Wow. This comes courtesy of Triablogue.

I found this nice open source barcode scanner that uses any webcam to scan barcodes off books, DVDs, CDs, etc. They link to several apps that implement it, including one called Books. You scan your book’s barcode, do a quick lookup, and it fetches the info from several places and fills it in. It features keeping track of checkouts, which should come in handy if you friends keep all your books. I will check it out and see if I want to spend the time to catalog my library.

Just wrote up a little something and put it on a page. It’s called the Good Person Test. Do you have what it takes to take it and deal with the consequences?

Unfortunately Hachuu died. At least I think he did. His right eye started swelling like crazy and it was pretty obvious that he lost sight with it. Since he wouldn’t eat I took him to the vet who discovered that his other eye also wasn’t working anymore. Being blind, he couldn’t see any of the crickets I gave him. The vet kindly agreed to find a home for him since I can’t hand feed him for the rest of his life or afford the surgery to get his right eye removed.
A few weeks later I got a sympathy card about the death of my beloved pet, so I conclude he didn’t make it. I know that two more out of the four at the pet store died there, so they probably came in with something bad. Poor fellow.
When we can afford it I’d really like a Crested Gecko. They don’t require special heating or humidity and are pretty mellow yet active. Yay!

We got a new router with our AT&T Uverse subscription, and the router web interface, besides being really really plain in functionality (please please add custom DNS servers), tried to resolve gateway.2wire.net when checking for updates and other things. The internet didn’t really provide much info, but eventually I figured out that it should resolve to the router’s internal IP address. I assume it would have added that on Windows automatically with the install CD, but because I am on a Mac and stay away from silly install CDs, I had to edit my /etc/hosts file manually. Simply add gateway.2wire.net somewhere after the IP address for your router, like so:

192.168.1.1 gateway.2wire.net

Everything worked as expected afterwards!

As an update, unfortunately I now get complaints about a second router being connected to my first router. Stupid 2Wire. I guess I will leave it as it was before and just add the hosts stuff if I want to check for updates.

More updates! For some reason it kept giving me the warning about the router behind the router, so I found a setting to disable it and it seems to work alright. To find it, just go to your gateway’s address and append /mdc, like so: http://192.168.1.1/mdc, then to Local Network -> Configure and uncheck the setting that says “Enable Router behind Router alert.” Voila!