I’m obsessed with the economy these days, to the point where I occasionally drive Susan a bit nuts at dinner chattering about it, but it’s pretty clear we’re entering into a significant recession and possibly worse. Evidence supporting the worse angle would be this article on engadget, , where they report that Black Friday sales declined… for the first time ever. There’s perhaps no greater indicator of the collapse of US consumer culture than this, folks. For the record, sales were down by 8%, which hardly seems terrible until you consider companies were already forecasting lower sales to begin with, to the point where companies like Circuit City already were facing bankruptcy. Another way to express it would be: if the black friday sales can’t get gluttunous US consumers to pull out their walletts, what can?
Praise for Tomato, free router firmware replacement
- Image via Wikipedia
Tomato is one of a number of replacement firmwares for routers. Last week I switched over to it from the stock firmware on my Linksys WRTG54. So far I love it, despite it being responsible for knocking my network offline and forcing me to re-configure everything from scratch. Truth be told at this point I’m pretty sure the network being offline was my fault (me? Read the docs? never!), and the process of rewriting every device’s config from scratch was a good exercise for me since I have a ton of devices and the configs were an accumulation of mistakes small and large.
The whole move to Tomato was caused by Thanksgiving, when one too many devices ended up on my network. This caused a cascade effect of ip addresses being bumped and multiple devices with one IP assigned to them. This knocked my consoles offline and caused my streaming music to stop working, pushing me to replace the firmware, but I had been planning to do it anyway for a couple of reasons. First, Comcast now has a 250GB monthly bandwidth cap and I want to track how much we’ve used of it at any point in time, and second because there are bugs in the factory firmware on my router which cause UPnP not to work for my gaming consoles.
The install process couldn’t have been simpler – just point the default firmware’s update function at the firmware from the site, do a nvram reset, and configure. It was even smart enough to pick up my old firmware’s configuration with its dozens of MAC addresses in the wireless access list, and though in the end I think that’s what caused the problems I initially had, I was still impressed that it worked.
UPnP now works on my consoles, the interface on Tomato is much nicer than the default Linksys one, there are a ton more features including ssh access, dynds/domain mapping, full routing functions, various logging/traffic reporting features, and more, and all for free – it’s a fantastic option if you have one of the supported routers. Definitely worth checking out.
For kicks, to give you a sense of scale, here’s a mostly complete list of networked objects in my house, each of which I had to poke yesterday as I resurrected everything:
Hardware:
- Yamaha receiver
- Pocorn Hour streaming media box
- Xbox 360
- Playstation 3
- Squeezebox Duet remote
- Squeezebox Duet content streamer
- Linux webserver
- Gaming PC
- 2 mac laptops
Software:
- Playon (PC)
- Apache (linux)
- MyIhome (PC)
- Squeezecenter (PC)
Problems with Nyko Frontman guitar and Rockband 2?
If you have a Nyko Frontman guitar and suddenly started having problems with it when you’re playing Rock Band 2 on your PS3, it’s not the guitar – a recent PS3 firmware update broke things, but there’s a workaround. Set the ‘footpedal’ usb controller dongle to Guitar Hero compatibility mode and your Frontman will work with Rock Band 2 again. Thanks to the folks over here for the pointer on how to fix this. Hopefully Sony patches this problem out of their firmware in a subsequent update.
Will you lose your credit card?
So next up from the economic crisis: no more credit for you, Joe Consumer. Check out this article over on Reuters‘ site. It’s a bit longer on speculation than fact, but this is not the only piece I’ve seen suggesting the banks are going to radically reduce the amount of available consumer credit, and I’ve already been contacted by one of my banks letting me know they’re jacking up my interest rate and fees. If you’re living your life off your credit card and you don’t have a stellar credit score, watch out.
Here’s an idle bit of speculation to ponder, too. How long do you suppose it will be before the insurance companies start dropping clients? All of this stuff is deeply intertwined, and offering insurance requires capital and access to it. Insurance is heavily regulated and there are more stringent requirements on capitlization than the banking industry was coping with, but where do you suppose those funds the insurance companies are required to hold are actually sitting? And how much do you suppose they’re actually worth versus how much they think they’re worth? I have no facts to back this up, just idly wondering how far this unravelling will go.
More melamine news
So now it’s turning up in infant formula, (90% of the major brands) and the FDA‘s response is to change it’s categorization of acceptable exposure to melamine, without any research to back it up. We’re the ones who are sneering at Chinese food safety issues? This epitomizes the Bush White House’s approach to governance folks, and man does it ever piss me off. It pays to be extra careful about dairy products – as I predicted a couple of months ago, this stuff is going to be showing up in lots of unexpected places.
Is there anything broccoli can’t do?
Broccoli is a superfood. Almost every week there’s another study pointing out some healthful benefit of eating it. I’ve been linking over to them fairly often. Today’s example is a study presented at a recent American Association for Cancer Research conference indicating broccoli may lower the cancer risk for current and former smokers.The lesson remains the same – eat your broccoli, raw or steamed (but don’t overcook it!), it’s fantastic for you.
What if WWII was a game on xbox live?
You have to be a gamer and have spent some time on xbox live or played some other online competitive game to appreciate this animated gif that tells the tale of WWII as if it had been fought as an online game, but if you have this is funny as hell. Warning though – harsh language, not politically correct by any stretch of the imagination, and it runs for a couple of minutes. Kudos to whoever came up with this though, it cracked me up.
Virtual Rome
I have a thing for Roman History, mostly because of a couple of great courses I had back in college, and I adore I, Claudius, both as a novel and the BBC dramatic series. Google recently announced the availability of a virtual tour of ancient Rome (circa 320ad) for their Google Earth tool, and it’s fantastic. Google Earth is free, as is the tour. You can get the details and download it here where they announcement is. There’s also a short movie demonstrating how it all works and what it looks like. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re at all interested in Roman history.
More news on George RR Martin on HBO
Image via Wikipedia
Last winter I noted that HBO had optioned the rights to George RR Martin‘s Song of Ice and Fire series of novels. I incorrectly assumed this meant they were going into production but it turns out that at the time they simply optioned the rights, and they’ve recently announced that they’re funding the production of a pilot episode. Pretty great news really – it still doesn’t guarantee we’ll be seeing the series on HBO, but it’s a significant step forward and increases the chances. Here’s hoping it’s good – as the article I link to notes, if anyone can pull this off it’s HBO.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, The Song of Fire and Ice is an as yet incomplete series of gritty high fantasy novels set in a sort of alternate medieval Great Britain. It covers some generally familiar ground, but it’s really well written, has some fantastic plot twists, and plays quite a bit with conventions in the genre. They’re definitely worth checking out if fantasy is your cup of tea.
Before the Devil Knows you’re Dead – two thumbs up
Susan and I saw Before the Devil Knows you’re Dead this weekend, and we both liked it to differing degrees. Susan didn’t care so much for the open ended conclusion, wereas I thought it was pretty great – otherwise we both enjoyed it. The story concerns two brothers with cashflow problems who decide to pull off a robbery and the chaos that follows as things go wrong. Central parts of the story are presented as out of sequence vignettes, jumping around in the timeline of events, and one particular vignette may not even be ‘real,’ but I’ll skip the spoilers so as not to ruin it in case anyone reading this wants to see it. This makes understanding the story and identifying the characters challenging at times but it kept us engaged trying to puzzle out what was going on and who was who. The acting is uneven – Philip Seymour Hoffman is great in one of the leads, as is a very aged Albert Finney, but I was less fond of Ethan Hawke’s manic younger brother (the scenes in the car rental place in particular I thought were pretty bad) and have mixed feelings about Marisa Tomei’s character. All credit to her for spending half the movie unclothed, but several scenes, especially when she leaves Hoffman’s character, just came across as forced. On the plus side, she looks great 😉
This is a slow moving drama, so it’s not for everyone, especially not for a lot of my regular readers, but if you’re in the mood for a well crafted, thought provoking, reasonably well acted crime drama, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 