Will's Blog (Posts about hardware)

Status 09/08/2007

Will Kahn-Greene — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 12:49:06 GMT

I ordered a Seagate Barracuda Ultra ATA/100 drive from Amazon.com the other day and it arrived today. I opened it up to discover it's a PATA drive. However, I thought I ordered an ATA drive and not a PATA drive.... Long story short after an hour of researching and finally calling up a friend who does hardware work, I discovered that "they" renamed ATA to PATA so that it won't be confused with SATA. No one sent me the memo.

I was at Tag's Hardware in Porter Square (Cambridge, MA, USA) to buy Poly-acrylic for some shelves I'm putting up and they're selling decent bookshelves for $20.00. We bought one--it's pretty sturdy and it folds up for moving/storage/whatever. They probably have more left if you're in the area and interested.

I've been working through PyBlosxom stuff. I updated the web-site to use PyBlosxom 2.0-dev (in trunk). We worked through entry caching plans on the mailing list and implemented most of them. We've also been discussing and working through template variable syntax and semantics. I've been adding new unit tests and using tests to help work out the design issues. The testing framework has made it so much easier to do development work.

I've been writing a todo-list-tracking application in Django. I'm hitting a point where it's half-implemented, but I'm thinking I may switch back to Pylons because it's Paste-friendly and easier to deal with.

Bunch more stuff, but it'll be in separate entries.

Athlon XP on the side of the road

Will Kahn-Greene — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 23:12:22 GMT

Last night, S and I were walking to meet some friends at the crepe place when I spotted a black mini-tower with a "free" sign taped to it. I looked at it and it had been hand-built and had case fans with LEDs. I figured that's kind of interesting. So I picked it up and brought it home.

Needless to say we were late to meet the friends. But the next day (today), I took a better look at the machine (i.e. I plugged it in and turned it on). It's an Athlon XP 1800+ with 640 MB of RAM (or something like that). I figure I'll slap one of the half-dozen hard drives I have sitting around in it and use it as a spare build machine or something along those lines. The things you find on the side of the road....

Dell Inspiron 7000

Will Kahn-Greene — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:29:21 GMT

Back in 1998, I bought a Dell Inspiron 7000 PII 266mhz monstrocity of a laptop which weighs in at over 8 lbs. It's really heavy. It's seen its fair share of action since then: it was toted back and forth between MA and CT while I was doing consulting work; it was abused by an x-girlfriend; it was shipped in a flimsy letter-sized envelope thing via USPS; and then it's been through several moves since I move on average once every 8 months. It's been through a lot.

The case is cracked, the things that latch the lid shut are broken, and the power adapter has been fixed a few times (the last one by Brian who had the right tools to fix it and thus it's been fine since [Thanks, Brian!]). Even so, I powered it up last night, did an apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade and it's going fine. Slow, but fine.

So this post is in homage to a laptop I bought back in 1998 that's stuck with me through thin and thick and is still usable even after all these years.

Dell Inspiron 7000 PII 266 mhz circa 1998 laptop, I salute you.

External HDD Enclosures

Will Kahn-Greene — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:33:48 GMT

I need an external HDD enclosure so that I can [fill in obvious use cases here]. I have a couple of 3.5" drives that I'm not using, so that eliminates a 2.5" enclosure that can power off USB which is a bit of a shame.

Anyhow, I was looking at these:

I haven't heard anything about any of these companies, though. So that makes it a bit difficult to decide which one to get.

Anyone have any thoughts? Anyone have a HDD enclosure they prefer over these?

Got a new case

Will Kahn-Greene — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:20:05 GMT

I gave my desktop to my girlfriend's parents because their machine was about to die (like, serious death) and my machine was more machine than I needed and I figured I'd borrow some spare components from my dad and after that series of transactions, everyone would be happy. Thus it transpired and everyone was happy! w00t!

Then I discovered I couldn't put the massive full tower case under either of my desks and with the fourteen fans (some of which were parts taken from dismantled B-52 flying fortresses) it sounded like my desk was sitting on the tarmac of an air field during an air show.

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I decided to get a smaller quieter case and picked up an Antec Sonata. It's great. Everything I had read about it was right on down to the fact that you can count exactly how many times you touched the top of the case due to the amazing ability of the piano black finish to preserve in a pristine fashion every single detail of every single fingerprint.

Then after wrestling with the IDE ribbon cables, I decided to pick up two rounded IDE cables for $8.00 each.

The machine is super duper! Total monetary cost to me so far is $112. My girlfriend's parents got a machine to replace their very seriously almost dead one. My dad freed up some room in his computer room. Everyone is happy!...

Well, except for my girlfriend who's a little unexcited when I spend long periods of time over several days futzing with hardware.

AMAZON::B000087ZQC::Antec Sonata case AMAZON::B0002344O8::24" Rounded IDE cable

Tossing around getting an mp3 player

Will Kahn-Greene — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 16:33:17 GMT

I'm tossing around getting an mp3 player again. My car only has a tape deck and the radio reception is kind of flakey for no apparent reason I can discern [1]. Also, I take the T around town frequently and it'd be nice to have a portable device that I can listen to at work, on my work commute, at home, on the T, and in other places.

I don't really need to upload my entire music collection. Having said that, I'm a mood-centric music listener and I have a bunch of different moods and it'd be nice to have at least 10 or 20 songs for each mood. Thus I've tossed around getting a hard-drive based player.

I'd rather have a player that doesn't require a fancy gui thingy on my host computer. Having said that, I realize those gui's are nice since they frequently build an index of the songs on the drive, so it makes boot up of the player <b>much</b> faster. I <b>HATE</b> Creative Labs Music Center (or whatever it's called). I've never used iTunes. I don't need something to categorize my life--just something to load songs onto the mp3 player.

I don't really care about size, but I'd like the player to fit in my pocket. I don't care about cool-factor. I don't care about user interfaces as long as I can select songs to play, play them, and skip songs I don't feel like listening to. I don't care about playing solitare or about organizing my life. A remote control would be nice but it's not necessary.

The battery has to last at least 6 hours and it's not acceptable for it to die in a year.

I don't want to pay a fortune. It has to be available at amazon.com.

And that's as far as I've gotten on this train of thought. Email willkg at bluesock dot org if you have ideas [2].

But the printer was just fine...

Will Kahn-Greene — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 19:21:52 GMT

I was printing out the 1,203,481,288 pages involved in my tax return on my HP OfficeJet Series 700 printer which I got from my uncle a million years ago back when printers would print one dot at a time and it sounded like disco music, when suddenly an error message pops up saying in really big letters:

PRINTER ERROR

The computer has lost communication with the printer.

Cancel printing, turn the printer off, then back on, do the hokey pokey,
burn incense, twirl three times, tap your heels together and then
try printing again.

I'm skeptical of stuff like that. I'm a programmer--I'm fully aware that computers and software have no clue what they're doing. My printer was still printing the pages--albeit so incredibly slow that a three-toed sloth would start getting impatient. I figured I'd wait until the printer was done doing whatever it was doing.

I came back 24 days later to discover everything printed out just fine. And in color--I had no clue this was a color printer!

I still don't know what that error was all about. Maybe the software didn't expect the printer to take so damned long? Who knows? Regardless, I'm done filing my taxes, it's 60 degrees outside, and I'm going to go get some breakfast.

My thoughts on organizers

Will Kahn-Greene — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 04:41:06 GMT

My cell phone is doing things that are reminiscent of a small furry woodland creature in the throes of death. It even makes the same noises, though my phone makes the noises in a highly non-reproducable and intermittent sort of way. Thus, I've been tossing around getting a new cell phone in the near future. That's the first problem.

Along comes problem two: my schedule went from this easy-to-manage one-or-two-things-to-do-a-week to a massive stack of errands and events that I honestly can't come to grips with short of getting a helping hand. I tossed around getting another Palm Pilot or similar device and then decided I should replace my phone and get a Treo 600 (buy at Amazon) because they're waaay cool.

I tossed this around for a week and then ended up deciding to punt on the phone issue until it actually dies and getting a paper organizer that fits in my pocket.

The biggest reason I got a paper organizer and not a PDA (that's "personal digital assistant" and not "public display of affection" in this context for those who are wondering) is that I want less gadgets in my life. Every time I add a gadget to the arsenel, it adds to the total amount of time I'm spending maintaining and fixing things not to mention the huge chunk of time it takes to get the things to work with all the other things I own. This is definitely a case where less is more and more is less.

To get a Mac

Will Kahn-Greene — Tue, 06 Jan 2004 22:07:38 GMT

My brother has a Mac. It's a something-or-other-with-high-end-thingies-and-stuff Mac, to be specific. Anyhow, I have a friend who after years and years and years of being a PC Windows/Linux guy got a Mac and never looked back. In fact, he then proceeded to get a few more Macs.

Their experiences and my needs for my next machine have caused me to think seriously about getting a Mac. Then I read this article and thought that was interesting because I want to create and produce things. If Apple really is focusing on that segment of the market, then I should get a Mac.