What Dave Is Up To

19-Jun-2007: I've been playing with AVR Microcontrollers. — And I have a blog on LiveJournal.

15-Feb-2004: Two weeks ago I finally told the DirecTiVo to stop recording "suggestions" and only record things we asked it to. The suggestions are often interesting, but I spend too much time watching TV even without them.

9-Apr-2003: We got a DirecTiVo a couple weeks ago (35 hours for real, dual tuner, $230 plus a 1-year service commitment, $45/month). It's very cool. I am exploring TechTV and The Science Channel. -- The 35 hours is "for real" because it takes the compressed video from the dish and streams it directly to hard disk, with no recompression and no choice of quality level (it's "DirecTV" quality, which is very good...certain much better than we were getting from "A/B cable").

I got lots o' nifty books and stuff for my birthday. Haven't updated Books To Read or DVD List yet.

On March 25th, I witnessed a car crash (DeAnza North turning left onto 280 North). Both drivers walked away, although their cars did not. It could have been me, by about 2 seconds.

I've been attempting some drywall repair, with help from Ben. I replaced the rickety wooden 6-foot A-frame ladder with a new fiberglass one ($98 from Home Depot). I probably shouldn't have taught the cat how to climb up it, as he has trouble getting down. -- I did manage to make the not-really-quadrilateral shape in the garage ceiling into something closely approximating a quadrilateral, and then cut a piece of drywall to fit into it. It was harder than it sounds.

25-Jan-2003: Yesterday I found SketchUp for Mac OS X: http://sketchup.com/. Not CAD, but close enough for me. They have 100 MB of QuickTime tutorials on the web site, and an 8-hour free trial.

22-Jan-2003: For the last 5 years I've been working on Measure (for Mac OS 8.6 through Mac OS X). It's a repository of mainly-numerical information about the world, with a built-in calculator. I will ship it soon (really). Send me email if you want to be a beta tester.

22-Jan-2003: Today I added some information to an Apple-internal Wiki system, and realized it was very easy and very cool. It turned out to be easy to set up a Wiki at my own ISP as well. Downloaded from http://www.usemod.com and got it working in a few minutes. -- Cool.