Fri, 31 Aug 2007
Bicycle Frame Painted
A month and half ago a chain on my bicycle cracked, so I have decided to do a bigger-than-usual maintainance work on my bike. Apart from the other tasks, I have decided to let the frame and fork newly painted. The current paint was more than 10 years old. I googled for the bicycle service shops in Brno who were also able to get the frame painted. I have found only the RockRoad.CZ shop.
I went there and ordered new painting for the frame and fork, as well as some other repairs. They were a bit surprised that I wanted a green color (they said that blue is more common these times). However, they have accepted the order, and said that it will be ready in a week or so.
Two weeks after that, the frame was still not ready. Another two weeks, the person on the other end of the phone said that they do not have a green color, so they are going to use a blue paint instead. I have rejected that, demanding that they return the frame, as I wanted to look for another paint shop. The serviceperson discussed it with his boss, and then replied to the phone: "It has already been painted blue". WTF? After repeatedly saying I do not want a blue bike (as I have most of the accessories green) and several other phone calls and two personal visits (I have even brought a voice recorder with me, just in case), I have finally managed to get the frame from them without paying anything.
For a moment I have been thinking about keeping the blue color, but after seeing their work, it is a no way: the color is unevenly distributed, with occasional drops of paint left (see the endings of the fork), etc. The message is: stay away from RockRoad.CZ (or at least from their painting services). And the question to my lazyweb is obvious: do you know about a good paintshop in Brno, which can paint bicycle frames?
1 replies for this story:
Peter Kruty wrote: Wow
This reminds me, that I should get my bike fixed as well. I would be pretty pissed off with this situation. Btw I was visiting you in the office two times and it seems that I'm really out of luck. I will give it another chance later :).
Reply to this story:
Thu, 30 Aug 2007
Svíčky 2007
Last weekend I took part in another puzzle-solving outdoor game, Svíčky. This time Svíčky took place in Jičín, which was quite far from Brno.
The first (and fatal, as we will see later) weak point of our team was the qualification. We were too busy to seriously solve the qualification tasks: we have solved only one puzzle, which allowed us to qualify. However, solving more would have given us the points which were later usable in the game itself.
I will not describe the whole game in detail, hopefully somebody will write a more detailed report. We were quite good, after the game we have found out that we were the first team at majority of the stages. We have arrived to the penultimate stage together with another team, Prahory. However, they had many points left from the qualification, so they have immediately used them to receive the solution, and even the rest of their remaining points allowed them to solve the last stage quite fast. As a result, we have lost to them three hours during the last two stages. The Prahory team won, finishing the game at 3:43 am, while we were the second at 6:48am. After that, there was a long gap - further teams started to arrive to the final stage at about 11am, and only one more team has solved the last puzzle (they were short of time, but they had a laptop with them, so they have computed the solution using frequency analysis).
The second place is not so bad - after long time another puzzle-solving outdoor game where we have solved all stages before the time limit (my previous one was - I think - TMOU 4). As for the puzzles - Svíčky 2007 was excellent! The only puzzle we did not like - as we have found later - could be solved by a more elegant way than we did, so even that one was OK.
0 replies for this story:
Reply to this story:
Sat, 11 Aug 2007
The Best Deal
I normally try to avoid looking at banner ads in the web pages. However, today I have seen something which I nominate for my Daily WTF award :-)
It was an ad to a digital SLR camera (which is why I have looked at it at all).
The screenshot is cropped, it was twice that high, with the other half
describing the camera and saying that Circuit City offers the Best deal.
WTF?
0 replies for this story:
Reply to this story:
Fri, 10 Aug 2007
Frying Pan
Our relatively new (~1 year) frying pan with teflon coating is becoming more and more sticky, so we are looking for a replacement. However, I don't think buying the new frying pan every year is the right solution to the problem.
So far the average lifetime of our frying pans has been slightly more than a year, with almost daily usage. After that, it either become sticky, or the teflon coating started to crack and fall off. And we are (at least moderately) cautious about the pan surface - we don't use sharp accessories inside of it, we don't put it in the dishwasher, etc.
The Wikipedia article on pans (marked as [[citation needed]] :-) says the following:
With the exception of cast iron frying pans, a Teflon coating can be applied to the surface of the pan to make it non-stick. This is popular for frying pans sold to the home user but less so for those used by professional cooks and restaurants. Cast iron naturally becomes non-stick through use and so would not benefit from a Teflon coating.
Is it true - do I want a cast iron pan? So far the Teflon-coated frying pans seem like an example of a product with a built-in obsolescence, designed to keep the manufacturer's cash flow steady. What about other materials (like titanium)? My dear lazyweb, what frying pan do you use/recommend, and what is the average lifetime of it?
5 replies for this story:
Honza wrote: Tefal worked for me
Hi, I bought a teflon pan from Tefal about 5 years ago and it worked great all this time. The surface is a bit scratched now, but probably due to sharp utensils a friend of mine used it on it - it is not sticky. I'm a single user, but I use it quite frequently (2x a week or more). I read somewhere that it helps if the teflon cools down when covered with oil (ie. it is better if you do not wash it immediately after usage). I'm not sure about the explanation why this help (it allegedly helps teflon to stay non-sticky), but it seemed to work.Also, I wash it thoroughly only from outside. From inside, I get of the remnants of food, but let the teflon stay a bit oily. Of course, I also had a few bad experiences with no-name teflon pans, so maybe I was just lucky this time.
Vasek Stodulka wrote:
Also for me Tefal rulez. I have been using it for five years frequently and it was only scratched by knives. Now we have two new Tefals from wedding. You can even use a non-sharp metal tools (like spoon) on pan and they will not damage it. It is also written in manual that you can and it is for me a guarantee, that Tefal is a quality pan. Other manufacturers restricts using of any metal things on the pan, in other case they revoke a guarantee. And with non-sticky cast pans I do not know. We have one iron pan (probaly not a cat one) without teflon and it is definitely so sticky, that you must use a bunch of oil to cook an egg.
Yenya wrote: Tefal
Hmm, I think two out of three of my last frying pans were Tefal. I did not find them more reliable than other brands.
Jan Kokoska wrote:
I can recommend Le Creuset cookware (e.g. http://www.dokuchyne.cz/lecreuset/), it's been great for the 2 years I've had it and you get a free replacement if anything happens to it that I've heard other people to exercise successfully. The warranty is 10 years for non-stick cookware like frying pans that you're asking about (for wok, it's lifetime). It's definitely not cheap though, but you can find yourself a discount on eBay or elsewhere (that's what I did). But someone famous once said that he wasn't rich enough to buy cheap things...
anicka wrote:
One of my friends bought an iron pan in some Chinese shop in Prague, quite expensive one for Chinese shops standards, by the way. He was advised to do some magic with an oil and his pan at the beginning (I do not remember exactly) and he got a pan which is less sticky than any of the teflon pans I have ever had (even the Tefal ones). I know I have not helped you much, but at least I can confirm your story. (BTW, you surely know that eating fried meals every day is not the best choice... ;-))
Reply to this story:
Thu, 09 Aug 2007
Spare CPU Cycles
Pavel, since you don't have comments enabled in your blog, I will post a reply to your blog post about using spare client's CPU cycles here:
Actually, I've got a similar idea back in the AltaVista times. I think the problem for Google would be a very bad PR as soon as somebody discovers it. On the other hand, even these times my precious CPU cycles (and a power budget) is abused by stupid web sites (like a comment system at Neviditelný pes) who cannot get their Javascript written in an optimal way.
I think browsers should gradually be made aware of this problem: For example, the current Galeon (or its Gecko core) offers me to stop Javascript whose handling took more than 5 seconds). The statement "The browser is the operating system" will be more and more true. We will probably soon need a better internal scheduler for Javascript interpreters running in different windows/tabs (or maybe even preferences like increasing the priority for the foreground tab in the focused window).
BTW, thanks for the link to Eternity II. An interesting puzzle indeed, but why would anybody want to solve it without a computer? It sort of defeats the purpose of a puzzle - to use your brain. If you need challenges for your brain, go play Haluz 2007 instead.
3 replies for this story:
thingie wrote:
And your website can't finish loading because of some stupid technocrati.com js thing :-) I can have operating system which runs another operating system as a process inside, in that system I can have Java or .NET VM (which are almost operating systems too) that runs my browser... and now browser is going to become operating system too. Oh. Give me enough layers and I will move the world! :-)
Yenya wrote: Technorati
Stupid technorati, deleted. Thanks!
Yenya wrote: Layers
BTW, in the PDF presentation mentioned in the yesterday's post about PulseAudio there is an excellent sentence: "We should stop abstracting abstracted abstraction layers." :-)
Reply to this story:
Tue, 07 Aug 2007
PulseAudio
I run a dual-seated configuration on my home computer (two monitors, two keyboards, two mice, etc.). It works for most applications, but it has one problem, which I haven't found a solution for yet: sound. I have only one 6-channel sound card, and I would like to use it from both heads (ideally split to two channels for one user, two channels for the other one, and the remaining two channels for Music Player Daemon output, connected to the stereo in the living room).
There are big problems with multiple users accessing a single sound card - usually when some application from one user's session locks the sound card (or create the ALSA DMIX shared memory segment or whatever), other apps cannot use it (which is pretty annoying especially when an incoming call through Ekiga arrives).
The solution would be to use a sound server (such as EsounD or aRts). But unfortunately not all sound apps have plugins for the same sound server. Each sound server appears to invent its own new incompatible API. However, today I have found something which looks like it can fulfill my needs in this area, and even better, it will be included in the Fedora 8 (see the feature list of F8): the project named PulseAudio.
There is an interesting presentation (PDF warning) on PulseAudio. Hopefully it will be a project of a "what people really need" nature instead of the "not invented here, let's create our own solution" one. Does anybody know whether it is possible to configure PulseAudio for two users (as described in the first paragraph)? From the examples from the PDF presentation it seems possible.
1 replies for this story:
petr_p wrote:
PulseAudio seems good. I've long time experience with NAS and ESound. NAS supports bidirectional streaming (i.e. recording), it's widelly supported and uses DISPLAY enviroment to get server address (ideal for terminal server). But it suffers from delays and poor sound quallity. ESound provides finer sound, but has problems with volume managment, it crashes sometimes and ALSA backend is not natively supported. PulseAudio has new design and great interface. I'm going to test it too.