RobotSkirts

MySpace went down yesterday when their LA data center was hit by power outage. It came back for a little while with a note that their backup power had failed. It’s been down most of the day Sunday. They eventually posted a Flash Pacman game (which DDoSed the games publisher). Despite their loss the seething masses have found other ways to communicate. Have a look at Technorati; it’s getting two MySpace related posts every minute in the middle of the night. Yes, even I miss MySpace. If it’s still down tomorrow it will be one of the more productive days this country has seen or everyone will just be clicking “refresh”

If you’d been looking at my Flickr photos you would have noticed I got my second Dell 2405FP. I bought the first one last fall; the second one was provided by work. The nice thing about the 2405FP (besides being freakin’ huge) is that the native 1920×1200 resolution lets you open two fullsize browser windows side-by-side since most websites are designed to be 800 pixels wide. So the picture above shows my new workflow with 4 full size browser windows open. The far left is Gmail. Next is a Wordpress edit window for this site. Followed by whatever site you’re researching. The far right is Bloglines which I use to read news feeds. A nice hack for Bloglines is turning on “Open Links In: Reuse New Window”. So if you’re running two browsers side-by-side every link you click in Bloglines will show up in the second window. It’s really slick and much faster than running tabs. I guess I’ll need to pick up a third monitor for IM.

The 2405FPW sells for $850 new. Dell had 16 refurb units last night for $650, but they’re gone already.

The left monitor is temporarily running off of my Gentoo box. I rebuilt it yesterday and can’t be happier. I had the home directories on a separate partition so I just reinstalled the root filesystem and it’s running like a dream. I had been meaning to do a reinstall since my dual tv tuner is supported by MythTV now and recently the box had been crashing (I assumed something to do with NFS since that’s all it did). It’s been working fine as a file server so I think I’ve got it fixed.

I’m completely moved into my new apartment. I bought a couple pieces of hardware to make it feel more cozy. Namely a Panasonic AE900U HiDef projector, Integra 4.6 receiver, and Paradigm Monitor 9 speakers. My friend Seth from upstairs and I got everything hooked up on Saturday in time for a nice house warming party. You can view photos of my apartment on Flickr.

[trim] I had opened with my “how I learned *nix back-story”, but we will save that for another time. Ever since blogging became my only source of income, I’ve started to worry about how “mission-critical” my computers are. I decided that relying on some operating system and GUI that I hacked together wasn’t the best plan (I run Linux on everything). I hate Microsoft, so I’ve only got one real choice. (more…)

Originally found on Slashdot. Some guy decided to to build a mobile WiFi access point. The box uses a PC Card to connect to Verizon’s network. It then passes that connection to a wireless card that provides internet access to anyone within range. My favorite thing about this project is the Soekris board that ties everything together; they offer several different embedded systems (with optional cases) and the prices don’t seem too bad for a really unique system.

Mom sent me a clipping about Seward County Recycling day. I’ll be throwing out a lot of the electro-junk in my closet: 4 monitors, 3 Pentiums, 1 gutted TRS-80. I’ll probably save a couple old I/O cards to practice soldering/de-soldering on, some old disk drives with the gigantor servos, and all of the hard drives (for security). I figure if I ever need a monitor I’ll just buy a new LCD instead of using the old crap.

Mandy recently sent a lot of people my way, which is great, but I feel I should apologize for this excessively geeky post. Here is a prize for reading the whole post: something stylish to help you beat up Vuitton enthusiasts.

Starting at 8am CST Wednesday April 13th Dell is offering great deals on laptops. Techbargains has all the details you need.

I used a similar offer last fall to get my laptop. It works like this: Configure the laptop till the price exceeds $1499. Then use the coupon code to get $750 off the price, plus free shipping. Make sure you read the details at Techbargains. Last time they did this the deal only lasted during buisness hours and some of the models were only offered till 10am so jump on this.

I have 600m that is now happily running Gentoo. If you get a 600m go for the SXGA+ screen; with its 1400×1050 resolution it is beautiful. If you want to run Linux get the Intel 2200 for the best b/g wireless networking. I hope someone gets a good deal out of this.

Gizmodo has detais on this simple USB to IDE adapter. As someone who has had many a harddrive dangling by the ribbon cable outside of a computer chassis, I can appreciate a simple device like this. I let’s you plug in any IDE device i.e. harddrives (regular and laptop) and cd/dvd drives to get a USB interface. Many times you are just plugging in a harddrive to get old data off of it on to your new gigantor drive; a full harddrive enclosure is over kill for this job. If you’re like me you don’t care if your case is hanging open anyway. Also, the price looks to be about US$26 which is half the price of an enclosure.

Engadget has a short little blurb on this eye-controlled video camera. At some point in the future everyone is going to be recording everything they hear or see. People will walk around tivoing their lives and it wil be devices like this that will make it possible. Blogging will simply be people editing out all the crap. I’m sure some people will still be inclined to write about what they had for breakfast, but now every car accident will be availible on the web for your viewing pleasure. They will need to work on the packaging though. I’ll have to start a new category called “social contraceptives”, items that gaurantee no one will have sex with you.

Tired of primates knocking over your home theater components? Onkyo has an elegant solution for people that can’t be bothered to mount their speakers properly.

A related piece of ingenuity: I recently screwed a pair of Packard Bell computer speakers to the bottom of my coffee table to provide “high quality” sound when I’m using my laptop in the living room. I’m also trying to mount my extra laptop to the bottom of the table to act as a music server… but the duct tape hasn’t been holding (I guess it can’t do everything). I’ll keep you posted on the progress of my network attached coffee table.