Recently in Hardware Category

Well, mostly. I've always wanted a MacBook Pro, but the price is a serious guilt trip and my 5 year old lappy was still going string...until tonight. When I went to open the lid, the hinges basicly exploded along with the case plastics around them. It literally won't survive another lid close/open.

It's a sign a tell ya. Without too much guilt, I ordered a reburbished 17" 1920x1200 7200rmp MBP from the Apple Store. It was $450 cheaper than a new one and has the same warranty. That price difference is just enough to pay for AppleCare, save $100 and feel just a little bit less guilty about the whole ordeal. :-)

Once I decided on a bitrate vs. size that I could tolerate on this player, I've started ripping CDs and filling this little monster. Once of the cool features this player has is that I can alter the play speed, so I can play drums along with songs at half speed if I have to. Kinda cool. I've got about 10 CDs or so @ 96kbps, which works out to about 35MB per CD.

That bit rate sounds low compared to the VBR/320/nothing less than 128 mantra, but honestly, for most types of music, you just don't hear the difference on this kind of player. With a 2GB limit, it's all about how many songs I can cram on it before I regret not getting the 4GB version. :-)

Long story longer. My good friend Ron from $work came over yesterday to help me setup the drumset. He, and my wife always prod me that I should start playing again, and honestly it's a good form of exercise; something I need but will never do.

Well, the drums are setup but for the life of me I couldn't find the the power cord for the CD player for play-along sessions. Well, hey, it's the 21st century. Time to get something that I vowed to never get: an MP3 player. I'm not a big fan of the iPods, mostly because I'm just not into iTunes. I just want to drag my files over and have a go at it.

While I was at Wal-Mart, I got to look at the Samsung MP3 that I found online today. 2GB. FM. USB-stick sized and you just stick in the USB port and drag files over. It even supports Ogg. $80 later and I have one. Damn small. Damn nice. Way cool.

Game on. Oh yeah, there are 4 mores drums to that kit that aren't even setup. :-)

It's been so long since STALKER was anounced, and postponed, and postponed, and postponed that I had never noticed that it actually came out. I snagged a copy at the evil Best Buy while I was out and about last night, along with a copy of Quicken 2007 since my 2004 CrippleWare won't do online crap after the 30th of the month. Sigh.

I was also checking one some of the new line of 17" Core2 laptops on the market. I hate HP craptops. I would never buy one again. The Toshiba Satellite 17"s look nice. My only beef is that the 105 Series has this insane narrow right shit key because they squeeze in a 10-key pad. Who the hell needs that. Totally worthless to me with a narrow shift key. Sames goes for keywords whom move the backslash key, or narrow the backspace key. Don't fuck with keyboard layouts please. It pisses off programmers.

Sam's Club of all people has a great deal on a Core2 17" Toshiba with 2GB DDR2 and a 120GB drive with Vista Premium for like $1200. That's a great deal with the exception of a close model of that on NewEgg.

I will says this for the overpriced 17" MacBook Pro: The keyword is full size. No narrowed key nonsense. To bad is only has one mouse button. :-P

Twin Powers Activate. Form Of A P4C800-D Motherboard.

The motherboard I purchased on eBay arrived today. The seller was quick and packaged the item extremely well. I'm quite happy with that since it was my first eBay purchase. The monitor should arrive Wednesday along with the DVD drive. Time to start putting the secondary game machine together. If I have enough working hard drives from the file server, I'll probably toss the latest Ubuntu beta on it just to see how it performs.

Like most things, once I get an idea in my head, it quickly spirals out of control; or my wallet does. As my wife likes to say "Go for it. We have jobs". Margo is going to be in DC for the latter half of next week, so it seemed like a good time to make chili and have a good old fashioned game night. My laptop is getting old and won't play UT2K without overheating and rebooting any more. While I've got that kick ass 23" Apple Cinema Display and a NDivia 7800GT up stairs, hauling it and my tower downstairs and having to put the office back together afterwords is a pain in the ass. Then the downfall of ideas start.

Now that the old file server is powered off and we're running off the new NAS, I have a spare, albeit it large, 4U 19" rack mount chassis with a heap of 40GB IDE drives in it. I have a P4 3.0C proc, 1GB OZX PC3700 DDR Ram, and an ATI Radeon XT800PE all gathering dust after upgrading the desktop upstairs a few times. So all I need is a motherboard to put it all together. A few trips around eBay, and I manage to snag another Asus P4C800 Deluxe; exactly what's in the desktop upstairs. Since I made a slipstream XP install disk with the RAID and other drivers pre installed, This should be easy.

Wait, I only have an old CD-ROM drive and I'm going to have to disk with DVD. Wonder how much those are. $29.00 for a DVD that reads/writes most things. That's harmless I thought.

I don't want to have to move the ACD and I have no spare speakers. Wonder how much a cheap LCD with speakers is. $174.99. I could always use a cheap LCD to tote to game night. That's harmless I though.

Sigh. One NewEgg order later, I'll bet putting together the portable, not so small gamebox next week. Damn technology. I imagine at some point that my desktop will reverse merge itself into the 4U case and I'll eBay the spare parts. Go figure. The 4U chassis has a boatload of room in it as it housed 6 IDE drives, a CD Rom, Zip, etc. It's probably easier to work in than the tall Antec case I have is. I just hope I don't need to put in a bigger power supply.

Hardware creep at its finest. MAybe I'll toss on the new Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta if I have the time.

In our previous episode, I mentioned that I was getting a D-Link DNS-323 NAS to replace a wonky RAID5 file server at home. It arrived Friday and the comedy trail of errors began.

As prescribed, I placed the 200GB SATA drives in the unit, plugged it into the network and powered it on. Once I fired up the Easy Search utility I was greeted with nothing. Nada. Zip. The utility didn't see the unit. This didn't surprise me really since I run DHCP at home that isn't the standard 192.168.0.x used in all of these consumer devices. Once I logged into the DHCP server and got the units IP address, I was off to the races.

The unit shipped with the 1.0 firmware which is junk at best. First on the list was to update to the 1.02b version. After uploading the new firmware, the update progress page never really indicated that it was done. At some point, I just assumed it was and rebooted the unit.

The next order of business was to configure the drives for RAID1. Once I did so and got the formatting process page, it kept freezing at 94%. Eventually, I assumed this 'feature' was just a glitch and the format was complete, and rebooted the unit.

Once I configured some users and shares, it was time to start copying files to the unit. Right out of the gate I started getting "Network name no longer available" and "File in use by another process" errors. Bummer. Not good things for a device you want to rely on to house your files.

After troubleshooting for a couple of days, I found out that the problem only occurred on my wireless connection, but not when I was directly connected to the unit. Eventually I stumbled across a KB article that mentioned that Windows File Sharing (SMB) gets really cranky if ICMP packets are blocked. Sure enough, my wireless connection settings had all of the ICMP stuff disabled. Once I turned that back on, things went much better, or so I thought.

I still had the occasional copy problem. This time, when the unit acted up, I went to the admin page interface. Instead of getting the D-Link page, I got my file server page. Like a dumb ass, apparently I assigned the NAS to a secondary IP my file server already had. Duh. Once I fixed that problem, the unit has been rock solid ever since.

So, aside from the owner bumbling, this unit has a great price point. At $200 for the unit, and another $100 for a couple of 200GB SATA drives for a unit that does RAID1 without all the power consumption of running a server is a no brainer.