Tech
-
Wow
The $100 dollar laptop appears to exist for real.
-
Just ordered
Visual Studio 2005. Full scouting report in around 3 weeks or so.
-
Quick round up
- It’s now six nights of rioting in Paris.
- Secret CIA detention camps around the world. I’m reminded of Wretchard’s line one time that when Truman ordered Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed, he had “the sand” to do it under his own name.
- I finally got the proper wireless adapter for my Tivo, which I got to work without incident. Sadly it uses Wep, but with 3-4 totally unprotected networks around me I would imagine I’m not worth pursuing.
- It’s amazing how much lists and visual sign of progress can affect one’s mood.
-
Thank you Mister Walton
Late last night my old D-Link router died. What was I to do? No electronics store opened before 10:00 AM and I had a full day planned with projects due.
I know (I thought), I’ll just head over to the Wal-Mart off of Memorial Drive. Then I remembered, the Avondale City Council decided that they preferred an abandoned building to a useful store.
So I had to drive to Dunwoody to find one that was open at 6:00 in the morning. They did have a nice Linksys Wireless G with 4 ethernet ports for a very good price.
That’s been my day so far. Fighting the good fight against zoning.
-
Weird and creepy
The EFF does good work says the WaPo
Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color PrintersThe feds claim that they do it to stop counterfeiters, but that seems a bit ridiculous. All the more reason to never register hardware.
Quotes:Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of underground, self-published literature. “It’s disturbing that something on this scale, with so many privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of publicity,” Schoen said. And it’s not as if the information is encrypted in a highly secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting samples from printers around the world and then handed them off to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week. “We were able to break this code very rapidly,” Schoen said. How long before this code floats into Open Source?
-
Weirdness
So, my computer is working again, with the old motherboard (GigaByte makes a tough one it seems), the new HSF (Zalman, very nice) and a quiet case fan, and for some reason the room is now around 3 degrees cooler than was with the prior setup. Very strange.
And I got the condenser mic. A full report tomorrow.
-
Peculiar
So naturally I try to use the motherboard I thought I’d broken one more time, because this time, it just might work!
And for a while, it seems to work, it goes through a post and the whole deal. I finish reassembling everything and it refuses to boot into windows. It goes about halfway through the process and stalls.
I then am in the process of writing down the model number of the motherboard so I can exchange the new one I got last night for one with the proper socket when I notice the AGP card is a bit askew. I shove it back in a little bit and presto! It all works. So basically all of my effort was for nothing then. And it’s still noisy.
-
Toil and trouble
First I break my motherboard trying to install a new heat-sink and fan, than the new one I get turns out to be a different socket type than the CPU. I really hate computers at the moment.
The new USB MIC comes today though
-
Oddly enough
I decide to check and see exactly where in Texas my upstream web host is located and I see
Many of VIP-Hosting’s customers have been requesting information regarding our data center operations during hurricane Rita. The VIP-Hosting data center is in a reinforced building and is equipped with a generator that will come online within ten seconds of a power outage. All servers are on UPS backups that will sustain power for the few seconds it will take for the generator to come online.
The voice communication system in the Houston area is experiencing heavy traffic so we ask that any non priority support issues and other requests be submitted through the integrated ticket system during this time.
Which is a good sign. It would seem that Texas is much more prepared than Louisiana for one of these things.
-
Go Dell!
To my great surprise I received my new laptop today. I hadn’t even received a notice that it had shipped! Actually they said it would ship this coming Monday.
My first impression is quite impressed. The machine is tiny and light, and from what I can tell quite fast. The keyboard is going to take some getting used to, but I think this will work out quite well. And as it turns out I have 2 unsecured wireless access points within range (though I’m currently using my wired network as I type this blog post on the new machine).
Any suggestions as to what a laptop needs?