A little package arrived from Russia this afternoon, containing a dozen ИН-16 "Nixie tubes":

Now I need to find a decent electronic components shop (since Radio Shack decided it was no longer worth their while), and build a transformer to convert wall power to 180VDC. And then build a tester to make sure all the tubes work.

And THEN I need to learn enough electronics to build a computer interface to drive the little buggers via a serial port (or even USB, if I can manage it).

A couple of nights ago, I bought The Orange Box - primarily to play Portal, because I love puzzle-solving games (and the 2D Flash version piqued my interest). Just for the heck of it, I installed Portal (and, out of necessity, Steam) onto my Linux box to see how badly it would fail. To my utter shock...

It's actually playable. I had to turn down many of the graphics graphics options to make it playable — but my Linux box wasn't built for gaming (unlike my Windows machine). And there are occasional graphics glitches (the main one I noticed was that the frosted/reticulated windows separating the testing areas from the observation booths are solid, opaque colors). Nevertheless, I hadn't even expected it to run on Linux.

The first time I ran Portal on Linux, the observation booth windows were solid, opaque colors. The next time I ran it, they looked like they were supposed to:

As a side effect of playing Portal for the last couple of nights, having replayed it a couple of times to get the achievements, I now really want some cake.

It took me close to two days to figure out why one computer couldn't access the Internet, even though it was set up identically to several machines that could, and it had no trouble talking to the internal network.

The TRENDnet TEW-633GR Wireless N Gigabit router, like many routers, has a MAC address cloning function, for sharing an Internet connection even if your ISP has tied your cablemodem to a particular network interface card. But unlike the D-Link router I was using previously, the TRENDnet router apparently does not forward packets to the computer it's pretending to be, if there's a switch between the router and the computer.

But on a positive note: Happiness is not having to daisy-chain switches any more, and still having plenty of ports open for expansion.

(Too many yellow lights on that, though; I definitely need to buy some gigabit NICs for the older machines!)

I've had an idea for a novel set in the 1800s, but since I am nothing if not anal retentive scrupulously detail-oriented, I've started researching the time period in earnest.

Having just begun reading Routledge's Manual of Etiquette, I'm astonished at how different the social customs were (of course, he was writing for English society, with its rigid class system). Merely introducing two people to each other was a weighty matter, and not to be undertaken lightly — your own reputation was on the line, for an introduction carried with it a voucher of good character. If you met someone in an acquaintance's drawing-room and he or she failed to introduce you, the next time you encountered each other, you should not in any way act in a manner which suggested acquaintance.

I particularly enjoyed the instructions for ladies on acceptable conversation:

Remember that all "slang" is vulgar. It has become of late unfortunately prevalent, and we know many ladies who pride themselves on the saucy chique with which they adopt certain Americanisms, and other cant phrases of the day. Such habits cannot be too severely reprehended. They lower the tone of society and the standard of thought. It is a great mistake to suppose that slang is in any way a substitute for wit.

The use of proverbs is equally vulgar in conversation; and puns, unless they rise to the rank of witticisms, are to be scrupulously avoided. A lady-punster is a most unpleasing phenomenon, and we would advise no young woman, however witty she may be, to cultivate this kind of verbal talent. [...]

Do not be always witty, even though you should be so happily gifted as to need the caution. To outshine others on every occasion is the surest road to unpopularity.

I do like the differentiation between witticisms and puns. I had been, in my misspent younger days, an inveterate punster; but ever since seeing the movie Ridicule, I have developed an appreciation for the true play on words, as opposed to the cheap pun. Pity puns are so much easier to make.

I discovered this morning that gkrellm, a Linux system monitor which I've been using to keep watch on my new CPU's temperature, can remotely monitor other systems as well — and that there's a Windows port.

So I set up a bank of monitors to watch most of my machines, reporting CPU usage, processes, CPU/graphics card/hard drive temperatures (where supported by the motherboard), disk and ethernet traffic, memory usage and uptime:

I really like being able to keep an eye on my Web server, half a continent away, without having to ssh into it.

The main thing which frustrated me when I tried to lean Blender before was that every how-to book, tutorial and video I could get my hands on was out of date. Buttons and panels are moved around, renamed, or work entirely differently.

But what really makes me want to smash things is when the video tutorials assume you're already intimately familiar with the program. For example, in a video on subdivision surfaces, the narrator says, "and you can see, by turning off the... and you can see the nice smooth shape that's underneath." Now, I could hear that he hit a key in order to turn off the control mesh... but he never said what the keystroke was. And since the hotkey reference helpfully lists the keys in alphabetic order, rather than grouping them by logical functions, and there can be twenty different functions mapped to each key, depending on what you're doing at the time, I've still got no smegging clue what key it was that he hit. And this only compounded the frustration that since the video was made, they've changed the way subdivision surfaces are created, and even where those controls are located... it took me around fifteen minutes just to find them.

Frustrating indeed. I just keep telling myself that, if I could model these in a text editor, as plaintext descriptions of 3D objects, I can damn well master Blender.