2004-11-06-0105Z


Amazing. My webcam just decided to start working; hadn't played with it for a while, and haven't made any changes that I know of that would have affected it; tonight I modprobed spca50x and the LED lit up instantly; ran xawtv and it complained about perms on /dev/video0. Went to root and chmod'ed 666 /dev/video* and tried again; bingo! There was the sunset on my screen. Nice. Now I can maybe use it as a security camera. But it sucks in low light level; with the little fluorescent I'm using now, it shows no detail at all. But at least it's good for daytime. It's a start.

Yesterday afternoon I went across the border to buy a laptop advertised on Craigslist for $200. Not a bad deal; actually I got better than what I bargained for, as this has not just a CD burner but DVD player as well. Comes with W2K but no install disks so if I screw it up, it's gone. No wifi, but I'll eventually find a cheap card I can use; I used to have one, don't know what happened to it. Oh, well. It's got ethernet, so I can use the web for free at the Kinko's stores that still offer it. Now that I've got a Windows machine again, I can get back to my software development projects that got stalled when my last laptop died.

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