Cars and Books and Discs and Stuff
Feb. 28th, 2004 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWell, yesterday my Dad came up to bring a battery for my car, and with the battery in place we drove it down to Aurora, to the mechanic my Dad uses because it's less expensive than "city" mechanics, and because he rode the bus with her in his school days. Given that it was where I got my replacement battery back in October and it was still under warranty, that also made the battery replacement part of it less expensive than it would have been. I'm going to be without a car until Wednesday, when I'm going to go down and share a visit with Dad and bring the repaired car back up. Until then, it looks like I'm riding the bus in and wheedling rides out of cow-orkers if I can to get back.
Something funny I've noticed lately...my upload rate over my cablemodem has suddenly about doubled. I wonder if the cable company finally realized that a 128 kilobit upload cap was just too restrictive compared to all the DSL companies that are starting to offer 256 or 384, or if it's just a temporary glitch in their capping. Well, either way it's letting me do a good job helping to seed the Baen CDROM ISO files that I have. I've posted links to the ISOs a few places, and downloading's really taken off. According to the BitTorrent tracker, there have been a total of 725 CDs downloaded as of the writing of this post. No, wait, make that 726.
One thing I've found is that the Mercedes Lackey This Scepter'd Isle ISO is small enough (about 133 megs) that you can actually fit the files on the same CD with David Drake's Far Side of the Stars if you use an ISO file extractor like MagicISO to pull the files out and put them in directories of their own. Feels like less of a waste of space to do it that way. I've also been experimenting with burning all five CDs, plus the three BlackMask.com public domain ebook CDs I have, to a DVD. They fit quite well; in fact there's about 1.3 gigs of space to spare, which feels like kind of a waste but oh well. I plan to get the next two public domain CDs from BlackMask at some point, and that should just about fill the disc. Then I'll be able to give away a whole DVD full (with some duplications and things among the Baen CDs, granted) of free e-reading to people.
My ultra-cheap DVD-ROM discs ($14 for a pack of 25) came yesterday. After some experimentation (and a few firmware flashes to the burner), I've come to the conclusion that you get what you pay for; they take about three times as long as the more expensive DVD+ROMs to burn, and will only burn data discs, not DVD-X-Copy copies of DVDs. Still, that's better than nothing, and pretty inexpensive considering the amounts of data involved.
Think I'll go find some breakfast, and see what can be done around here without a car.
Something funny I've noticed lately...my upload rate over my cablemodem has suddenly about doubled. I wonder if the cable company finally realized that a 128 kilobit upload cap was just too restrictive compared to all the DSL companies that are starting to offer 256 or 384, or if it's just a temporary glitch in their capping. Well, either way it's letting me do a good job helping to seed the Baen CDROM ISO files that I have. I've posted links to the ISOs a few places, and downloading's really taken off. According to the BitTorrent tracker, there have been a total of 725 CDs downloaded as of the writing of this post. No, wait, make that 726.
One thing I've found is that the Mercedes Lackey This Scepter'd Isle ISO is small enough (about 133 megs) that you can actually fit the files on the same CD with David Drake's Far Side of the Stars if you use an ISO file extractor like MagicISO to pull the files out and put them in directories of their own. Feels like less of a waste of space to do it that way. I've also been experimenting with burning all five CDs, plus the three BlackMask.com public domain ebook CDs I have, to a DVD. They fit quite well; in fact there's about 1.3 gigs of space to spare, which feels like kind of a waste but oh well. I plan to get the next two public domain CDs from BlackMask at some point, and that should just about fill the disc. Then I'll be able to give away a whole DVD full (with some duplications and things among the Baen CDs, granted) of free e-reading to people.
My ultra-cheap DVD-ROM discs ($14 for a pack of 25) came yesterday. After some experimentation (and a few firmware flashes to the burner), I've come to the conclusion that you get what you pay for; they take about three times as long as the more expensive DVD+ROMs to burn, and will only burn data discs, not DVD-X-Copy copies of DVDs. Still, that's better than nothing, and pretty inexpensive considering the amounts of data involved.
Think I'll go find some breakfast, and see what can be done around here without a car.