buttons: a title menu button and a root menu button. I only had my ati wonder remote set up to do the root menu. One I fixed that, it's worked great ever since. (Thanks to all the folks at myth-users who explained that in great detail.)

A post post

So my new bike had a problem. Besides the rust (it came off) and the flat tire with a presta valve (my husband replaced the tube), it had a stuck seatpost. This was something that never occurred me or my husband to check. (Note to readers: check that your seatpost is not rusted to the frame.) Apparently water can get in between the seatpost and bike frame causing it to rust together. In the case of an aluminum seat post, it can actually make a chemical weld so that the only way to get it out again is to physically cut the seatpost off and saw it out with a hacksaw.

I took my bike to a bike shop who had the opinion it wasn't worth fixing. Since the bike only cost $25, and the parts and labor would be around $70 (that assumed the post was cut out). There didn't seem to be something that could just be stuck on top of the seatpost to get a couple more inches. Then my husband took a big wrench, put it around the seatpost, laid the bike down, and pushed really hard from side to side (Note: this can warp the seatpost and or your frame). The post moved. He managed to get it out. The bike was fine. I was very happy. I scrubbed all the rust off the post, now I just need to find some grease to put inside the frame to keep it from happening again.

My New not-quite-so-ugly bike

I discussed my new bike here. Now that I (and my daughter) have cleaned off most of the rust, touched up the paint with nail polish, and my husband has fixed the rear tire and greased the chain, it seems like a nice bike. Here's a picture:

My new ugly bike

I bought a bike today at a garage sale. I've never biked much. Growing up in San Diego, we mostly walked rather than biked; the street we lived on was fairly busy and very unfriendly to bikes (no real shoulder). Recently, my husband and I bought a bike trailer at Shop-ko so that my husband could pull my kids behind him on a bike ride. We had also purchased a bike carrier for my car. The possibility of all of us riding bikes together was too much for me to resist. I decided I wanted a bike, but not just any bike: the cheapest decent bike I could get.

After some research on the Internet, I realized that my idea of a $50 Wal-mart bike might not be a good one. Apparently cheaper bikes are more of a pain to ride and thus people stop riding them. Ignoring the fact that people who buy cheap bikes might not be that interested in biking in the first place and thus quit not because the bike stunk but because they lost interest, that left me with Deseret Industries and garage sales. My husband looked at the bikes at DI and said they weren't that great. Today I saw a garage sale with a bike. I went there and looked at it. It had the kind of peddles my husband said to look for, the kind of breaks he said to look for and more or less it was the right size for me. It was $25. It had two problems: 1) the back tire used a presta thingie (don't ask me I don't know terminology) so the lady selling it couldn't pump it up, she didn't have the right kind of pump (neither do I by the way) 2) the bike has been sitting out all summer, thus the chain and gear thingies are kind of rusted. My husband said that ignoring rust, the bike was comparable to his.

Monday I'll go out and try and see if it cleans up with some WD-40. My wonderful husband said he'd change the tube on the back tire so it has a regular thingie. I still need to get a helmet, but then hopefully I'll be ready to ride around the church parking lot then on to the Provo River Trail.

My current project, free food storage software: FoodThinger

Now that I have my PVR/Tivo/that stupid computer that took way too long to set up working, I'm back to some of my older projects that I've left to languish. Currently I'm working on free food storage tracking software. It would help me keep track of what I bought, when it expires, and what I have left to buy to reach my year's supply. I plan on making it open source after I'm done (and after I clean up the code enough that I'm not ashamed of it.)

Why: I want to know what food I have, what food I need to get, and when it expires. I wasn't able to find a free program that did this (there is a $40 program that is pretty cool, if I wasn't so cheap and really want to make something free available I'd use it). Plus, while I'm writing it I don't have to actually organize my food storage :)

Platforms: Windows 2000/XP, probably Linux

Current status: has a list of foods and how much of them I'd need as per providentliving from the LDS church. I can add foods. I can export my foods to a csv file (this is in case I decide my program isn't what I want and decide to just move to a spread sheet).

Currently working on: being able to add custom foods (finished 9/11/2006)

Still to come: reports showing what is expiring in the next n number of months. Reports showing how close I am to a year's supply.

Still to come in a few years when I'm not sick of this project anymore: Meal planning, recipes, and the ability to know what recipes you can make based on what is in your storage.
ETA: probably a month or two assuming I don't get distracted again. I'll probably put it up on SourceForge, unless I get lazy then I'll just post it to PingerThinger.com along with all my other programs.

note(added 6/2008): FoodThinger is now released. Go to http://www.foodthinger.com

Why I love Linux/ Fedora Core 5

(For the other half of the story see why I hate Linux.)
Here's what I love about Linux:

1. My kids can't do any serious damage to my computer since they don't have the right permissions
2. Somewhere on google is the answer to my question.
3. All the software I'm using is free.
4. Mythtv is so cool.
   
5. Once I figured out what I was doing, I realized almost everything worked right "out of the box"
6. PPracer / Tuxracer - help Tux the penguin race down a snowy slope, what could be better than that?
   
7. Don't have to reboot after installing new software
8. Yumex (graphical interface for yum, very nice since it lists all the packages you have or might ever want.
   
9. The Gimp actually works. (I used it a lot under windows and it just never was completely stable.)
10. man
11. The thought that now I can get a "Chicks dig Linux" t-shirt from thinkgeek.com
    

Why I hate Linux / Fedora Core 5

(Note: before flaming me check out Why I love Linux.)
This is a bunch of generalizations on why Linux / Fedora Core 5 64 bit sucks. If you are considering switching to Linux, don't let this scare you off.

1. I have to compile everything my own dang self. (OK, not really, but I've had to ./configure, make, make install more than my fair share of stuff)
2. Anything that I really want to run will not compile without downloading at least one other dependency, plus the header files.
3. If you want a program to do a specific task, there are at least 5 of them in source forge and they all are in pre alpha or abandoned or both.
4. Queries in Google on how to fix a specific problem returns a bunch of results, problem is they are all for either a) a version of Linux I don't have or b) written about 5 years ago and are no longer relevant.
5. One word: Permissions

Great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts

My other problem with my mythtv box (running fedora core 5) is that using component on tv-out, it likes to a weird green blob on my sanyo tv. It doesn't always do it, just when the screen is sitting still. The blob slowly fades in. Moving windows around will make it lighter and watching tv (from my computer) will make it go away too, at least for a while. I have no idea what is causing this behavior. I'm leaning towards the tv being somehow at fault as my brother-in-law's laptop does the same thing to it. Although, my husband's laptop does not have the problem. (If anyone knows a solution, let me know.)

Update: the dvd player does the same thing, so it must be the tv's fault

The sound of silence

As part of my on-going mythtv saga, I've been having an intermittent problem with my integrated sound card. It doesn't always get detected. I'm not quite sure where the problem is coming from. Basically, the sound card doesn't always get created under linux, sometimes it decides that my tv capture card is a much better sound card. I'm not quite sure what is to blame. Last time it failed, I tried running "MAKEDEV sound", which did load a bunch of drivers, but did not add the card under the /dev directory. So today I loaded the newest ALSA drivers. We'll see if they help at all.
Update: 9/3/2006: Updating the newest alsa drivers seems to have helped.

tv on tv

I got mythtv working on my crt (monitor) and on my tv. I can't have both my tv and monitor on because the K8ngm2 won't support it, but I can have one at a time, which is all I want. If you want to know how to get both your tv and monitor working, here's the best guide: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/NVidia/TV-OUT. So now I just turn on my computer, run my script, hit ctrl-alt-f8 and mythtv is on tv.

(See this thread http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=67964&page=3&highlight=8762+tv-out
comment #39 if you have this motherboard and a digital monitor, there's a complete xorg.conf file).

(I know this sounds boring, but it has taken me several days to figure this out.)

Fedora Core 5 and K3b compilation error (qt-mb) solution

checking for Qt... configure: error: Qt (>= Qt 3.2 and < 4.0) (headers and libraries) not found. Please check your installation!
For more details about this problem, look at the end of config.log.

Anyway to fix this problem, I looked at /usr/lib/qt-3.3/lib and having read in a few news groups that bad links were sometimes the problem, I went through use ls -l and looked at all the links. The problem seemed to be in libqt-mt.so.3.3.6, the permissions wouldn't allow me to read it as my user. Maybe I should have been running as root, who knows, anyway, I cheated and chmod 777 libqt-mt.so.3.3.6 and got the stupid thing to configure past that point.