Back when I was still in high school, I lusted after a particular subnotebook computer that had just come onto the market. It had a 486BL2-50 processor, a 7.7 inch screen at 640x480, 200 Megabyte hard drive, and 4 megs of ram. $1800. It was a mere 10.1"x7.2"x1.7" and only 4 pounds back in 1994. Needless to say, I never managed to buy that system, but as a graduation present my parents bought me a $800 Thinkpad 755CE.

I loved that system, and especially enjoyed the TV card that I bought for it. In the time before PSone's came out with their little LCD screen, that was the best way to play console games. It ran OS/2 Warp 3.0 perfectly and I used it for the first 2 years I was in college. After that, I pretty much abandoned PC compatible systems as my portable units. I used Palm Pilot Pro's, Palm 3, Palm 3C, Tapwave Zodiac, and Garmin Ique3600, and even had a keyboard that worked with some of those systems.

I'm back to a PC compatible portable unit now though, and this one is even better than the 510c. This one is 8.9"x6.9"x1.5" (1.2"x0.3"x0.2" smaller than the 510C and even smaller than the P2000 at work), it has a 1024x600 screen, a full pound and a half lighter than the 510C, and the screen is significantly larger. 100x the storage capacity, a processor that is at least 320x as fast, and 256x as much memory... and this one clocked in at only $280!

Asus EEE 901, I've already replaced the OS with a version of Ubuntu and it's just a great system. Having this smaller unit though makes me realize that my goals with the 510C were unrealistic though. I doubt it would have ever fit in my inside coat pocket... I may need to build a custom coat pocket just for this unit though.

Trying to install Windows 2000 off a USB drive is a thorn in my side though. I suspect I'll just need to fork out the $70 for a USB cd drive... (Cutting it short here at 5 paragraphs for STRedwolf's benefit. ;)

I don't know why, but Microsoft is always there for me... when I have problems with my computer, they're the first ones to step to the plate and make everything just that much worse.

I bought a retail copy of Vista awhile back, and had installed it to my old Sempron system, then that thing left a glowing crater... Then I installed it to my wife's computer. She bought a laptop, so I purged it off. Now I build my own computer a month ago, and it just won't activate automatically no matter what I do. They want me to buy another copy. So I call them up. They have some vague prompts that if you don't answer exactly right, kick you over to a random tech support person in India that you have to assure that you're only installing it on one computer. Of course, they barely understand what you're saying and it's hard to explain that it was on other computers, but it's a retail copy so you're allowed to move it from system to system...

Well, a month after I built my new system with vista the motherboard stopped booting, giving me a SMBIOS error. I just happened to have a board lying around that would work with it, but even though it's booted up, Vista is now whining that it needs to be activated again. Even though the processor is exactly the same, even though the hard drive is exactly the same. Even though the CD drive and Video card is exactly the same. Because I changed one part, it needs to be activated again. And I have to talk to a random person in India again to get it activated. Way to add insult to injury microsoft. I'm sure that when my $200 crossfire board gets back from Asus, I'm going to have to activate it yet a 3rd time with some random person in India!

Come on, Stardock. Write your stuff for another operating system. Please! You're about the only reason that I'm still using this bastard operating system...

I mentioned how I was still using the same old Logitech mouse that I bought years ago back in February.

This mouse gets between 1 and 2 months of battery life per set. It works great, but I recently heard about a new series of mice from logitech. Laser mice such as the MX600, which claim battery lives in the 6 month range. Not only that but it has far more buttons than the older one.

A forward and backward thumb button, a zoom button and 100% button set, plus the standard 3 buttons.

The ones that caused me some problems though were the left and right scroll, and left and right scroll click buttons built into the scroll wheel. I kept pressing the scroll wheel down and wondering why the middle click wasn't taking effect.

It turns out that it's hard to tell when you push down on the mouse button if you pushed it straight down, or more to the left or right. I found a program that lets me reassign these though. Now the right and left scroll click are also middle button clicks. The plus on this is that middle clicks take far less effort. I normally have my finger on the left mouse button, right up next to the scroll wheel, that way with minimal effort I can scroll, and click, only having to really move my finger to do the middle mouse button click. Now I just push on the side of the scroll wheel and it does that click as well. Hurrah for laziness!

Now I just need to replace my keyboard, so I can take my old mouse and keyboard to work and replace this HP keyboard and cheap ball mouse I use there.

I must have been taxing my poor windows box too much this week with all that Eve Online playing. It's gone and croaked itself. tried narrowing down the possibilities and determined that it is most likely the motherboard.

Yanked my hard drives out and stuck them in alternate linux boxes.

In the meantime, I managed to get Eve Online working pretty well on my linux system, moved the sound over, moved the windows box monitor over, etc. I tried booting the windows drive in KVM, but alas windows is too bloody stupid to recognize when the drivers should change. I'm going to install it from scratch in kvm to run those very few applications that really need windows and don't need a 3d card.

Everett Kaser stuff should work fine with wine. My tax software and so forth should work in kvm. The only things I will not have access to are things on my U3 drive (I'll have to see if i can get this working in kvm), Galactic Civilizations 2, Mr. Robot, and Starscape. It sure would be nice if there was a way to make a virtual 3d card that a windows virtual computer could latch onto.

More depressingly, this is the same computer I promised to my brother when I got my upgrade next month. Grrrr... I dropped the carcass off at his house in case he wants to try swapping the motherboard out on it.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2007/200707/20070730/article_325330.htm

This says that the voltages can reach 380v inside the case of a computer, but really, in a modern computer only the inside of the PSU would ever have anything over 12v. Did he take the case off his power supply too?

The only exception I can see would be if he has one of those cases where there's a cable running from the external power port and the power supply (Like my Antec Aria and Antec 2u20 cases, though they both have electrical tape covering the posts in the connector) and then it wouldn't be more than 220v in china. 220v can kill you though...

The other alternative is that they're using substandard computer parts in china where the power supply innards are exposed.

For quite awhile, I've been using anime and game characters for most of my systems. Precis from Star Ocean 2, Ein from Cowboy Bebop, Ruri from Nadesico, Lain from Serial Experiments Lain, Bebedora from Arc the Lad 4. My game systems usually have Final Fantasy related names. Rikku the PS2, Penelo the PS3...

When thinking about Bebedora and the reasons for naming it that, I came up with a new naming scheme. Bebedora in the game is a puppet and a puppet master, controls enemies like puppets. Bebedora the system has my keyboard and mouse, and controls all the other systems with that keyboard and mouse. What's another interesting puppeteer? Nessus the Pierson's Puppeteer from Ringworld. I then started naming all my systems based on this.

precis->louiswu (Kind of the main character, and also the main outside server.)
ruri->teela (The lucky server that gets all the new parts)
ein->speaker (speaker-to-animals, my firewall. :)
bebedora->nessus (The puppeteer, only windows box)

I'll probably keep the game system names the same though.

( Potential parts for server upgrade )

I can't decide which system I want to be my secondary desktop. Bebedora is currently my secondary, but I think it may end up having less memory and being slower than my new server system. I'm going to be mirroring the home drive across both systems, and they'll probably have an almost identical feature and software set, so technically I could use either of them as a secondary desktop. The only thing I'd really need to move over would be the TV card from bebedora.

I'm also wondering how much of a challenge the bidirectional merge will be between both systems and if rsync will be sufficient. Both systems will need identical password files for one thing. I guess I could continue with my tradition of throwing all shared configuration files like this into subversion. :) One problem would be if I cleaned up my folder. When the sync hits it'll copy back all of the stuff from bebedora that I just erased...

Maybe a one-directional copy with Bebedora using an nfs share over /home would be better... Of course, if you put the files in /home, how would you back them up when /home is covered up? if you put them somewhere else, how would you quickly fallback if ruri went down? Maybe the solution is to make /home be a folder full of symlinks to /usr/local/home/*? that way you can back it up and still have all the applications work when /home is uncovered...

All my services on Kaolla have been moved to Bebedora now. I'm going to begin the process of making Kaolla be Precis' backup server next week. This will be a little simpler because Kaolla won't be acting as a live server unlike the newruri/bebedora situation. It'll be a one-way mirror of the entire hard drive to a partition on kaolla's hard drive, then a special rescue disc that will boot into this copied system if Precis ever goes down. Much simpler than trying a bidirectional sync.

Has anyone done a system like this before? Maybe some examples would be helpful.

I picked up the Antec Aria case last night. It looks like I'll need to scrounge up $150 next paycheck to fill it out with components. It'll be my first 64-bit AMD system when it's done. :) It's quite a cute case, but much larger than the Biostar system I have at work. The plus side is that it has 4 total drive bays. that's 2 more than the other SFF's I've worked with.

This one will probably take the place of Ruri. I took a good look at what I really used Kaolla for and decided that it could easily be merged with Bebedora without much performance loss. I'll be back down to 4 total systems again (including one SOC router) but they'll be much higher quality computers overall. Only the firewall will be under 1600mhz.

I also looked into what it would take for my next main system upgrade. Between the MB, Processor, and Video card, it would be $488. That would net me a relatively new Nvidia 6600 card with DDR2, gigabit ethernet (yay), and an Athlon 64x2 3800+. With that out of the way I can shift Lain's existing mb/cpu/vid to Bebedora. As long as the new components for lain are quiet, that should drop the sound level of my computer center by quite a bit. Between the two of these it should also let me get my Distributed.net RC5-72 speed back up as well. With all these Intel Northwood chips I've had to shift everything to OGR-25...

I'm going to need to get a gigabit ethernet card for the new ruri, though...

So says the IBM commercial. Unfortunately, my wife watched these commercials and has started complaining about our own proliferation of servers. I have 2 network servers, 2 desktops, 1 firewall (small form factor), and 1 Web server (offsite)

Short of backup servers for Precis and Ein, I believe I currently have the optimal number of systems for my house. Precis resides at my work and serves up all my web pages and web applications. A hot spare for this would be really handy to me. Ein is my WRT54GS router with OpenWRT. I haven't been able to upgrade it though since I started working with it because it's always in use. Another little WRT54GS would be handy...

To appease my wife, I told her that I was considering replacing Kaolla with a SFF system. Kaolla is my house DNS and DHCP server. It's a little P2/300 and takes up a large bit of space for what it does. I was going to merge its functionality with Ein but found out ein couldn't handle Subversion. All my DNS and DHCP Config files are kept on Precis' Subversion server so they can be quickly replicated to all of my systems. The solution? I'm considering a Mac Mini for replacing Kaolla, and maybe even offloading more from Ruri.

Getting Kaolla was just kind of a lucky coincidence. Ruri was my main DNS/DHCP/SAMBA/Print/Jabber/etc server for ages. My Playstation 2 (Rikku) with Linux served as my backup network server for use whenever Ruri was down. It got really tiresome to reboot Rikku into linux every time I needed to take Ruri down. I got ahold of Kaolla the same time as Rikku kind of became a permanent DVD player for the house.

Maybe the Mac Mini would let me offload the job of Primary Samba Browser, Print serving, etc from Ruri over. I'm not sure quite why I want to move everything off Ruri that I can yet, but it unnerves me to be so reliant on it. Maybe it's the fact that it's OS hasn't been reinstalled since 1999. Or perhaps that I have every shred of important data stored on it... Its 160gig drive makes it a very tempting target to fill up. I guess the fact that it's an Athlon 850 with an HP OEM motherboard and a VIA southbridge. It's getting rather crusty really. I'm really not sure what to do about it. At least I've started backing up my home folder to DVD-Rs.

I would rather put that money into upgrading Lain though. The cost of a Mac Mini would net me a low end Athlon 64x2... That would let me shift Lain's hardware over to Bebedora which is the biggest cause of noise in my house right now. I really want to trash Ruri's hardware, but I'm not sure what I should replace it with.

Anyone have a ~$200-250 solution for an small form factor server? It'd need to handle at least 1 gig of storage space, ~300mhz or higher performance and preferably at least 64-128 megs of ram. Subversion (client), DHCP, DNS, Samba (as a WINS server and Master Browser), and a small assortment of other tiny servers. This would let me get rid of the hulking P2/300 system and still have almost full redundancy on my home network...

Why yes, it can be says this nifty article from mindjack. It reiterates the same things that people like Eric Flint have been saying all along. Digital piracy promotes word of mouth and eventually makes the product even more successful than it would have been otherwise. He uses Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who as his examples.

He also throws together an different way of advertising that would allow pirated (or freely released on the i-net) shows to still have advertising and still make the producers money.

I doubt the TV industry and content producers are going to be impressed right away with the article. It's more likely that they'll be dragged kicking and screaming while destroying tons of consumer protections until they eventually capitulate and participate in new forms of distribution or die off slowly.

It looks like I'm going to have yet another problem once the PS3 comes out very similar to the problem I had with the PS2. I'm cheap. I scrounge up parts and hack together interfaces between inexpensive parts for my entertainment center. Back when I first bought the PS2, I only had a 20 inch standard TV with no composite inputs. Only a single Coax jack. I used an old VCR as an interface converter to link the two together. This worked great for games, but it rendered utterly unusable for playing DVDs due to the MPAA's demanded Macromedia copy protection. I limped along for awhile using my wife's computer to play DVDs (which was unstable and overheated, skipped, etc.) until finally I just gave up and bought a TV card for my computer and used the PS2 through that to watch DVDs. (Coincidentally, one could also record dvds through that system. So much for macromedia being decent copy protection. All it was is a huge inconvenience for the consumer.)

The PS3 has HDMI ports on it. I have a DVI tv now. HDMI is technically the same in signaling as DVI, but the HDMI standard requires HDCP copy protection while it is optional in DVI. I can get an adapter for HDMI to DVI, but I believe my DVI monitor lacks this copy protection. Some sites have said that it will not be used for Games and Film, but I believe otherwise. I'm pretty sure that BD-Rom movies will require HDCP copy protection to be shown. It's likely they may even require it of standard DVD-Rom movies. This means I'm right back where I was last generation. Because of MPAA mandated copy protection, I can no longer get full use out of my hardware. The sad thing is, they're hurting themselves 2 separate ways here (Customer loyalty and word of mouth sales) without even dealing with the style of piracy that actually takes money from their pockets (chinese pirated copies that are sold on the street and on ebay.) I don't as of yet see a way to view movies on my LCD screen in full resolution. I guess that will mean I'll be less likely to buy sony's little Bluray disc movies as they will not provide a quality boost over DVDs if I can't view them on my HD Lcd screen.

http://searchviews.com/archives/2005/06/msn_spaces_supp.php

You know though, China may have had nothing to do with this. At least as far as the words "freedom" and "independence" are concerned. I would think that those two words would run contrary to their "Windows Everywhere" project and they would be willing to ban them even if they weren't doing it for China.

Microsoft recently released a document to various gaming organizations. Only one site I know of published it with a huge warning up front that it was direct from microsoft with no editing whatsoever and was extremely slanted. Further research shows that its slant approaches vertical. Since then I've noticed on many gaming sites that Microsoft fanboys have been abusing these numbers that they apparently don't even understand and using them to tout the superiority of their choice of two systems that aren't even OUT yet. The Sony fanboys understanding of the technical issues seems even more lacking and they seem incapable of coming up with a coherent response. I'm going to start with the microsoft document and refute some of its points then move on to some common misconceptions I've seen on the various gaming boards. It will get a bit hairy and technical here. Beware.

( hairy technical essay-thing )

All in all, it's not the power of the systems but the games and how the developers use that power that will determine the winners of the console war. I suggest everyone chill out and wait until the PS3 is released to start bickering about which console is best. For now from the stats, it's far from certain which one is truly better.

Edit: Replaced a subscription link with a free one of the same story. Take that, registration required sites!

Amd says Intel's dual core isn't really a dual core
( Rambling observations )
( My upgrade plans... )

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000640041047/

Sure would be nice to have a single high-density standard and not have to go over the whole vhs - betamax war again.

I've found yet another project to keep me busy. I've been running my own firewall on an older linux based system, K6/166 with low memory and a small hard drive. It's in an old style AT Desktop case that takes up a corner of my living room. I've been wanting to replace it with a smaller router for awhile, but could never find a hardware one that did what I wanted. One of the main sticking points was the lack of an oidentd package that would forward the ident requests to the appropriate internal system. I'd been digging around for board-level products with two ethernet ports and a linux compatible processor. All of them were in the $300-600 range or didn't even have a site you could order them from.

So I stuck with my K6/166. But today I ran into a project that could finally change all of that. http://openwrt.org/

It's a linux distro... For Linksys WRT54G routers! It's perfect. Now I just need to buy a WRT54GS router so I can have the 200mhz processor, 32mb ram, and 8mb flash all in a little tiny box. Cheapest local price was $89.

http://news.com.com/2010-1071_3-5057321.html?tag=fd_nc_1

I guess that's why I used Debian for so long. Too bad it's not currently keeping up on the releases. The Progeny Componentized Linux looks like one to watch though. Maybe I'll keep the Athlon 850 around once I upgrade Ruri to an Athlon 64 and use it to try new distros out.

I'm thinking of switching to Ubuntu soon here though. Maybe this weekend.

( BOWFNAR )

Howard Tayler recently posted a car analogy to linux distributions. He says that Turn signals etc should be standardized in consumer cars. Turn signals, lights, hazard blinkers, etc are all methods of communicating to other drivers. Almost every distro of linux is standardized in that they communicate in the same way to the outside world. They all follow the RFCs for TCP and other protocols. These are your OPEN standards. How about other standards that apply to cars. Say the ability to install new features such as car stereos. Most linuxes are standardized on this as well. Almost all linuxes have POSIX compatibility. This ensures that any standard posix app will not only work on Linux, but almost every UNIX out there as well! Sure, you have to either compile them for your distro, get a package for your distro, or use a package converter, but you have to do the same thing on cars as well. I seem to recall that less than 3 car manufacturers actually put standard sized stereos in their cars. After-market stereos usually need an adapter kit (package converter) to fit the standard stereo in their non-standard dashes. The united linux people are suggesting that all distros standardize on one system, like RPM. This is like passing a law that all cars sold in the united states must have a standard radio slot in them instead of letting the market create tools to adapt the stereos to the cars.

What we really don't want is any one corporation deciding what we should and shouldn't do because they own the "Standard" linux. We don't want to restrict individual freedom in places where interoperability isn't an issue. A tyranny of the masses would be just as bad as a corporate tyranny in this regard, IMHO.

If there's one thing that annoys me it's arguing for a corporation dominated mono-culture (bad thing, see microsoft) under the guise of arguing for standardization (good thing.) Standardization has already happened with linux in almost every important location. It just hasn't happened on the shelf. The free market should decide that as well, not some corporate suits or corporate suit owned politicians.

It appears that I now have 99 Gmail invites. Very strange. I woke up today and both of my accounts had 50. I had to see if it was a string manipulation bug, so I sent one to a gmail aggregator. It dropped to 49. Anyone heard anything about this?