Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

This morning, there was a loud beep along with a variety of other strange sounds that woke me. The power had gone out. I could still breath, so my PowerSource400 was doing its job.

I don't yet have the humidifier plugged into the PowerSource400, but I was only using it in passive mode last night. Though I was told in chat that it'll work on an inverter, so it would work on the PowerSource400. The brochure even touts it as a feature of benefit to truck drivers and campers.... Didn't occur to me to find out. Though biggest problem is forgetting to turn it on at night, and/or turning it off in the morning.

Almost as soon as I was fully aware that the power was out and that I was still getting air....there was another beep, and power was back on. I went back to sleep for a little while longer....

Later I saw the clean air filter light was on the air purifier in the room next to my bedroom, so wondered if the air cell would fit in my ultrasonic cleaner. So, first I cleaned my cushions using it....and then found the air cell was too big. But, also time to replace white filter....or rather swap a white filter in for the grey filter....gonna say it picked up a long more funk because I traveled last weekend....

Also in between cushion cleaning and air purifier cleaning...I decided that it was time to try my hand at modifying my ComfortLite II mask. Guess we'll find out how that works tonight.

Finally, I was looking at my data...and decided I should see if I can get EncoreViewer & USB reader working on my new laptop...where its running Ubuntu...with Windows XP in a VirtualBox VM.

Had lots of fun trying to get USB working, but basically it was combine various information found online on the subject...until I got it to work. There was a bit of VirtualBox/USB and Intrepid. udev file didn't quite match, since there was already a vbox one that did the same thing that it described. Another forum post had a different method, but talked of creating a separate group...make the device nodes in that group...and adding vbox & user to the group....while the 'VirtualBox/USB' method said add user to vboxusers group.

What I went back and did was have it make the /proc/bus/usb device nodes for the vboxusers group...and then finally the devices showed up (after a reboot).

The XP VM detected the USB devices, installed drivers and the light turned green....EncoreViewer started reading the smartcard, but then it failed. I fiddled some more...eventually rebooted the XP VM, it did a bunch of stuff (some 33 updates?)...and trying again, I was able to successfully read the smartcard.

Then it was a matter of copying some files from my desktop to the VM, so I could have the historical data. Laptop way will just be so I know it would work rather than use it regularly....of course, that might change if I make it the bedroom computer after the rearrangement. Though I'm thinking a whole new computer would go there....perhaps one of those ASUS atom based all in ones.

Hmmm....

What kind of trouble can I get myself into next.