Computer cruft, TV antenna, and garden

Busy day with LOTS of activity.

Computer cruft
I'm continuing to work on the Fire Comcast TV affair.  BB now has my Toshiba and we've set her up with Skype so she can talk to David in Korea.  That leaves the old Asus laptop with the broken keyboard that I've been using to drive the TV free.  After thinking about it a bit I decided that since it is actually working fairly well I'll just continue to use it for the time being.

I might try a USB TV tuner to see if it can record.  Alternately, I've got another fairly large desktop upstairs that might have a PCIe buss that would accept a dual channel tuner.  I'll need to look into the options and decide what to do.

I also looked into downloading movies using NZB files and Usenet.  That looks interesting but I'm a bit uncertain about copyright issues.

No matter what I do I need to get the Asus laptop visible on the net with some shares.  It should have been simple but thanks to dear old Microsoft it was a bit of a challenge.  It turns out that in order for Windows 7 to see the machine LLTD (a protocol for network resource discovery) must be running on XP.  Sadly, the Asus runs XP.  More frustratingly Microsoft's docs say SP3 (the most recent/last service pack) supports LLTD.  As far as I can tell it doesn't, at least on the version of SP3 I installed a few weeks ago.  A good deal of web searching, most of which pointed in the wrong direction, finally revealed this hot fix.  It actually enables the LLTD and now the machine shows as it should.  Now it's easy to share folders etc so that I can store content on the Asus machine.

I picked up a nice Logitech 505 mouse to clean up the wire mess the old wireless mouse needed.  Works like a champ with at least 12' of range!  On sale $30 and worth every penny.

TV Antenna
I've made another fractal antenna using some foam insullation board that has foil on both sides.  I'll post photos etc. after I've had a chance to test it.  For the moment I'm doing other things (a dozen or so OTA channels are enough to start).  I may build a 'bow tie' antenna as well and perhaps experiment with other fractals.

Garden
All the rain did a number on the garden particularly the lettuce.  Hopefully a few days of dry will give things a chance to recover.  I'd bought 3 plastic tubs and have set them up as planters.  While doing so I found 5 more good size pots.  It looks like I'm good for planting space.

I also picked up some seeds for squash.  I'll start them with a view to planting them on the ground in some pots by the driveway where the vines won't be an issue.