canspice.org

Want to quiet down your computer? One good way to do it is to replace chipset fans with passive heatsinks. Fans make noise, passive heatsinks don’t. Small fans generally make more noise than large ones, which is why the small fans on chipsets like video card GPUs and northbridges are often targetted for removal. If you’ve got a noisy video card fan, try replacing it with a heatsink. I’ve got one up for auction on eBay, it’s a Zalman ZM17-Cu heatsink. Never been used.

Bid early, bid often!

Yesterday we received our electricity bill from HELCO. At a whopping $225.47 for one month, it was the highest bill we’ve had in four months of living here. Because this is just too outrageous, we at The Hoose have initiated Campaign Screw You HELCO! (yes, just like Yahoo! the exclamation mark is key). Our goal is to get our electricity usage down from 29.9 kWH/day to 25, giving us a bill of somewhere around $180.

Sure, there are four of us living here, but we shouldn’t really be using that much electricity. Our fridge, washing machine and stove are all fairly new, and we have clotheslines that we hang our laundry out on fairly often. We don’t have much that’ll suck up electricity other than our (mine and Alice’s) computer and the hot water heater.

Thus, our first target was our hot water heater. We opened it up last night and found two dials, the top one turned to the off position and the bottom one turned to 160. I emailed my dad about this and he said 160 is, and I quote, “far too hot and dangerous.”

The opening salvo in Campaign Screw You HELCO! is thus turning down the hot water tank to 120. Take that!

To be fair, I guess the opening salvo actually came on Thursday when the power supply in our computer died, negating that electricity drain, but that wasn’t something that we consciously did. Turning down a dial feels so much more like an action of aggression than watching your computer shut off spontaneously. Screw You HELCO!

Oh my goodness, I just discovered that Warp Records offers FLAC-encoded Autechre tracks for purchase on Bleep. I bought a couple of albums off there a while ago, but in high-quality MP3. Now you can get them in a lossless format, so they’ll sound exactly as they sound on a CD, even if you’re one of those incredibly bizarre people who can tell the difference between 320kbps and CD-quality.

Warp kicks more ass because they offer the entire song up for preview through a funky Flash-based interface. I’m currently listening to VI Scose Poise of Autechre’s album Confield. You know, that allmusic review is so far right, it is an assault. Sometimes that’s a good thing, a good audio assault to get the blood flowing.

If only I had the money, I think I’d buy Warp’s entire catalogue because they’re so fucking cool.

I’ve brought photos back to canspice.org thanks to Pixelpost. There are only six of them up there at the moment, but more will come with time.

Check the archive browser — took me a couple of nights to get the funky colour action happening there. The darker the red background, the more photos in that category.

Edit: Seven photos. Had to include the camp as fuck torture scene.

Growing up in Surrey we had an acre of land. It doesn’t seem like a lot of space to have a lot of animals on, but we crammed them in. At various times we had dogs, cats, turtles, fish (in aquariums and ponds), chickens, sheep, and ducks.

Since I moved away from there I’ve lived in more urban settings — downtown Victoria, downtown Ottawa, and what passes for downtown Hilo. I wouldn’t expect to see many animals other than dogs, cats and birds.

We’ve got birds alright. Yesterday our friendly neighbourhood peacock was checking out the laundry I had on the line. Today one of the neighbourhood cats was yowling at it, even though the peacock is five times its size.

A couple of houses away they’ve got roosters. Don’t know if they have any chickens or are just raising the roosters for fighting.

Just up the street someone’s got a goat. Yeah, right there in their front yard they’ve got a big goat tied up.

Sure, it’s not as farmish as Brian and Suzan, but I don’t think they live two blocks away from any sort of downtown, even one as small as Hilo.