Quoth Mark Pilgrim:

I have nothing to say about the iPhone that hasn’t been said already. Apple made it very clear what they were offering: a carrier-locked, closed-development mobile computing device where every aspect of the user experience would be controlled by Apple. I’m told it can also make phone calls. If that’s what you want, then buy it. If not, then don’t.

Read the whole thing.

Palm canceled the Foleo.

Back in January I put together a new desktop, but for some reason I never got around to buying a new UPS to go with it. So today, while I was out picking up some other items, I used a $20 gift card I had kicking around and picked up an APC BE325R at Office Depot for $19.99. Not a bad price.

The BE325R is discontinued, and it will only give me a minute or two of backup power, but I think that’s all I need. I turn off my desktop when I’m not using it anyway, so I just need something to condition the incoming power and to give me enough time for an orderly shutdown if the power goes out.

Right now it’s doing it’s initial 16-hour charge…. we’ll see how it goes.

My last attempt to get a new desktop PC didn’t go so well. So this time I did what I knew I should have in the first place… ordered the parts and built my own:

• Shuttle XPC SN27P2
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Dual-core 2.2GHz CPU
• Corsair XMS2 2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel RAM
• eVGA Geforce 7950GT KO 512MB PCI-E x16 Video Card
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB HDD
• Samsung 18X DVD±RW w/ LightScribe

I ran some of the NVIDIA demos and tried out Far Cry for a bit tonight. It’s awesome.

All the CPU-Z stats are available after the jump…

(more…)

Back in August I linked to a story about the possibility of external video cards. Now it looks like Asus is demo’ing one at CES.

After waiting far too long, I finally ordered an extra hard drive to stick in the Dell SC430. It’s a 320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 from NewEgg:

europa ~ # hdparm -I /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: ST3320620AS Serial Number: 3QF0LFPW Firmware Revision: 3.AAE Standards: Supported: 7 6 5 4 Likely used: 7 Configuration: Logical max current cylinders 16383 16383 heads 16 16 sectors/track 63 63 -- CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064 LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455 LBA48 user addressable sectors: 625142448 device size with M = 1024*1024: 305245 MB device size with M = 1000*1000: 320072 MB (320 GB)

europa ~ # hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: ... 2057.87 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: ... 77.02 MB/sec

Now I can keep all of my media (e.g. mp3s, photos, videos) on that drive, and rsync it to the USB drive enclosure (250GB) that I picked up a while back. That should work as a decent backup system for at home.

I considered running RAID 1 in the server, as it would have been cake to set up. But I wanted a true backup, not just improved availability and hardware fault tolerance. Honestly, I don’t really care about recovery time or availability. However, I care an awful lot about not losing any data. So I’m pretty happy with this setup.

Ordered a new power supply for my main desktop PC tonight. This is part of my continuing quest to figure out why my PC seems to lock up when I’m playing 3D intensive games…

Update: Shipped from Memphis, TN with a scheduled delivery date of 10/12/2006. w00t!

Back in August I upgraded my IPCop hardware, and tonight I finally installed the latest Zerina OpenVPN addon. The next/last thing I wanted to do was to hook up the parallel LCD and permanently mount it in the front of the case.

I had the LCD working on IPCop before using Mario Minati’s LCDProc addon. But when I checked tonight, his site hasn’t been updated since the 1.3.x series of IPCop releases (the current version is 1.4.11).

And this ipcop-users post doesn’t sound too good:

Does anyone know if there is an LCDProc addon for IPCop v1.4.x. I used to use the addon on v1.3 but unfortunatley it did not work on v1.4.x series so it would be nice if anyone managed to get it going on a current release. If not, then I’ll probably try to recompile it and get it going, but don’t want to reinvent the wheel if there is something out there already.

…and there were no responses.

Hopefully someone will compile a version and release it. I can use the LCD on a different box, but I was hoping to put it in the IPCop box.

Just a quick proof of concept post from the Palm Tungsten C I picked up on Ebay. Seems to work pretty well so far…

Tonight I switched some boxen around and upgraded my IPCop firewall. It is now a rather respectable P3-450 with 512 MB of RAM with four NICs, allowing me to run a Green + Blue + Orange + Red configuration.

I still have to install OpenVPN on it, but after that I should be all set.