Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

This guy has put together a very good list of ‘Tips on…’ and ‘How that works…’ for Gmail accounts. See List

If Gmail accounts aren’t publicly available yet, let me know and I can create an invite for you.

Side Note: My Genie garage door opener came with a messaging control panel, which they called G-mail with the logo (as seen on the instruction sheet) baring an uncanny resemblance to Google’s Gmail logo. I wonder if the two parties ever discussed this matter. I’ll try to get the instruction sheet scanned if I can find it again.

Sparking the purchase of my new hardware was the motherboard failure of my 4-year-old daughter’s computer. Since I rarely use my Windows box for anything day-to-day, I was able to transplant the Epox EP-8RDA+ motherboard into her computer last night. I took my time doing so I could get every little thing in place and cleanly installed. Once everything was installed, I gave it a quick boot to see if the memory and CPU and motherboard had survived the move from one case to another. No problems. I used an Ubuntu Live CD I had in my possession to log into the recently hosed Windows drive (Oops!) and grab all of the necessary profile documents and whatnot to make the backup onto my trusty Linux box.

With the backup complete, I began the reinstall of Windows XP on her box. Everything went as planned with the install, updates, service packs, software, etc, etc. The only thing that remains is a good program that will emulate CDROM drives for her games. I used GameDrive previously and found it worked *just* okay, but not perfect as bootup always Autoplayed every single virtual CD. Ouch!!

Summary:
My 4-year-old daughter has a faster computer than most adults I know.

Epox EP-8RDA+ (400MHz FSB)
AMD Athlon 2600+ (2.09GHz)
1GB (2@ 512MB) DDR400 (PC3200) RAM
NEC 1100A DVD+RW
Maxtor 13GB HDD

Hopefully one day, I can say I influenced her to do something great.

For those of you who love Star Wars and have missed one or more of the new volume of Clone Wars on the Cartoon Network, you can catch up at their site.

Well, I just read a post today on bloglines about the OmniFi Digital Media Streamer, a cool product that will stream wma and mp3 files from your local network via Ethernet or 802.11b. The unit comes with the Ethernet dongle, but has USB 1.1 ports on the rear to accomodate a USB Wifi adapter. From what I’ve researched, this device is running a light version of Linux with the 2.4 kernel or something in that area. OmniFi, a Rockford Fosgate Company, has a product for home and for auto use. I’m actually quite interested in both.

Good News:
I bought it!

Well, my new hardware, mentioned in previous post is on its way. I did purchase the goods from Monarch Computer Systems, and I’m looking forward to the hassle free assembly of this already tested motherboard combo with RAM.

Adobe Acrobat version 7 is now available for UNIX/Linux via the Adobe FTP Server. The server has the source install and the rpm available. This is a major leap from the current blah version 5 that they previously released. The bad news is that this version is supposedly just as bloated as the Windows version, which I guess never really bothered me. Here is a screenshot comparison of the two versions.

For sites without RSS feeds, there is the roosster. This sweet project is providing what the original site owners should be, a simple data feed for those on the go. See their site here

As an addict of movies and movie trailers, I frequently visit Apple.com to see what the latest trailers are and to decide what I’ll be watching in 6 months when they hit video. Most of my Netflix Queue is decided this way. Anyway, for some unknown reason, Apple has yet to publish any feeds for this list of trailers they provide. After finding roosster, I thought I’d give them a try and submitted a ‘feed request’ for Apple’s Trailers. Within 3 days, I got a reply back from them stating my request had been done. These guys work fast and do very good work. Kudos to roosster.

Browse their feeds here

Well, I found a friend who had a noncorrupt copy of SuSE 9.2 and I promptly installed on a spare drive I had laying around. If SuSE has done nothing else for the Linux world, they have mastered the Art of Polishing the look and feel. No other distro can hold a candle to the Out-Of-The-Box install of KDE on SuSE. Check out the screenshots. I haven’t had a chance to play with the OS on the server level, but for a Desktop, this would be a very welcoming site for linux newbies. Everything in their menu is easy to find and intuitive. Much of this has to do with KDE, but you can tell that Novell too their time designing their apps to be consistent and look nice across the entire OS. Yast is the equivalent of Windows Control Panel and a great tool it is. When Novell bought SuSE, the first thing they did was implement Yast in their enterprise desktop solution, Novell Desktop.

Novell has slated the next version of SuSE (9.3) to be released Mid-April 2005, and from what I’ve read about it already, it is a must see.

Well after my daughter’s computer (motherboard to be specific) suddenly stopped working, I found myself in a dilemna. Do I purchase the necessary parts to get hers working again, or do I take this as the perfect opportunity to upgrade my PC and pass down my parts to her PC? Easy!!

When funding for this project arrives, I’ll be ordering the following to complete the project:

• Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo2-F: has 1GHz FSB and two sets of dual channel DDr400 slots
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3500+: slightly higher than what I normally would have purchased, but this time I wanted something that would really perform in the world of video recoding
• RAM: 2x512MB PC3200 DDR400 OCZ

I found all of this hardware available at Monarch Computers for very near the lowest price available, but what they provide that no one else does is preconfiguring. They’ll assemble the Mobo, CPU, and RAM, test for compatibility and download the latest BIOS updates for me before shipping. This will remove a ton of possible headaches and it is guaranteed to work when I get it. For a Build-It-Yourselfer, the is a blessing considering they don’t charge you anything extra for the service (I’m sure it is built into the price).

My daughter’s computer will be getting a nice upgrade from a Athlon 1900+/256MB RAM to a Athlon 2600+/1GB RAM. You know those Sesame Street games will be screaming now!!

Okay, I goofed. The second (side) tab is the Audio-CD Tab. Perhaps this is typical Nero 5 behavior, but it has been awhile. I also needed to install mpg123 from source, which I imagine some systems would already have installed.

I can’t say enough about how great it is that Ahead has taken the steps towards supporting Linux. This is a huge acknowledgement from the longtime Windows software. However, I have tried this new software and have found one major ingredient missing or completely hidden from view. I cannot figure out how to make an Audio-CD from a group of mp3 files. Nero’s website claims:

Audio encoding and decoding done on the fly, using external utilities (mpg123, ogg123)

If someone could try this and point me to what I’m missing, I would greatly appreciate it. I can only get the Data-CD view.

The interface is very Nero 5, despite the requirement of a Nero 6.6+ (for Windows) license. Get more info here.

Without going into a day’s worth of details, I’ll say we took back the silver van and got a more feature rich van.

*price before TT&L

What we bought:
Dodge Grand Caravan SXT with a one year subscription to SIRIUS Radio.