QotD for 14 Feb., 2007

"A logically consistent Evangelicalism (if this is not an oxymoron) cannot allow for alternative points of view (or it collapses)."

--- Prior Aelred, St. Gregory's Abbey, Three Rivers, MI

Canonical Partnership with Linspire

Two of the most popular, Debian-based desktop Linux OSes have decided to share technologies between the two distros. The partnership between Canonical (home of Ubuntu Linux) and Linspire will result in changes like Freespire 2.0 (due in April, 2007) being based on Ubuntu, and future Ubuntu releases having access to proprietary software (e.g. DVD players, media codecs) via Linspire's Click 'N Run (CNR) service.

There's a FAQ avail on the Freespire wiki with more info.

Gambling

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about gambling. Esp. the most popular forms - slot machines & video poker.

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.