… for when you’re serious about being connected!

But seriously, I don’t see the purpose of this except for some cases where the machine could function as a internet sharing gateway as well. As far as I’ve gathered the purpose for dual LAN-connectors is for people “seeking complete network redundancy” but in my opinion this is just hogwash. Network redundancy would require two different uplinks as well, not just two cables plugged into the same NAT-gateway, because I seriously doubt most people have two completely different connections to the ‘net to use when distributing this load.

I never cease to be amused at the vaguely worded but impressive sounding crap computer companies put out today.

And yes, this is the rear of my computer, and yes – I do actually have two cables plugged in. It happened about two minutes before writing this, and as soon as I’ve published this I’ll probably yank one of them out.

A while back I had a neat idea. It was one of those brainfarts that I occasionally get, and while the majority of them are quite stupid this one actually seemed kind of neat.

See, I own a cheap no-name generic bluetooth dongle. It works quite well and I like being able to connect my phone to my computer using it. Transfer files, sync phonebooks and all that jazz.

Anyhoo, this particular dongle has a tiny green LED indicating activity. When it’s idle it blinks at a rate of about 1 blink per second. When connected to a device it lights up stronger and also flashes intensely if there’s data-transfer. Demonstrated in the video below.

It was the 1 blink per second that got me thinking.

Why not put simulated aircraft lights on a casemod? I’ve always liked the blinks of airplanes and helictopters, and if you’re building an aircraft-themed case why not add a few aircraft LED’s to the mix. Much more stylish than the old-ass windows and cold-cathode tubes everyone has. Additionally it adds some neat bling to it, and also makes the case seem more hardcore. It would even work on a spaceship-themed mod as for example the good old NCC-1701 has aircraft lights on it.

I think that would be kind of neat, some nice pseudo-aircraft lights on a sweet hightech/military type looking case.

However, if you decide to go this route, you shouldn’t use particularly bright LEDs, rather you should go for the subtle approach. In this case (har har) I would say that less is definitely more.

I’ve built countless computers in my days. I’ve built them for myself, for friends and professionally. There is very little I don’t know about building computers, and while I don’t really have the time to keep up with every single new invention I adjust quickly when it’s crunchtime. I started building my own custom computers long before it was common to own a computer, much less assemble it yourself.

While hardware has come and gone there is one axiom that still remains when it comes to building your own computer, and that is the undeniable fact that any included cooler will always suck ass. This is still true, despite the years rolling on and despite technology getting better. Any CPU-cooler that’s included with a retail purchase of a CPU will pretty much blow chunks.

Sure, I admit that it’s money that’s the primary reason. CPU manufacturers simply throw together the cheapest thing that will do the job and ship it, and that’s why the damn things are loud, awfully engineered and keep the CPU at a temperature that is adequate but not in the least impressive.

I recently built a new computer. At first glance the included box-cooler looked pretty decent. It had heatpipes. It had lots and lots of thin aluminium-fins. It had a copper-core.

And when I started the computer it still sounded like a helicopter with severe case of swineflu. In addition, I think that had I put a slice of cold grapefruit on the CPU instead it would’ve been better at cooling the processor.

Why is this?

I think Intel and AMD need to realize they suck at doing this, and tell whatever chinese sweatshop that are assembling these turds to drop dead. Wouldn’t it simply be easier to ask for example Arctic Cooling to build coolers for them to include with a new CPU? Arctic Cooling manages to make coolers that are not only quite efficient, but aren’t ludicrously priced and also fairly quiet.

Yeah, weird topic. However, I discovered MyPaint purely by chance earlier today. It looks like a neat Painter-style application geared towards people with a preference for Free and Open Source software. It runs on Windows and Linux, and there’s a nice .deb ready for Ubuntu from GetDeb so installation was a breeze.

I dug out my ancient Wacom tablet (not my tablet pictured, mine is a lot more dirty and worn, and I lost the silly mouse thing years ago) which I’ve had for almost a decade (it turns ten this summer) and got a little curious as to how painless it would be to get it running under Ubuntu. Turns out it was completely painless – plug it into an available USB-port and presto, everything works just as expected. Especially important was the pressure-sensitivity, and when I gave it a quick go in MyPaint it worked just fine.

So, maybe soon I’ll be doing some virtual painting again? Was a long time since last I did this, might be fun!

My moms computer was dying, so she had me find a new one for her. After some comparison and weighing in the wishes she had (fairly portable, not costing a bloody fortune) I settled on recommending her buying an Asus eeePC 1101.

I helped her set it up this weekend, and it’s quite a neat little machine. Here’s some random impressions I got of it.

* Her unit was delivered with Windows 7 Home Premium and had twice the memory (2 gig instead of 1) and a bigger harddrive (250 gig versus 160) compared to what Asus lists on the website. I don’t see this listed on Asus website, but it appeared to be factoryinstalled.

* I found it rather ironic that Asus puts a really great, vibrant colorful HD-resolution capable display on a computer that simply doesn’t have enough oomph to play HD-content. The display is LED-lit and has a 1366×768 screen that would happily play 720p content. However, like I said – the machine just isn’t beefy enough to do that. Maybe I missed some setting, but I doubt it. Asus also makes a big deal out of this HD-capable display, but like I said – HD video on this thing, I don’t really see it happening. However, it’s absolutely gorgeous on a large-ish netbook. Bright, vibrant colors.

* The graphics adapter is a built-in Intel. This is probably the bottleneck for HD-video, and when Asus starts shipping the Nvidia Ion-equipped eeePC’s this problem with HD-video is probably a thing of the past. However, I found that the Intel-chipset barely has enough oomph to make Windows 7 with Aero run not too annoyingly slow. Things like Google Earth jerked around worse than Kathryn Hepburn on bad acid, albeit somewhat usable. If you buy one of these things expecting AMAZING 3D-performance you’re going to be badly disappointed.

* What the hell is wrong with Microsoft? While I think Windows 7 is an upgrade over Vista I still think it’s a laughably tired operating-system, and I question the wisdom of Asus putting it on a frickin’ netbook. Plug a USB thumbdrive in the computer and then wait 10-15 minutes while Windows 7 find and installs the driver? What the hell? Ubuntu does the same thing in less than five seconds.

* Also, despite Microsofts happy propaganda claiming Windows 7 is excellent for netbooks, my experience with this is quite the opposite. Windows 7 is probably a decent desktop-OS (if you can stand it being Windows) but on this netbook it feels slightly overwhelming – and this is a fairly beefy netbook!

* In fact, most of my complaints with this computer boil down to Windows. I didn’t feel like installing something lighter since it already came with W7, and the problem with a lack of native driver for the Intel-graphics on this particular model makes a decent alternative such as Ubuntu a no-go. This sucks, since Ubuntu would’ve been perfekt for this machine, but Intel refuses to release and kind of driver for this particular chipset and as such I figured, just leave W7 on it.

* The keyboard while somewhat cramped is actually quite nice. Good response, good feel, decent-sized keys for a somewhat large netbook.

* The touchpad has multitouch, which is kind of sweet. I always liked the two-finger scroll on Macs and you can do the same thing on this touchpad. Asus also mentions in the manual various tricky moves you can perform to zoom, but this is made impossible by two things. First, the small size of the touchpad prevents any finger-acrobatics unless you have fingers the size of toothpicks. Secondly, W7 has no nice zoom-function, so at least when I tried to do it nothing happened. It would’ve been sweet with Compiz, but alas, no such thing.

* Battery-time is listed at 9+ hours with the included 6-cell battery. I have absolutely no doubts that this is possible, if you turn the screen brightness way way way down and strangle anything that uses power. Essentially just sit there, stare at the desktop and occasionally move the mouse cursor to prevent the computer from going to sleep. In more real-world environments, with the brightness at a low-ish but tolerable level doing normal things the battery reported about 7 hours of useful capacity.

* The amount of crapware included with this machine was painful. Admittedly, it wasn’t a complete clusterf**k but it was quite annoying having to uninstall all the trial-versions of Microsoft Office (if memory serves me three different versions were available), frickin Microsoft SQL Something-or-other, two trial-antiviruses and 2-3 other minor annoying applications. At least they didn’t include useless crapola such as dvd-recording software on a machine with no optical drive.

* My dear mother went for the blue color, depicted below. I’ve gotta say, it’s one of the prettier computers out there. First off, for a laptop it’s tiny which shoots the cute-factor way up high, but then it has this gorgeous blue paintjob on it. It’s quite dark, if the room is murky then it looks almost black but in lighter conditions it’s almost a lovely candy-blue.

This is the fanspeed reported by i8k on my recently inherited free second-hand laptop running Ubuntu. Notice anything?

The speed reported is… well… slightly exaggerated. 70k plus revs per minute? A jet engine powering a jumbojet doesn’t spin that fast. Methinks the speed is erroneously reported…

The last two years or so I’ve had really bad luck with harddrives. I’ve had a whole bunch of them fail me, and most of them weren’t even that old. Ironically enough the drives that keep chugging along most peacefully are in my server – and they’re of a brand I never trusted (Maxtor) as well as going on six years of age. Keep in mind as well that they’re in my server and thus is rarely if ever turned off. I think I’m going to max out the MTBF on those bad boys some day.

But as for most other drives, great misfortune. I’ve had about 600 gigabyte of Seagate-drives die on me. Even the mighty Western Digital have fallen for my curse, and my current 640-gigabyte Western Digital started having minor issues this spring. A while back I ran some tests on it and sure enough, it was having bad sectors and they were slowly but surely multiplying.

I say “my current” but as of the time of writing this it’s my previous. I rifled through my mattress and text-link money and managed to scrounge up enough cash to buy a new drive. This time I went for a 1TB Western Digital instead. It just seemed uneconomical to buy a smaller drive for almost the same price. I’m also constantly amazed at how much space they squeeze into the same formfactor. I grew up in the era when it was considered spectacular to have a 3.5″ drive with a whopping 2 (TWO!!) gigabytes of space on it, so 1TB is even more impressive.

Anyhoo, this also called for a reinstall of my OS. Since early 2007 I’ve been an Ubuntu-man and I saw no reason to change this. This time I decided to be adventurous and went for the as-yet unreleased Ubuntu 9.10, aka the Karmic Koala. It’s currently in Alpha4, but I felt bold and since it’s going to be released in another two months I just didn’t see the point in installing 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackal) and then upgrade later. Plus, I was really curious about some of the new things.

So, some first impressions. I’ve run this for less than 24 hours, keep that in mind.

* It’s fast. I installed it with the default filesystem, which previously was EXT3 but since Koala has become the new and shiny EXT4 on new installations. I was a bit skeptical to the claims I’ve read, but boot-up on my machine is very quick. There’s obviously been a lot of optimizations to bootup and I’m sure EXT4 helps out a lot. I have yet to enable concurrent booting as well, so maybe that’ll help too.

* It’s fast. Yeah, I know. Technically these things are the same, but I felt it warranted two mentions. It not only boots fast, it logs in fast too. I didn’t install preload until an hour ago, but it never bothered me. Everything just starts up virtually immediately. With preload I suppose it might be even a little quicker. Even slow hogs like Firefox start up much more rapidly.

* It’s unstable. Yup. It’s Alpha 4 after all, so there’s bound to be a lot of quirks. Up until just an hour ago for example I was unable to listen to music, since Rhythmbox would crash after 5 seconds of play, and bring the whole soundsystem (PulseAudio, whatever) with it and turn my box into a deaf-mute until I rebooted. An update seems to have fixed this. There’s plenty other quirks, applications that crash without notice. So there be dragons here.

* Liferea STILL segfaults with signal 11 for me. This is messed-up. A brand-new install, with Liferea from the repos, and it still segfaults? Now it doesn’t even start, it just pukes out a segfault when you try to start it.

* Lots of nice minor touches, visually. The Karmic login-screen is so much nicer than the default in Jaunty. I might actually keep it, instead of replacing it with something slicker from Gnome-Look. There’s been improvements to function as well, the default login looks and acts professional, while being somewhat pretty. Additionally, it fades away nicely to reveal the desktop in a very MacOS X-like fashion. With Compiz Fusion enabled it also does blur and fades and all kinds of other snaziness.

* More control over Rhythmbox’s notifications. Yeah, this one might seem trivial but for me it’s a big deal. I tend to keep Rhythmbox running maximized on another desktop, since I have eight of them. I don’t see any reason to minimize it. This meant however that Rhythmbox didn’t notify on song-changes, which in turn meant I had to change to that desktop if I wanted to see the name of the next tune. This has now been corrected, you can tell Rhythmbox to ALWAYS notify on song-changes. To quote Jamie Oliver: “Lovely!”

* Firefox 3.5 has really, really crappy visual integration into Gnome, for some reason. I’ve gone back to the 3.0.x-series instead. I like using the bitmap Artwiz fonts for visuals, and FF3.5 completely ignores these and apply it’s own philosophy of butt-ugly fonts in menus instead. No thanks. FF3.0.x doesn’t have this hubris and instead decides to fit in. So it’s my browser until Ubuntu/Whomever fixes the visual integration. This kinda sucks, since FF3.5 is stunningly fast.

* The bug in the kernel affecting us with an AMD/ATI-chipset is still there. Details on this are fuzzy, and it’s plagued me for more than a year. Essentially it causes really high load (and slow speeds) while copying to USB-devices. At least for me, many others have other problems such as slow SATA-speeds, but that has for some reason not affected me. Also, maybe it’s not related to AMD/ATI since I remember reading about people with Intel-chipsets on Asus-boards also having similar problems. Which in turn makes it more difficult for kernel-devs to figure out.

Occasionally I do freelance computer work for friends and family. More often than not I find a dust-filled computer that is choking trying to maintain it’s cool while slowly filling with crud. Often these computers require some minor care, and one of my routine procedures is to blow them clear of the crud. It’s almost fascinating how such a simple act can bring back an almost dead computer to life.

Now, I’ve seen some pretty bad horror-shows in my days, but this has got to be the top five at least. Sadly this machine was beyond rescue as it had been zapped by lightning, but it still serves as a good example as to why you should occasionally spend some time keeping your electronic pal clean.

Computers rely on fans to stay cool. Unfortunately many of these fans also suck in dust-particles, and after a while these tend to collect in nasty layers. When your computer looks like the one below, it’s really struggling to stay cool and functional. Imagine yourself trying to breathe through a layer of crud like this. It’s not a pleasant thought.

So spend some time occasionally lifting the cover off your electronic buddy and giving him a good clean. You can buy canned air at most any electronics shop or photo-outlet. It’s a simple tip to keep your machine running smoothly.

If you want more photos of this sorry machine, have a look in my gallery.

… there was some kind of technology that would allow me to literally slap applications. I’m very tired and frustrated right now, and software that takes time to respond annoys the living bejeezus out of me. So I wish I could just SLAP the lazy-ass piece of crap. Give that application a traditional whooping and maybe it’ll wake up out of it’s coma.

Update: Oh, and for the record – Thunderbird might be a kick-ass email application but IT SUCKS ASS at being a news-reader. My regular old Liferea is segfaulting for unknown reasons and no-one seems to have any clue why, even though I’m not alone in this.

Before my reboot of this blog, I had a posting where I waxed nostalgic about the progress of mobile storage, in the form of USB thumbdrives. Essentially I had a “I remember when I was young…” kind of thing. I also had a photo of my then current crop of USB thumbdrives. Here it is again, in case you forgot it:

From left to right: 128MB that I got as a christmas present back in ‘04, then two 512MB units, the grey one is a 1GB unit and the black farthest to the right is a 4GB unit which at the time was bought dirt-cheap.

That was almost a year ago, and just a few minutes ago I felt an update was needed so I whipped out some memory and took a photo of it.

From left to right: A 1GB Micro-SD that I have very little use for. It used to be in my R4DS but I replaced that with a 2GB unit instead. The 16MB Nikon Compact Flash is just for laughs. Then there’s the 128MB PNY-stick and the two 512MB units. The 1GB is missing since I gave it to a friend. Then the black 4GB Kingston, a 4GB SanDisk and finally a whopping 16GB Kingston which is my newest addition.

Fun fact: The neckstrap attached to the 4GB Kingston Datatraveller is the same strap that I got with the 128MB PNY. It’s even labeled PNY but has survived numerous sticks.