My laptop is not better. It's less bad, but still very ill. Apparently, either the power subsystem in the laptop itself is busted, the connectors are messed up, or Dell shipped me another AC adapter that's only slightly less damaged than the old one. I can't trust my laptop, and it constantly flickers between on-AC/off-AC mode, the screen brightening and dimming as it goes. While jiggling the cord can put it back on AC, it quickly flickers off again. Heat appears to be related -- when the system is off, if I can position it right, it stays charging for a few minutes before it starts to flicker.. It is *very* frustrating, and if the eBay-supplied AC adapters don't fix it, I may need to either ship the whole thing back to Dell for repairs, or look at getting a new laptop. Argh.

My Neuros arrived today, and I spent a good amount of time getting it working. It turns out that Positron, the neuros Manager that I was pointed at, is badly broken, and despite my prodding at its source for quite some time (it's written in Python, which I dislike, but can code in when needed), I was unable to fix it. I suspect that part of the problem is that it was written for an older Python, and perhaps that Python 2.3 is itself a monstrosity. I found all sorts of strange behavior, including what looked like a perfectly sane file copy failing, the pyogg/pyvorbis packages segfaulting if you use them on more than one file within a script, and .. well, frankly I don't understand why they felt the need to do their own filesystem-to-filesystem copying anyhow. So, even if Python is to blame for it not working, the thing is a piece of junk to begin with. Instead, I went with a Java-based program called NDBM. Fast, easy, and while not as powerful as positron, it works (in fairness, the positron failures only happened when I was dealing with OGGs). So, now that I have it working, how is it? Answer: It's totally awesome! It can do all sorts of crazy things, it's reasonably attractive, has a nice interface, and is pretty fast when used as a disk. One note: while I've long scoffed at tagging my MP3/OGG files with author, genre, etc, the Neuros uses these things more than it does filenames, so I'm going to need to go back and either re-rip everything or give things accurate tags (the latter necessary for things which I either no longer have or never had the CD for). This may be a good opportunity to move a lot of my music into ogg format.. and for the rest of the stuff, I'll write a script. Wow, this thing is so cool. I can scoop the last of my data from my voice recorder too, recording it right to mp3 on the neuros, finally mail it to its new owner (sorry for the delay, J).. and I can give my USB keychain drive to someone new (I think I know who'd appreciate it the most). With 40G of storage, I have plenty of room to store a lot more than music on my neuros..

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that a friend pointed me at a site where people can pass useful things to people who want them.. here's an url that'll help you find a local branch. For Pittsburghers, I believe you'll want to join "theburghfreecycle" group. w00t!

Oh, two new TMBG CDs arrived in the mail today. Hurray! So yes, it takes a lot to cheer me up with my laptop ill, but I have enough good-ness to do it.