Archive for the 'Technology' Category

The final hardware piece of the Dell Latitude c600 puzzle arrived in the mail today. I had started to get the basic parts set up with only 64 MB of RAM, but it just wasn’t enough to do much. Firefox took up so much memory that after 15 minutes of browsing the system was stuck paging memory continuously in and out of the swap partition. This made the whole system utterly unusable and usually resulted in one or more processes crashing with out of memory errors. Today that all changed.

I opened up the mailbox to find a bunch of junk mail and one conspicuously poorly-packed package from the New England area. The homemade envelope was made out of what felt like brown grocery bag paper taped together at the ends. There was a tear in the paper and the green circuit board and some black chips were visible and exposed. I had read a negative comment from one individual who had bought RAM from the same seller I had on eBay. I guess his RAM worked, but he was upset at the packing materials used. There was a no DOA guarantee, so that was good enough for me. I popped open the back of the laptop and installed the new RAM sticks. It booted (which is a good sign) and everything seems to work perfectly!

I left the seller some glowing feedback and am now on my way to learning more about Arch Linux (the more I learn the more I like) and to tweaking this laptop. Browsing the web on this 700 MHz Pentium 3 feels just as fast as it did on the 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 Celeron (Dell Inspiron 1000) that Krissy is now using. This c600 has better support for hibernating, suspending, and sleeping which makes it more portable. It runs cooler, too. It tops out at 55 degrees C under normal circumstances, and I’ve seen it hit 58 degrees C when recompiling Xorg (but only briefly, and when one of the vents was obstructed by my knee). The Pentium 4 Celeron would run at between 52 and 55 degrees C under no load and would sometimes get up around 80 degrees C under heavy load. That makes for quite a toasty lap, let me tell you!

That’s two great deals now that I’ve gotten on eBay in the past two weeks!

So I have been slowly learning how to do things the “Arch Linux Way” these past couple of days. I am really impressed with the way it is set up. I still haven’t run into a package that I want that isn’t already in the repositories, so I haven’t had occasion to compile my own software or make any packages yet under Arch. I hope that process is as smooth as everything else so far.

My brand new Nova Tech mini PCI card arrived today, and I was really excited to try it out. I got the kernel module installed and gave it a go. It couldn’t see anything. So I started doing some research. It turns out that the Dell Latitude c600 requires an additional tiny little hirose u.fl cable. You’d think a thin little 4-inch long cable would cost maybe between $3 and $5, but that’s not the case. Dell seems to have forgotten that people might actually need this part and have kindly removed any mention of it from their website. Reports I read stated that calling tech support results in stupefied silence. The item has become a wonderful specialty part that some companies are selling for as much as $40! I found one on eBay for $7.77 plus $3 for shipping. I was hoping to just pop into Fry’s and grab one, but now I have to wait another week for one to come in from Rhode Island.

Speaking of Fry’s, I wanted to check out their prices on 256MB sticks of PC100 SODIMM RAM. So I poured over their confusing grid of memory prices until an associate finally acknowledged me. I asked him what the cheapest price for the RAM I needed was. He punched i up into the computer and then called someone else. I couldn’t hear the conversation. Then he turned back around and said they didn’t have any! I thought he might tell me that all the good priced RAM was gone, but not that I couldn’t get it at all! I only have 64MB right now and I get programs dying for lack of RAM.

One last thing… I was all set to get this ultra-portable laptop ready to go today because all I needed was the proprietary Dell IDE connector that arrived in the mail today. I had to preload the OS onto the hard drive because the laptop I was installing it into has no drives but the single hard drive. I got everything set up to the point where I could connect it to the network and transfer the rest of the files onto it that way. I went to install it and it was too thick! I hadn’t even considered that that old laptop would use the slim form factored hard drives found in current systems. So all that work was for nothing. Now I’m looking for another hard drive.

I’ve talked before about the coyotes that come out at night and make all sorts of noise howling and attacking one another across the creek from us. I love using my binoculars and a maglite to try and spot them and get them to leave. What would really be great is to get out there with some night vision goggles, though. Then I could see them wherever they may be hiding. Optics Planet is a great place for all things optical. They offer the latest and greatest binoculars, scopes, lasers, telescopes, etc. They have guaranteed low prices and stuff made by practically every company imaginable. Best of all they offer free UPS shipping on all orders of $29.99 or more.

If you don’t know where to start with these kinds of optical products they have a gift guide showcasing all of the best recommended items available this holiday season. One of my favorite items is something that I had never thought about before but seems like a natural merging of technologies: the Digital Camera Binoculars! Not only do you get a great close up view of the action, but you can take a picture of it as you are watching it. Use the binoculars as a viewfinder. I’ve tried to take a picture with a camera by holding it up to the eyepiece on my binoculars. It just doesn’t work. If I had one of these I could finally get pictures of those coyotes attacking each other at 2am. There is some great stuff available for Christmas gifts this year.

I bought a 20 GB laptop hard drive off of eBay a week or so ago. I was looking for the cheapest way to get a Dell Latitude C600 back on its feet. It is a pretty snappy machine considering that I got it for free. It had no hard drive or even hard drive connectors, only one stick of 64 MB RAM, a pretty nice battery, and no wifi. So I had my work cut out for me. I ended up paying a total of twenty dollars and some cents for this hard drive. It was sold “as is” which basically can mean one of two things on eBay:

1. I am selling a lot of products and am in too much of a hurry to test them all

or

2. I am a scammer and can sell broken crap without my buyers having any recourse

Fortunately for me the laptop arrived on the same day as the proprietary dell adapter for IDE drives. When I plugged it in it was recognized by the BIOS. I booted up Slax from a CD and the NTFS filesystem still had files on it. They all looked like the usual Windows 2000 files. I repartitioned the drive and formatted it. I ran badblocks on the drive and it didn’t find anything wrong. It looks like I got lucky! Now comes the difficult decision. What distro should I put on here. It’s a 700MHz Pentium 3 CPU. I plan on buying 256MB of ram for it, but so far I don’t have more than the 64MB it came with. At the moment I am leaning toward Arch Linux because it seems customizable like Slackware, but looks like it might be updated more often. I am apprehensive to switch away from Slackware, but I figure I ought to experiment with something new. I’m afraid Ubuntu would be too slow. But that’s probably more Gnome and KDE’s fault than anything else.

Making web pages used to be fun. I started back in the old days around 1996 with my first attempts to learn HTML. It wasn’t complicated. There weren’t very many tags. There was no such thing as CSS. You just made invisible tables to position everything. Life was good. You didn’t have anything so complicated that it “looked wrong” in another browser. Then things started to change. People started using Microsoft Internet Explorer and making their web pages with it as their rendering tester. After their designs were finished they would start getting complaints about how their site was all messed up in Netscape Navigator (that’s what the web browser was called back then). So instead of trying to make their site work right in all browsers (which is still hard today) they just slapped a little image on their site that said “This page best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer Version X.”

There has been a push for web standards in the hope that pages might render the same on all browsers. No browser implements all of the standards correctly, unfortunately, but some didn’t even try. Internet Explorer has historically been the most popular among web users, but at the same time the worst when it came to standard compliance. The biggest problem with Microsoft Internet Explorer, though, has been that it had been years since it was updated with any new features. New technologies have emerged that were simply unsupported in the most widely used browser in the world. It appears that IE7 seeks to change that. I still don’t recommend that people use it over Firefox, but at least with the world shifting to a more feature-rich browser web designers can finally start using the advanced technologies that have been supported by Firefox, Opera, Safari, and others for years now.

Maybe Microsoft Internet Explorer’s best contribution to the Internet will be that it makes web design fun again. Let’s home it doesn’t end up like IE6 in a couple of years: ignored and outdated.

Over the past few years of waiting and watching many sites slowly switching to a reliance on Flash 8, doctor Linux users have been left out in the cold. Adobe originally promised a version of Flash 8 for Linux, case but then they decided to jump over that release and just work on getting a Linux version of Flash 9 out the door. I can say that in my preliminary usage of the new plugin it is much more stable even though it is still in beta. It is more stable than Flash 7 for Linux (which kept crashing Firefox). So I say upgrade now to Flash 9 for Linux and enjoy a more stable, more compatible Flash experience online.

Every time we have to cut up an onion for a recipe it’s always a coin toss, paper-rock-scissors, or choosies for who has to cut them up. It’s always difficult because the onion always wants to fall apart mid-chop. On top of that, though, it takes too long and that makes you cry as you hover over the onion and get the fumes from it reacting with the water in your eye which produces sulfuric acid! What we really need is the Ultimate Chopper. This thing makes short work of practically any chopping task. Check it out!

Well, Tommy, they finally did it. It finally happened, and we weren’t there for it. Tommy and I had this idea when we were kids that people should have a soundtrack for themselves when they walk. I’m sure the idea came from video games where there is always background music for no apparent reason. Now there is a wearable computer called PersonalSoundtrack that plays music from a playlist based on your current walking speed. Minor variations in speed are measured and the music speed is dynamically adjusted to match your footsteps. If a deliberate speed change is detected then a faster, more speed-appropriate song is started. I think I would have the slow Peter and the Wolf song for slow walking. I don’t know about fast walking, though. There are so many possibilities it would be difficult to choose just one.

The hardware and software upon which this is built is open source and there is a section for source code on the web site. I’m assuming this will become an open source project soon. This would be a fun project and a great way to annoy people and have fun at the same time.

I decided that I ought to test out the Dell C600 laptop I got from Krissy’s dad. I only have one stick of 64MB RAM, so I put it in the machine. I popped in a bootable Linux CD and off I went. I was able to verify everything. I ran memtest on it all night, too, and the memory I have now is good. That’s surprising considering that it’s been hopping from laptop to laptop for longer than I know anything about. I got a 20GB hard drive off of eBay that’s on its way. I’m trying to do all of this as cheaply as possible so I took a gamble on an “as is” sale. Let’s cross our fingers. I also put a bid on an Atheros based mini PCI wifi card that someone pulled out of an old Toshiba laptop. Let’s just hope I can figure out a way to connect it to the Dell laptop’s internal antenna.

While I was looking for a PCMCIA network card one of the pictures was of a scantily clad woman. I thought it must be a prank or a mistake, so I checked out the seller’s profile. They seem to be a high-volume seller basically running an eBay-based business selling computer components. The list of their sales showed that almost all of their products had, as the primary photo, which is supposed to be of the product in question, lingerie models posing. I guess it’s true what they say, as the seller seemed to be doing pretty good business.

Nintendo added new video recently of people playing games on the Wii for the very first time. It looks like these people probably wouldn’t play video games on their own normally, but they are having a lot of fun with the Wii. Unfortunately they use Flash 8 for the videos. It’s not their fault, but Linux users are out of luck viewing these. Watching these videos, though, made me even more excited for the Wii release.