Jeremy Reimer talks about the possibility of external video cards at Ars Technica.

Sometime over the weekend the power supply in my MythTV box went south. It didn’t completely die, but the fans started to sound really bad. So I figured it would be a good idea to power it down until I could swap in a spare.

Tonight I finally put the spare in (an old Enermax 431W) and powered it back up:

Unfortunately the new one is a bit louder than the original stock Antec power supply (which was almost silent). But it is nice to have Myth back in action.

I ordered a Dell XPS 400 desktop on 7/10/06. It shipped on 7/13/06, and after one failed delivery attempt (I wasn’t home to sign for it) I picked it up at the UPS depot in York on 7/18/06.

I brought it home, promptly hooked it up, and powered it on.

The first thing I noticed was that for a supposedly “silent” case, it sounded like a jet engine. The second thing I noticed was that it was dead on arrival.

Thus began my unpleasant experience with Dell Customer Care, and why I no longer recommend Dell products…

(more…)

So after driving over to the UPS depot to pick it up, I finally got my new Dell XPS 400 on Tuesday night. Drove home, hooked it up, and hit the power button.

The first thing I noticed was the awesome new and simplified interface.

I thought I had ordered the box with Windows XP MCE 2005 on it. But instead I guess I have some better version made by Dell. Rather than all those confusing icons and menus, my computer just says:

No boot device available - Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility

See, simple! Only two options, and hitting F1 takes me right back to the same two friendly beeps and error message. Pressing F2 lets me click around many menus indeed.

Plus I had the chance to (so far) spend 111 minute and 58 seconds on the phone listening to relaxing music and speaking to people in exotic and distant lands.

Yay for Dell! And yay for my new Dell DOA 400!

Update: I guess I’m not the only one… Woe betide my Dell

More: Read my follow-up post to this one to see how this all worked out in the end. Not good.

For you hardware hackers out there:

Pyro stands for Python Robotics. The goal of the project is to provide a programming environment for easily exploring advanced topics in artificial intelligence and robotics without having to worry about the low-level details of the underlying hardware.

A while back I took an interest in robotics and picked up a Basic Stamp. I should really get back into that.

Finally! I ditched my miserable old T616 and replaced it with a shiny new Motorola RAZR V3…

I was able to get my Logitech headset paired with it rather easily, so I’m happy with it so far.

I needed some portable storage for my mp3s, so I ordered an AMS Venus DS3 3.5″ drive enclosure from NewEgg, and cashed in a gift card at Circuit City to get a 300GB Seagate drive.

Formatted the drive and copied everything over tonight:

That’s a lot of space, but I’m sure I can fill it.

BTW, if you are looking for an enclosure, I can’t recommend the AMS unit enough. There’s a reason it’s one of the top rated items at NewEgg. Inexpensive, easy to install, and almost completely silent. Good stuff.

Update: Contrary to the screenshot above, I ended up reformatting the drive as ext3. NTFS was just causing too many permission problems under Linux and Samba.

Linux Journal has an article about Building a Home Automation and Security System with Python from back in January. It’s an interesting tutorial, and even if you don’t plan on doing any home automation, it’s actually a good introduction to interfacing with serial devices using Python. Worth reading if you are a budding hardware hacker.

Most of it centers around this $70 isolated serial kit.

Also, check out PySerial and PyParallel.

Got Gentoo loaded on the new Dell PowerEdge SC430 tonight. Apparently the handbook only supports Stage 3 installs these days. Just one of the many things that have apparently changed since the last time I did a full install.

Everything went smoothly except for the inability to grab the time from the system’s hardware clock (via hwclock). It would fail to read /dev/rtc and then give the following error:

select() to /dev/rtc to wait for clock tick timed out

Apparently I’m not the only one who has run up against this issue, as there are quite a few references to it on the net. It could be related to ACPI, but a post about Debian Bug #277298 gave me a decent workaround. Fire up your favorite editor and add/modify the following lines in /etc/conf.d/clock:

CLOCK="local" CLOCK_OPTS="--directisa"

Restart the clock service:

europa ~ # /etc/init.d/clock restart * WARNING: you are stopping a boot service. * Stopping syslog-ng ... * Setting system clock using the hardware clock [local] ... * Starting syslog-ng ...

After that, everything works fine. Good enough for me.

The new server showed up last night. It’s a PowerEdge SC430 that Dell Small Business was closing out the other day for an extremely low price. I decided it was time to upgrade from the P3-450 that is/was currently in use.

Details:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.80GHz, 1MB Cache, 800MHz FSB
• 1GB DDR2, 533MHz, 2X512MB ECC DIMMs
• Intel 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA Controller
• Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit PCI Express
• XGI - Xabre Graphics Inc Volari Z7
• Maxtor 6L080M0, 80GB 7200RPM SATA HDD
• LITE-ON LTN-4891S, 48X CDROM

w00t!