Car stuff admin on 21 Sep 2005 11:35 pm
Dark. No Light.
It is a dark and stormy night. The power went out. The UPS made a lot of noise. After leisurely shutting down the desktop computer it is eerily quiet. Also it is dark, as I have mentioned.
Note to self: get a UPS for the TiVo. Also include the Firewire drive on the other UPS.
All the networking gear — in the living room “data center” — is not on the UPS. I could plug it in but I doubt that’d be very useful. For the moment my laptop is an island, which will last about another 2 1/2 hours unless the power comes back. If I get terribly bored working on my self evaluation (and “dry-blogging”) I’ll pop in the Hitchhiker’s DVD and watch it with the other audio commentary.
I don’t need to guard my car in the garage, I’d wager, since it’s very dark down there (thus removing one of a potential thief’s convenience factors) and I could very easily hear the alarm since it is eerily quiet, as I have mentioned.
Speaking of car security, which I’ve been investigating a lot since the break-in, the PowerLock seems to be the best anti-theft device you can get. It won’t necessarily prevent your steering column from getting thrashed, unless the potential perps know how to read window stickers (which I think I’ve established is not the case with the dumb-asses around here), but it is “guaranteed” to prevent them from hot-wiring the car. The price isn’t too bad, $200-ish + installation. I’m going to see if anyone around here sells ‘em.
I did order a security camera today, however. Not a crappy X10 camera — I borrowed one and couldn’t get a decent video signal from across the room so I didn’t even attempt sending video through all the concrete and metal between my apartment and the car. (Interestingly my 2.4 GHz cordless phone works perfectly fine by the car so it’s theoretically possible to get a clean wireless video signal from there to here.) What I bought was the MicroEye Digital Video Capture Camera (aka Home Guard). It’s 1/2 the price and has 1/8th of the features of a MemoCam, but it should suffice. All I need to do is point it at the car and any scofflaws who meander past will get their picture taken, covertly. It’s entirely self-contained so no wiring is required, it saves 2,000-8,000 pictures on its smallish (64 meg) flash memory and outputs video directly to a TV. The picture quality should be adequate, I’ll find out in a few days when it arrives.
(and now, after a 3+ hour power outage and just as I hit the red-zone on my battery, we’re back online! And right in time for MythBusters and Top Gear. I’ll have to consult the internet for the “Lost” premiere…)