Molly Ivins

Everyone's no doubt heard of the passing of quintessential Texas humorist Molly Ivins. The Houston Chronicle has a few of her many, tasty quotes available here, and there are many more in this entry from About.com. One of my absolute favorites was from her response to a speech by presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan to the Republican National Convention in 1992:

Many people did not care for Pat Buchanan's speech; it probably sounded better in the original German...

May she rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon her.

I (sorta) Built a New PC

Right before the Christmas holidays, my homebuilt 2.4 GHz P4 box went belly-up. Most likely a bad motherboard, but I was just tired of messing with it.

So I scavenged almost everything I could out of it and started hunting around for the current price/performance breakpoint in "Intel-based" PCs. Turns out that title belongs to the very inexpensive 64-bit AMD CPUs like the Sempron. Ended up with an Asus Vintage AE-1 "barebones" system from Directron - one of my favorite PC parts suppliers.

One of the big advantages of doing business with Directron is that they'll assemble & test any PC components you purchase for a very reasonable fee. So I had them drop in an AMD Sempron 3400 and 1GB DDR400 RAM in to the AE-1, test it, and ship it to me. I then added my DVD burner and AGP video card myself and badda-boom, new computer. Both WinXP and Ubuntu Linux installed easily (had a minor work-around with Ubuntu & the SiS190 ethernet chipset on the AE-1 motherboard, but nothing serious), and for just over $300 I have a small, speedy and quiet new system.

Recommended.

The Creature Lives!

Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy, has a new book out featuring my childhood's favorite campy swamp monster - The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Time's Black Lagoon is reviewed by Cory Doctorow on boingboing where he calls it:

funny, deeply weird, and action-packed...Di Filippo manages to cram every great tradition of the science fiction adventure novel into this one, giving it the feel of one of his baroque masterpieces...

An Ideal External Drive

I've recently found an almost ideal line of external hard drives with the Western Digital "My Book" series. I purchased the 250 GB model and discovered several great features:

• It's very quiet and runs cool


• The case is decent looking and unobtrusive


• Most importantly, the drive spins down after a period of inactivity (unlike most of the other external drives I've seen)

The only, slight drawbacks are that the drive automatically turns on & spins up whenever the attached PC boots (vs. defaulting to "off" unless you press the power button), and that the disk is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem. The filesystem issue isn't necessarily bad - just depends on what sort of OS your PC runs. Folks who run WinXP exclusively (I'm sorry) may want to reformat the drive as NTFS, and MacOS users will probably want to change it to HFS+. But FAT32 isn't bad. All modern OSes can read/write to it. The only drawback is that a single file can't be larger than 4GB on a FAT32 filesystem.

Anyway - good piece of kit. Recommended.

Old Phones

Ever wish you had a source for one of those "built like a tank" old Western Electric desktop phones ? Well drop by Old Phones and have a look. All of their phones come equipped with an RJ-11 modular jack and are made to be used, not just displayed on a shelf.

How about a brand new, military surplus, rotary dial ITT model 500 in the original box for $65.00 ? Nice, hefty handset, and a good, loud "answer me, dammit" ringer - a classic :)

[via the Silicon Underground]

WRT54G Reclaimed for Linux

As a follow-up to my post below about a Real Router for $60, word comes that recent models of the popular Linksys WRT54G can now be converted to Linux like the older models.

The current, series 5 models of the WRT54G have come from Linksys with the VxWorks OS loaded, and were resistant to being flashed with alternate firmware. But...

Jeremy Collake, aka "db90h," appears to have created a "VxWorks Killer" flash image that overwrites the VxWorks bootloader on series 5 WRT54G routers with normal Broadcom CFE firmware. This then enables the device to be put into maintenance mode at startup, after which Linux firmware can be installed easily.

[via Linux Devices]

A Real Router for $60

There have been alternative, Linux-based firmware upgrades for the Cisco/Linksys WRT54G series of wireless routers for some time now. But a new article on Lifehacker introduces this easy upgrade in a very approachable way.

After following the instructions and upgrading to the DD-WRT firmware, your cheap WRT54G can do cool, "real router" things like QoS (Quality of Sevice, a.k.a. traffic shaping), where you assign higher bandwidth to certain machines, or to critical apps like Skype, while still letting that Bittorrent D/L chug along in the background. You can also increase its wireless Xmit power from the default, and rather measly, 28 mW to something more useful - like 70 mW. Or set it up as a static DHCP server, where the individual MAC of a machine's NIC is always assigned the same IP addr with its DHCP lease. Endless, geeky network admin fun awaits...

[via boingboing]