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2 Oct 2006
I am in need of a product that I am virtually sure exists. I can't, for the life of me, seem to find a place that sells this product — although I suspect that's just a difficulty with putting my thoughts into search terms. I also am even having a difficulty envisioning what it might look like. So I ask for your help. I need some way to easily keep all of my different USB cables (iPod, Palm, phone, camera, video camera, et al) as easily accessible and not-ugly as possible. Requirements:
- A hub, or at least some way to not have to reach around my tower to get the right cable plugged in. I only have six USB ports, and including my keyboard, mouse, and printer, I have far more devices, so there currently ends up being a lot of juggling.
- Some sort of cable hiding solution. Cable ugliness is the number one cause of premature death, followed closely by the goddamn Nihilanth.
- The cables should be easy to remove, so that I don't have to spend fifteen minutes pulling one out just to bring it to a friend's house.
Just a simple USB hub that I can plug things into solves the biggest part of the problem: the pain of juggling. But I still have to keep the cables neatly tucked away in a little bin next to the desk. Is there a better solution that I'm missing? I can't be the only person with this problem.
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7 Aug 2006
Is anyone else unimpressed with Apple's WWDC announcements today? They're cool, I guess, but there was no real bang. Certainly no surprise. I suppose if I had a Mac, I might be excited about some of the Leopard details, but none of them seem especially groundbreaking to me. The Mac Pro was not only rumored for weeks, but doesn't seem especially spectacular or surprising. (Let's see, Macbook, Macbook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini.. Hmm.. What else could they transition to Intel?)
Okay, 16GB of RAM and 2TB of disk in a desktop is pretty impressive. But.. I dunno. What am I missing?
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20 Feb 2006
The biggest disadvantage to building your own desktop is that when things go wrong, you actually have to figure out what it is. A couple weeks ago, in the middle of a game, my desktop shut itself off. It would no longer get so far as POSTing, and sometimes the power supply wouldn't do anything when I hit the power button. After some fiddling, I determined that it was most likely the motherboard, and since I had a three-year warranty, I sent it back to MSI for repairs.
When a different motherboard (of the same model) came back, it still wasn't working. This narrowed it down to the (cheap) power supply or the (less cheap) processor. I randomly came across a great rebate deal on a 350W power supply at CompUSA, so I ran there and purchased it. I was lucky, and that did it. It only cost me ten dollars in the end, and my computer now seems quieter, too.
I only wish it hadn't taken a month.
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14 Apr 2005
I'm starting to really like the looks (not to mention the rumored specs) of the upcoming PalmOne Tungsten X (a.k.a. LifeDrive). Since my current PDA is a six-year-old Handspring Visor, this would be a tempting upgrade.
Unfortunately, it'll probably end up costing nearly as much as the LCD screen I'm fantasizing about considering.
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11 Apr 2005
Our new 3par storage mega-arrays at work are something else. They have some amazing hands-off features, and are extremely fast, but they also call home. They send the manufacturers statistics and apparently also our configuration information. It's a little disconcerting, but it does have one interesting advantage. Occasionally, they notice something is wrong before our NOC does:
From: Ken Hardin
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 10:01 PM
To: Unix System Administrators
Subject: Transfer overdue for 3PAR InServWe received an alert from our monitoring system indicating it has not received a heartbeat file for over 4 hours from one of your 3PAR InServ storage servers (serial number [XXX], called nw-3par-02, in CT). The last time we heard from it was around 15:30 EDT (today, 4/9/05), and at about the same time there were network errors reported by the other InServ (S/N [XXX]). This probably indicates some type of network problem.
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30 Mar 2005
My boss at work just told me we're going to be getting ten old Sun Rays that he found on eBay for something like $20 apiece. We're going to put a Sunfire v20z behind them, probably running Xen. That's a dual-Opteron beasty with 8GB of RAM. They're fast, and they'll be about a kajillion times better than my current 500MHz desktop. I'm really super excited about this.
Update 6 Apr: We got the Sunrays in today. They're exactly as awesome as I expected.
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17 Jan 2005
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11 Jan 2005
Macworld Expo starts tomorrow, and here's a good rundown of all the rumors. It's been difficult to see the wisdom of some of Apple's decisions lately (although, like Jack Bauer, they were eventually shown to be right). But just about everyone sees immediately that both the flash iPod and the headless iMac are ridiculously good ideas.
Update: iPod shuffle, Mac mini (no i?)
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22 Oct 2004
Blu-Ray? HD DVD? Confused by the tech? Unsure why you should even care yet? Gizmodo presents a good overview called Blu-Ray Has Already Won.
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21 Sep 2004
In the same vein as the PSone, here comes Sony's PStwo. (Okay, that's not the real name, but it should be). That thing is ridiculously tiny. Barely more than an inch thick and one-quarter of the volume of the original. Yikes.