After spending pretty much the entire long weekend cleaning and unpacking various boxes, we finally have our apartment in mostly presentable condition. It’s been a month since we moved in and finally most of the things that are in boxes are out of boxes, or have been put into different boxes, or have been tossed. We probably haven’t tossed nearly enough stuff though. Soon we will be ready for the housewarming. All that’s left is a few things in the bedroom and some boxes of class notes that need to be put away or thrown away.
Oh, here we go again…
The Bahamas got hammered by Frances, and Florida’s getting it now too. And in another week or so, it may very well be deja vu as Ivan comes barrelling through. It was called a hurricane with today’s 5AM advisory with the 5 day track taking it over Haiti/Dominican Republic and over the Bahamas. But it’s still early yet and a long way away. Definitely another one to keep an eye on.
Apparently August has been a particularly busy season too, with 8 named storms so far. A record from what I’ve read.
In the meantime, if you’ve got some extra cash burning a hole in your pocket, consider making a donation to the Red Cross’ Disaster Relief Fund. You can even donate your spare change at a Coinstar machine.
T3 battery hacks
One of the chief complaints about the T3 is the dismal battery life. It’s the 400 MHz processor and the screen that kills the T3’s battery life, and the size of the battery you can squeeze into it is limited. Personally I don’t have a problem with battery life on my T3. It lasts plenty long enough for me to survey three x-ray units (a good 6 hours of work), and my routine use isn’t all that draining on the battery. But then again I’m not playing games on it all day, or using it to watch movies.
There are a number of hacks out there for extending battery life ranging from the Palm Power-To-Go external battery sled, external battery powered dongles for quick on the go recharges and tips for soldering in a new battery. I think this is one particularly cool (maybe not the prettiest) hack though. Take a bunch of Li-ion batteries from a laptop and stuff them into a cradle. Wall power charges the T3 battery or the add-on batteries, and the add-on batteries can be used to charge the T3. And it still syncs too!
Where will Ivan go?
Well, thankfully Frances has weakened somewhat and won’t significantly impact us here, but that means Florida will take most of the impact, which is bad considering what Charley did a couple of weeks ago.
Now the next thing to think about is Ivan, which will probably be another big storm coming in the next 7-10 days.
It’s big, it’s blue, it’s a Dell!
After 5 years of limping along using an old Dell Latitude P120 laptop at work, (actually I haven’t even used it all that much ever since getting a PDA and keyboard), I was finally able to get work to buy me a new laptop. It’s a Dell Inspiron 5150 (most everything around here is a Dell…hard to buy anything but Dell), and it’s pretty sweet. Running at 1400×1050, it feels like there’s hectares of screen space. Takes some time to move the mouse around the screen with the touch pad though. I’m looking forward to experimenting with interfacing the laptop with some of my meters to expedite the data collection process. All I need to do is find a Serial to USB cable and I’ll be set.