It’s been running for nearly 28 days now, handling all my IRC traffic via ZNC while I shut my desktop off for 10 hours a day.

I think its power supply is a 30 watt supply, compared to the desktop’s 300 watt supply, which means that if I’m actually shutting off the desktop, I should expect a power savings, correct?

(By shutting off, I mean shutdown -h, which in Windows 7 causes the machine to enter hibernation, not a sleep state.)

With this happening, I should move my battery backup block out of my room and into the living room where the router and that box are, so as to actually protect them from power outages.

After all, It’d make more sense to put those on the backup than it does to put a desktop that’s off for 10 hours a day on it at that point, since I want it to be uninterrupted when I let it do my IRC work.

On an aside, getting Ubuntu to even install on that thing was a pain in my rear.
In retrospect, I could have solved it by downloading and installing the server edition instead of trying to reuse the desktop edition ISO that I had.

Now, if only I’d remember to shut my desktop off when I pass out…

I’ve been having some issues with wireless around the house lately.
The roomie has resorted to running a Cat5 cable from the router in the living room to his room so he can actually connect, because he’s that frustrated with the lack of performance — his drops are worse and more frequent than mine, it appears.

I’ve noticed that my connection will vary: It’ll drop to dog slow and unusable, with horrible ping times while the roomie can’t connect wirelessly or it’s like business as usual.

Since he’s gone to the Cat5 solution, he’s been pretty damn stable. I’m considering doing the same thing, but I don’t really like the appearance of Cat5 strewn across the floor (an issue I noted in season 1 of Furnish Our Apartment), which might cost me my geek license in some circles. It could be because I tend to stumble over it, though.

I’d like to run as little cable as I can to get the job done, so I did a little snooping.

We’ve got coaxial cable run around the apartment (thanks to the previous tenants, I’d dare say), which should allow me to move the modem. However, I remember that the last time the modem was more than a short throw away from its wall mounted jack, I had problems with the modem itself getting and keeping a signal.

The router, on the other hand, would be free to move.

Therefore, it appears that my best option to fix the connectivity issues in the apartment would be as follows:
Leave the modem alone. Pick up 50 feet of Cat5 and a power extension cable. Run it as neatly as possible from where the modem is to one of the closets. From there, move my IRC terminal (a WYSE Winterm WT9455XL running Ubuntu headless) and the router to this new location. Get them spun up and ready to go. Once I’m sure the two work by poking them from the wireless, then I’ll re-run my roomie’s Cat5 cable to his room to eliminate the extended run, and run a Cat5 for myself from the router to my room.

Part of me wants to put holes in the wall for this, but it’s an apartment. I should ask my landlord what I can do with regard to the wiring, and see if he has a problem with us redoing some of it to be neater than it currently is (since some of it is really tacky and abysmal — holes punched in walls without plates covering the deal, and placed in a bad position). Maybe knock a little off the rent for a month to let us redo the wiring, or something…

Not a heavy smoker, just a couple of smokes a day to keep from reaching out and choking someone to death, if even that.

At the top of the year, they changed how cigarettes are made and sold in my state, requiring all of the store-sold cigs to be capable of extinguishing themselves if left unattended (a gross over-simplification, I am aware).

I applaud the idea, but cannot stand the method used to reach this goal.

They added more chemicals to an already chemical-laden stick.
I didn’t know about this change until I lit one of my usual brand of smokes after taking a break from them for a bit, and noticed that it was the worst menthol stick I’ve ever had.

My roomie leaned around the corner and asked me what that noise was. In my disgust, I made a rather loud exclamation.

He pointed out the change in cigarettes to me. It made sense — the cigarette I was used to went from tolerable to disgusting. I couldn’t enjoy my nicotine. Every pack of smokes I’ve seen since the top of the year are stamped with “FSC” to indicate their compliance with this new regulation.

It makes me wonder: where the hell was I if they had to vote to make this a requirement for all cigarettes sold in the state to have these noxious additions to them? What the hell is really in the retardation juice they’ve added? Why do these give me a headache?

(and perhaps, most importantly, why is it so damn hard to get my hands on something other than these? I’d probably fare well with an e-cig kit at this point, since I really just do it for the nicotine.)

I am in the mood for something like… crispy bacon wrapped tilapia, served with garlic butter broccoli and carrots, or maybe a big burger, stuffed with grilled mushrooms and onions served on a toasted bun, or a cracked black pepper turkey sandwich with blue cheese, tomatoes, and cucumbers sandwiched ‘twixt two hearty slices of toasted whole wheat bread.

I just need to have the drive to get in the kitchen and make these things that I want.

I’m thinking that for the tilapia, I’d like to bread it before bacon-wrapping it, so I guess I’d need some egg whites and potato flakes (why yes, ‘breading’ with potato flakes is good and adds texture). While breading it, I might need to start the bacon in the oven, to give it a few minutes’ head start — I found out through experimenting that wrapping the bacon around the tilapia and baking them at the same time will result in overcooking the fish if I am not careful,  while trying to get the bacon crispy.

Once breaded and the bacon’s had a few minutes to start, I’d want to (quickly, because it’s f’n hot!) wrap the tilapia with the bacon, and return them to the oven for baking.

This might turn out quite delicious.

I noted that I wanted to be able to run it from the command line at some point.

I managed to pull this off in a couple of iterations of the script, and as such, I am happy with that.

I offer my little script up for people.

It can be had here: wp-tattler.tar.bz2

To run it, you need shell/command line access and PHP5. You may have to change the shebang. chmod it to executable status (chmod ugo+rx ttlr.php worked for me). cd to a directory that may contain a WP install, and call the script (for me, it was ~/path/to/ttlr.php).
You should get output like this:

[xial: ~/pxnet]$ ~/my/path/to/ttlr.php
WP Tattler 0.1.0
Local WordPress files claim to be: 2.9.1
But the database says: 2.9.1

Hopefully it’ll be a help to some stressed admin, even if it’s only a basic foundation for something written much better than a newbie like me can do.

Addendum: License is a BSD license.