I got an interesting email from an eBay member, letting me know that a seller I'd won a few auctions of wasn't the best person to be dealing with.

Apparently they'd paid for their auctions, and the items had not arrived, and the seller would not reply to their mails.

Hmm, now I'm not sure whether I should pay for my auctions, or contact eBay about it. I decided to just leave it for a few days, and try to find out what's going on.

The hard drive started grinding in the IPCop machine, and it went for ages. I don't know what it was, because I couldn't connect to it at all while it was doing it, but it was still routing, so I was still able to use the net (albeit slowly).

I just left it to finish doing whatever it was doing, and I went off the supermarket.

When I got there, I realised that I'd forgotten to bring the CD with me that I had to post to my mate, crap, I'm not going back to get it now, several kilometres away. I'll just post it some other day.

At some point in the afternoon, I managed to break my sunglasses, the arm snapped off on them. Ah, I knew this would happen.

I was chatting to my mate on IM, and he asked me about a long svideo cable, so he could watch videos from his PC on his tv.

I had a look at getting the parts to make up a long cable for him, but I didn't know when I'd be able to get the parts to make it.

I kept looking, and I found that just buying a cable, while a few dollars more, would probably be better, since I wouldn't have to make it, to start with, and because premade cables are usually a bit more resilient, custom cables have a habit of getting loose connections in the plugs, or the wires snapping off.

A while later, I had aMule running, and I found the performance to be a bit lacking. When I mucked around in the settings, I found that I still had it configured for when I was on dialup, while I waited for my ADSL to get connected.

Once I adjusted the settings, I found it to work quite a bit better, it wasn't saturating my connection anymore, and the incoming speed increased quite a bit.

I noticed the USB adapter for the Xbox (that goes in the controller port) hanging around, and I wondered if the light for my laptop would run off the Xbox controller port.

I plugged in the adapter, and booted up the xbox. I plugged in the light, and it worked. Heh.

Hmm, I noticed that the LED on the front of the Xbox went red for some reason. I wondered if it was because there were no controllers (only the IR receiver) and no output cable attached.

I turned it off and on again, and it did the same thing. Hmm. I plugged in the output cable, and turned it on again.

This time it came on, I could hear the DVD drive accessing the DVD I left in there, and then the light went green.

That must have been it, but that's pretty dumb, what if I installed linux on the Xbox, I'd want to be able to boot and run it headless, it's dumb if I need to have an output cable plugged in, but not even attached to anything.

I mucked around playing the bass guitar a bit, using the effects board thing I bought (PODxt).

I ran the speaker out of my laptop into the line in on the board, and then the line out of the board to the reciever, which was quite groovy, because then I could play along with the songs.

The pedal squeaking began to really annoy me.

I googled around, for details of adjusting it, and I read in the support pages on the POD page about adjusting it, they reckon you just take a couple of screws out, and then there's a screw to adjust the pedal.

I didn't realise this actually referred to a different device, and I took the bottom off the board. I couldn't see any screws to adjust the pedal.

I worked out how it worked though, with a big bolt as the pivot, so I just grabbed a small spanner, and a torx driver (though it was actually an allen head), and loosened the bolt a tiny bit.

This made the pedal a lot easier to use, but it was still squeaking a bit. It wasn't as bad though, so it'll have to do.

While I had the base off it, I looked over the PCBs, and noticed the line in jack is labelled as "jam along in" on the PCB, heh, funny, considering it's basically what I was doing.

I put it all back together, and I went to look for any custom patches on the internet, but I couldn't find any bass patches still.

I found some good guitar ones though, which would probably be good for my mate, because he's got the guitar version, on this page.

After "jamming along" a bit more, I decided to muck around with the preamp I bought a while ago, to allow me to use a microphone in the line in on a sound card, so I can do 2 channel recording with 1 card.

I realised that I wouldn't be able to use it with the Shure, mainly because that's around at my mate's place, and even if I had it, I don't have a cable with XLR jacks on both ends.

I wondered how it would go with the guitar input (since it also has a few 6.5MM inputs, but they're labelled as line in rather than mic in, so probably expect line level).

I plugged in the guitar, to one of the line ins, and was surprised to find that it amped it quite well. I must remember that, I could carry it with the guitar, since it's so small, and then blast out anywhere I've got access to a receiver/speakers.

Details about the preamp are here.