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Hardware

Cursed, I tell you

I’m cursed I tell you, cursed.

It’s a well known fact in my circle of friends not to let me build PCs. Something always seems to happen. I’d guess I have about a 30-35% success rate on the first try that PC’s I build work.

One of my major goals this week on vacation was to rebuild a few machines, including:

  1. My server
  2. Athlon 64 box
  3. Music backup box which (I think) had a bad video card
  4. Rebuild my wireless network, including my wife’s laptop with a MIMO card

Well, I’ve had a 25% success rate this week. Some vacation.

To recap:

The server: I’ve watched the server die a slow death all week. From the first hard drive failure 6 months ago, I’ve seen the CMOS reset, the BIOS reset a few times, and now booting from the DVD drive isn’t working. I looked into buying a 1U rackmount server today to replace it, but can’t seem to get wife approval yet.

Athlon 64: Swapped out processors and video card (got a sweet deal on a 6800 OC), now getting a 25 or 52 error on the Abit uGuru machine. Need to take the memory out and troubleshoot. Figures.

Music backup box: Success! Swapped out video cards (took the 4200 out of the Athlon 64 since it got a 6800) and bam, no more lockups. Yay.

Wireless Network & Kelly’s laptop: Success and then oops. Wireless network swapped out, got WEP up and running, and went to install the MIMO card in Kelly’s laptop (my old one). Followed directions, installed the drivers first, then put the card in the PCMCIA slot, and the card wouldn’t power on or be recognized. Very weird, as especially for the last year I had been running an Atheros card in that laptop when it had been running Linux as Broadcom built-in wireless sucks. Flashed the bios, and bam, machine won’t power on. HP told me to take it in for service. Wife not happy with me at all, as she wanted it on our trip home this weekend.

Success rate this week: 25%. To top it all off, I had powered off my desktop to do some cable management, and when I powered it on to go to HP’s site for support, I got 2 non-system disk errors. Was reaching for a LiveCD when I rebooted one mroe time and it came on. I was pretty livid at that point.

Moral of the story? Don’t let me touch your PC. Ever.

Turn your laptop into a picture fram

Turn your laptop into a hangable, on the wall, picture frame.

It has to be seen to be believed. Disassemble your laptop, mount it to a picture frame, and just follow the step by step instructions.

Think about it if he wasn’t using XP: you could take some really, really old laptops that can be had cheap and do a bunch of them using say, free software like Linux. 🙂

Nevertheless, a very cool hacking project.

Broadcast Flag not dead yet – we have 48 hours!

The EFF is reporting that Congress may sneak in the Broadcast Flag into other legislation in the next 48 hours. This is not trivial – HD content is available over the airwaves unmodified already today and the Broadcast Flag will stop that single-handedly – once it goes forward there will be no going back to using your media and your hardware the way you want to.

Fill out the Action Alert now and / or contact your Senators.

Just say no to the Broadcast Flag.

Apple & Intel

Icculus sums up similar thoughts to mine on Apple picking up Intel much better than I can.

He’s 100% right when it comes to gaming. And that’s me saying that after making the switch to Linux 100% this week (more on that later).

HP dv1000

I received a HP dv1000 as a gift from the Company last week, and quickly threw Ubuntu 5.04 on it.

It’s a gorgeous laptop – Centrino based, with an Intel 54g built in, built in 5 in 1 card reader, firewire, USB everywhere, and widescreen 1280×768 monitor. It’s pretty sexy for a notebook too, with a silver finish on the outside, and a shiny, glossy black finish on the inside.

Ubuntu worked great on it, other than the Centrino wireless, but Intel is starting to make a push in supporting Linux with their wireless cards. Following the How-To on the Ubuntu Forums helped, but it didn’t work until I changed my kernel from 2.6.10-5-386 to 2.6.10-5-686, and bam, everything worked.

Ubuntu works great on it, the card reader is supported, installation defaulted to the correct widescreen, DVD-RW, Synaptic touchpad worked, and battery life is excellent.

Need to throw some other applications on it before the weekend, including Tomboy, Bluefish, MP3, DVD playing, and Muine, and I’ll work on the blog layout while visiting the in-laws this weekend.

If you want to read a decent review and see pictures, click here.

Playstation3 Unveiled

Trumping Microsoft in the aesthetics department, the Playstation3 was unveiled tonight.

Gorgeous, sleek design (with the exception of the controller, blech), in 3 colors, with more connectivity than you’d ever think you need: 6 USB, 3 Ethernet, 6 Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (for PSP!) and best of all…2 HD outputs.

Check it:

Speaking of video, Sony Computer Entertainment’s Chief Technical Officer Masa Chatani was on hand to show off the PS3’s panoramic video functions. Since the console has two HD outputs, it is can be hooked up to two side-by-side HDTVs to projecting video in a 32:9 extra-widescreen format (think Cinemascope in your living room). Like a gigantic version of the Nitnendo DS, the dual digital outputs also allow for an extended game display, with the action on one screen and either game information or video chat on the second.

With just a little less system memory than X-Box 360, and launching 4-6 months later, it will be interesting to see the big bad mega-corporations duke it out.

Broadcast Flag Struck Down

On Fri., May 6th, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled the FCC overstepped it’s bounds when it created the Broadcast Flag.

The EFF has the story, as well as CNet’s News.com.

This is big, very big. It was unexpected, especially a unanimous decision by the Court. Congress needs to legislate, not the FCC.

My favorite quote from the judges:

“You’re out there in the whole world, regulating. Are washing machines next?” asked Judge Harry Edwards. Quipped Judge David Sentelle: “You can’t regulate washing machines. You can’t rule the world.”

Here’s to all the groups that opposed the travesty that was the Broadcast Flag, from the EFF article:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) joined Washington DC-based advocacy group Public Knowledge in fighting the rule in the courts, together with Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association. The coalition argued that the rule would interfere with the legitimate activities of technology innovators, librarians, archivists, and academics, and that the FCC exceeded its regulatory authority by imposing technological restrictions on what consumers can do with television shows after they receive them.

Receiver down, receiver down

My center channel on my receiver has stopped working for no apparent reason. I’ve swapped out speakers, cable, checked the connections and the settings, and all I get is warbly static out of my center.

No idea why it picked now to stop working. It’s 6 years old, and with the basement on the horizon, I really don’t feel like buying a new one for the living room.

Dammit.

Dell 2405 First Impressions

It’s here, a day early even. Here are some random thoughts & first impressions of the Dell 2405 24″ LCD Widescreen Monitor:

  • It’s bright. Much brighter than the Sony 21″ CRTs I’ve been used to.
  • It was a snap to set up physically. (Hmm, bad pun). Snap the base into the screen, and voila.
  • The base is quite sturdy. I don’t think the cats jumping off the window ledge will knock it over.
  • Thanks to Bernd Paysan’s Dell 2405 web page for the correct scanlines to use in Linux. (Courtesy of Google).
  • 1920×1200 resolution rocks.
  • I need to get a DVD playing ASAP. Just for kicks.
  • I’m not used to feeling like I’m sitting so far back, even though it’s just the monitor pushed back farther on the desk.
  • I’ll have to keep my desk clean now that I have all this extra space. (No, really).
  • I’ll be able to hear my speakers again as my monitor isn’t blocking them.
  • Coding web pages and stuff will be fun with multiple windows.
  • I can’t believe I bought something from Dell.
  • I can’t believe none of Dell’s competitors can compete. The nearest monitor even close to this was a Sony 24″ at $1800. Buying a Dell became a no brainer.
  • The 9 in one flash card reader is a very cool feature on the side of the monitor. And the 4 USB ports.
  • Even better, Ubuntu recognized them without any prompts.
  • Need to post the pictures. (And done)
  • No burned out / dead pixels
  • When scrolling this blog really fast, I get some motion blur on background on the far left, but you really have to look for it
  • UT2k4 in 1920×1200 is jaw droppingly gorgeous.
  • No noticeable motion blur in UT2k4. Get sucked right in and you dont’ even notice it’s an LCD anymore.
  • I should probably go boot into Windows and check performance. But I’m lazy.
  • Dell’s customer service still sucks. After the hard drive return process I went through last year, it’s not any better. The hoops I had to go through over the weekend, after I made the purchase, just to find out if it shipped with a DVI cable, were ludicrous.
  • It ships with a DVI cable, FYI