Trendnet 4 Port KVM

Just picked up the Trendnet 4 port kvm switch from buy.com. It comes with 4 cables, has a $10 rebate, and you can use Google checkout. I'm using this for my server room which has 3 machines right now, and will likely have another at some point in the future.

Amazingly I received this in the mail yesterday, and had it setup right away. It works great.

SSL Certificates for Mail.app

I remember why I stopped using Mail.app. If you setup SSL access, but don't have valid root certificates (i.e. self-signed certs) its going to complain. Argh. I think there is a way to override this, but I'm not exactly sure how.

N.B. - Figure this out!

Safari, Firefox, Camino, oh my...

With my new Macbook, I'm taking my time to set it up right. Currently I'm on the password step, and I installed Gentoo's keychain, which works awesome. Now I'm checking out Apple's Keychain, which I've used many times in the past with positive results. Firefox and Thunderbird do not store their passwords in Mac's keychain though, which is kind of disappointing.

Camino does though, so I've taken another look at it. I used it before Firefox was around, and I still like it a lot. It even has an ad blocker! One complaint is the tabbed browsing. In Safari, you can rotate through the tabs using a couple keys, and in Firefox you can option click the tab number, but in Camino, you can do it but its option-command-arrow. Ugh.

No biggie, still not sure which browser or email client to go with. I am now checking out Mac OS X "Mail" application again. I just hate that name, its impossible to find support for it because the name is so ubiquitous.

Low LCD prices

I just got a 15" LCD from Frys.com for $89, shipped. That's awesome. Like compact flourescent light bulds, low cost lcd screens will definitely have an impact on our power consumption.

Q kju

I'm evaluating Parallels, but I came across Q, which looks pretty cool. It still has some emulation going on, instead of virtualization, but that's in the works.

I'm working with Q right now, installing Debian, and its AWESOME! I'll skip Parallels.

Macbook is Awesome

I haven't even installed all the packages I want, but so far the Macbook is awesome. jEdit works great, NeoOffice is surprizingly fast, and in general the machine is very zippy.

Its a 2Ghz core-duo with 2GB ram, and a 7200 rpm hard drive.

Macbook protection

I'm looking for Macbook protection. Here's what I've found so far:

Macessity Keyboard Shield - $19.99 - $4 shipping

Total Body Shield - $26.99 - $2.00 shipping

Marware Protection Pack - $19.99 - $6.25 shipping

Keyboard cover - $10

Hmmm. Decisions, decisions.

MacBook

Thinking about buying a MacBook and I'm looking at J&R as well as Amazon. They both have free shipping and are the same prices, but Amazon has a $100 rebate, while JR won't charge sales tax, and has a 2% discount via FatWallet. The rebate is great, but my wife already got a Mac with that, so they may not let us get a second one. Most rebates are limited to one per household.

I'll probably go with the 1.83Ghz core duo for $1099, then upgrade the memory and hard drive for better performance. I'm mostly concerned with responsiveness.

I actually paid $1099 to Apple for a refurbished 2.0G chip, with superdrive. I then paid approx. $370 for 2G ram and a faster HD from newegg.com. I'm really psyched about this machine, its going to be so awesome having Mac OS X, Windows XP Pro, and Ubuntu all on the same machine. I'm leaning towards bootcamp instead of Parallels because its cheaper and supposedly less buggy. Though VM Ware would be nice if it exists.

Now, what to do with the extra hard drive and RAM?

New DVDR for my old Dual G4

My old dual G4 was one of the first Apples with a dvdr, and thus it was really slow. I just paid $28 for a new on (16X faster) from Newegg.com. It got here in about 15 minutes! Thanks newegg.com!

I installed it in about 15 minutes too, and its up and running. I had to rebuild the G4 as the old hard drive crashed, and so this saved me at least a half hour on the rebuild. Paid for itself already.

Hard drive enclosure

I'm looking around for a hard drive enclosure. I want:
* USB 2.0
* Sata & IDE
* Low power consumption

I want to use this to test out and recover hard drives. For example, a machine in the office recently failed, so I'd like to access it. If I need to rebuild a drive, it would be faster to use an image to restore it.

I'm now thinking a USB to SATA or IDE + power cable would be more appropriate. I'm not looking to permanently enclose an otherwise internal hard drive. I ended up going with the HD ADAPTER| USB2-IDE/SATA BT-300 Bytecc USB IDE SATA hard drive adapter for simplicity and easy access.

Another AMD Processor and Motherboard Combo from Newegg

This deal is much better as the motherboard is actually really good quality, it has 4 SATA ports for a software RAID. However, it doesn't have onboard video. While I was at it I also bought a stick of RAM for it.

This will go well with the POWMAX case I bought recently, which came with a power supply. I'll also switch out the video card with our fileserver, as I just bought a cheap PCI card just for that purpose. After that, I'll finally be able to close up the file server for good! (And lock it to keep it from my tinkering hands!)

Anyway, back to the new motherboard and processor:

MB ECS KN1 Lite 1.0A NF4U 939 - Retail (Qty=1, Price=$73.99)
CPU AMD|A64 3400+ 2.2G 939 512K % - OEM (Qty=1, Price=$109.99)
MEM 256M|CORSAIR D400 CMX256A3200 % - OEM (Qty=1, Price=$32.99)
DISCOUNT FOR COMBO #10650 (Qty=1, Price=$-73.99)

I'm pretty psyched about this. I just noticed that the motherboard has an RCA output. If that is for video, that would be awesome.

I hate stuffit

Why do people still use stuffit? Argh. Need help finding the link to download stuffit expander without being spammed by lame alladin? Thanks VersionTracker:


Spam free Stuffit download

IOGear USB 2.0 Hub & Card Reader

I just purchased a USB 2.0 Hub & Card Reader (GUH284R) USB 2.0 Hub & Card Reader 6-Port Hub & 12-4 Memory Card Reader/Writer from Staples for $44.99 from Staples. It can be had elsewhere for cheaper, but Staples makes things easier, and I had a couple of $3 coupons.

I'm pleased with this purchase as I just realized how incredibly fast some USB 2.0 flash memory devices.

NSLU2 Rsync

The NSLU2 is awesome because it can run a fairly robust linux distribution. I run DebianSlug on mine, and for the past couple of days, I've been trying to get it to work as a backup system.

However, whenever I fire up rsync, it counts the files, then dies. When I watch the memory consumption with top, rsync starts out using a lot of the cpu and memory, but soon goes to 0% cpu usage. Something is killing it.

So I'm instead running the rysnc process from the machine to be backed up, and as long as I slow the bandwidth way down, it seems to work. I'm currently at 1kbps, though I'm going to try 3kbps when I change to the arcfour algorithm. If that doesn't work, I'll try blowfish and/or 2kbps.

Dyndns again

Dyndns rocks. I just setup dyndns again for a couple of dynamic ips, using ddclient for linux. The problem I was running into was that I was using ez-ipupdate, but that wants to get its ip from and interface, and I'm running it behind a firewall / router.

ddclient makes it easier, with a built in command for obtaining its ip:

Page at dyndns.com on how to setup ddclient

This is another great tech deal because it is free! :-)

Canon Trade Up Program

Thanks again to Slickdeals.net, I just upgraded my Canon Powershot S200 to a Powershot SD450 for $166.45. The SD450 only has a 6 months warranty, but Canon makes quality products.

Slickdeals Canon camera trade-up post

BenQ Displays and Mac OS X

I recently got a bunch of BenQ LCDs for decent prices, and have finally set them up with my primary workstation, a dual G5 Mac OS X. The dual G5 is one of the earlier models, with an ATI Radeon AGP card. I just purchased another Mac edition ATI Radeon card, but this time its a PCI card (the one with the $30 rebate). Now I have all three monitors up and running and its looks really good.

I'm of course tweaking the settings here and there and came across the term "Quartz Extreme" in the Apple System Profiler. Two of the monitors have the Quartz Extreme enabled, but the widescreen FP202W says it is not supported. I'm wondering if that is due to the monitor or the graphics card.

Hmmmm. Anyone know about this? Just researched the card, and it should support Quartz Extreme. Maybe its the monitor...

MythTV Box now VLC Box

I'm dying to build a proper media center PC with Myth TV. Here's a couple of related links I want to keep track of:

Installing Debian Linux on a Pentium-M mini-ITX SBC

I'm trying to find out the minimum bandwidth requirements for playing DVD quality video over a network (the DVD VIDEO_TS folder would be on a network share accessible over the network, via Samba or AFP). Related cool thing: DistantDVD. Damn, it costs $15!

VLC - I've used this before to play videos, but VideoLAN also makes a video streamer - VLS. VLC can actually stream too. This is actually really awesome. I was using Mac's DVD player to open up a video_ts folder shared via Samba, but it was skipping here and there during action scenes. With VLC, I'm able to set the buffer, and the playback is much much smoother.

http://www.pchdtv.com/
Engadget article on HDTV from a PC

MythTV runs on Mac OS X, but only the front end. For the back end, you need a linux machine.

For now, we're going to stick with just using a Mac for DVD tv shows.

Best way to watch DVDs on Mac OS X

Mac OS X VNC Widget

OH NO!!! While VLC has basic support for DVD navigation, its really not that good. I'll continue to simply use the DVD player from Mac OS X for that.