December 2011
1 post
Newish Camera
A few weeks ago I got an Olympus E-PL3 camera for digital use. As far as future plans with it goes I need to get a better flash than the one that comes with it and I really want a good wide angle prime lens.
I love wide primes on my film cameras especially the Voigtlander 21/4. Maybe I should go with an M adapter for it too. How bad is it to manually focus?
Here is one of my first shots with...
September 2011
1 post
Been a while
I haven’t posted too much on here since trying out Google+. There just isn’t too much activity on there though. I still have my Facebook account but ugh.
The biggest thing happening for me lately was purchasing an HTC Thunderbolt and an Asus Eee Pad Transformer. I managed to root and load ROMs on them both within the first week of ownership and now I’m quite happy with them...
June 2011
1 post
New Stuff
Looks like a nice Thunderstorm is on its way here in a bit. I’ve always been a fan of thunder at night as long as the power doesn’t go out.
As for the new stuff:
I got my new modem hooked up today. It is a Motorola SB6120 DOCSIS 3.0 modem. I am very happy with the speed boost from the new DOCSIS protocol since my old modem was a 2.0 one. Apparently the tech isn’t supposed to...
May 2011
2 posts
GTMO
We finished up all the work we needed to do down here yesterday. Unfortunately I can’t fly out until Tuesday at 8am. GTMO is pretty dull mostly because of the lack of internet in the hotel we are staying at. So here I am sitting in the coffee/ice cream shoppe drinking a milkshake and trying to use the ridiculously slow internet connection here.
Bringing the Cr-48 Chromebook wasn’t...
Gitmo
I found out a little while that I’ll be going to Gtmo with a couple of guys to do some work in a couple of weeks. I’m kind of looking forward to it. It’ll be a nice break from the usual routine of work. I don’t know how I’ll manage without Lizzie for a few days. Luckily one of the guys from work will help out and take care of her while I’m gone.
Lizzie has...
April 2011
5 posts
Sunday
So this week I got an iPhone 4 to replace my Droid Incredible. So far so good. I like the size and weight of the iPhone even though it is a little bit heavier than the Inc. The screen is gorgeous and love all the apps since I can use most of my iPad apps on it.
I’ve been trying to keep up on my Chrome CR-48 but it is losing out to the X120e simply because the Lenovo is much faster at...
3 tags
Retired the EeePC
Today I finally retired my EeePC 701 as my irssi server. With the purchase of my Lenovo I had the Acer Aspire sitting around collecting dust I loaded Xubuntu on it and it is now serving as my irssi and ssh computer. I’m not sure how much it’ll help but the Aspire has gigabit ethernet, a 1.2GHz dual core Celeron, 4GB of RAM, and a 64GB SSD. That is actually a pretty big jump up from the...
3 tags
Update
I’ve had the X120 for a couple weeks now and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. After finally getting the SSD installed and working I haven’t had any major issues with it. Firefox 4 on it is very nice and the hardware acceleration works perfectly. It is good for Kindle for PC too.
One minor issue with it I’ve noticed graphics glitches on it if I leave the laptop on sitting on...
March 2011
13 posts
Rainy Day
What a crappy rainy day. Lizzie has been a pain in the ass all day and I’m kind of bored too.
The other day I ran iometer on the SSD in my X120e and got these results:
128KB Sequential Read:
AMD AHCI: 181MBps
Windows AHCI: 227MBps
128KB Sequential Write:
AMD AHCI: 156MBps
Windows AHCI: 146MBps
So it looks like AMD’s AHCI drivers offer slightly faster writes and a little...
X120e Update
Finally got it up and running with the SSD. Definitely was a pain in the ass but it is worth it. Here is what I did:
1. Resized the system partition with gparted on the old drive (I resized it to about 90GB)
2. Backed everything up with Rescue and Recovery (Took about 2.5 hours)
3. Restored it to the SSD (Took about 45 minutes)
4. Resized the partition in Gparted again.
So all in all it...
Lenovo X120e
I picked it up last night and was up until around 3:30 trying to get everything set up on it. I installed the SSD and 8GB of RAM right off the bat and went ahead and installed a fresh version of Windows 7. This is where the first problem popped up as I installed the 802.11n drivers. There appears to be a bug in the x86-64 version of the drivers where they pop up an error after install saying...
Lenovo Update
It’ll be here tomorrow according to the tracking status. Hopefully they can hold it at the location for me after the delivery attempt fails. Who is home before 10:30 to pick up a package? It is a little ridiculous. I preferred it up in Maine when UPS would come around 7pm. I’ll definitely post my impressions of it tomorrow when I get it set up.
Today I almost finished my castle in...
Response from Lenovo
I e-mailed Lenovo yesterday with a question about the order status and this is the reply I got:
Right now we do not have proper information about the order status. This system is in huge constraint and causing delay on the ship date. I would request you to wait for 2-3 business days. By then we should have a better update and we will be able to give you the right information about the order...
Ship Date Updated
The estimated ship date on the Lenovo updated this morning. It got pushed back to the 29th of this month. I’m pretty disappointed I have to say. I’d figured they would send me an e-mail or something to let me know if there was a change in supply or something. I guess it must be really popular.
All my stuff backed up successfully last night to the Synology. It took about 2 hours for...
Still Waiting
I’m still waiting for news on my X120e. It is supposed to ship today though. Like the song says “Waiting is the hardest part.” It especially hard since I already have the hard drive and RAM that I’m going to put in it.
I finally got a regular hard drive for my Synology. I decided to go with a WD 2TB Green Power. I’m hoping with the GP it’ll stay fairly cool...
New Laptop
In my effort to constantly have to many systems in my apartment I have ordered a new computer. What did I order? A Lenovo x120e CTO. I decided to go with the Zacate E-350 and the Thinkpad a/b/g/n wireless rather than the defaults. I’ll upgrade the RAM with 4GB I have laying around and the SSD from my Aspire 1410 laptop. Hopefully the speed and battery life will be good.
I hardly ever use...
February 2011
15 posts
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?
Back to 7
Since my mini is dead and I have to use my desktop for stuff I have loaded Windows 7 back on there. I have to get Steam back on there and I already loaded Minecraft. Chrome 10 on Windows screams. I get tired of the dekstop though and I might go over to an iMac or something when they go to Sandy Bridge.
I still have the Eee with Linux and I now use Putty on my Desktop for IRC and SSH.
I...
No mini!
Well the Mac mini is back down again. I thought that a reinstall would fix the crashes but it is still doing it so the Linux desktop is back up and running. I guess I must’ve screwed something up when I install the hard drive a few months back. I guess that’ll teach me not to screw with Apple’s computers.
I’m restoring my iTunes library to my Macbook from my time machine...
Mac mini
I got bored with my Linux desktop and set my Mac mini back up. Love to get back to Mac OS X on a desktop. iTunes and everything is set up after copying the library off my Macbook. Copying that over made me glad I have 802.11n and gigabit ethernet. Having the Diskstation set up for time machine helped a lot too. Didn’t take all day to get everything off of it too.
I still have znc going on...
BeOS on a Dual Pentium II w/ 64MB of RAM →
Impressive demo of BeOS from over 10 years ago.
znc
I’m using ZNC now to connect to Ars Technica’s IRC server. I lose the autologging as far as I know but gain the ability to use a GUI based IRC client. So now I have ZNC set up on my Asus EeePC 701 and I am connecting to it through either Textual on my Mac or Xchat on my Linux computers.
I do need a solution for my Chrome Notebook though. I’ll have to give it some thought.
irssi + screen vs. znc
I’m currently using irssi + screen to connect to my favorite IRC server and channels but I’ve been reading a little on znc. It seems like a neat system and a cool way to connect but I’m not sure how I’d like it rather than irssi. I like that you can use a regular IRC client to connect to znc though. I might just have to give it a shot.
Switched back
I’ve switched back over to Tumblr. Squarespace was cool but it was more than I need.
Switchover
I’ve switched my blog over to Squarespace. It is still at http://naqlc.me though.
New Themes
Changed my theme and colors on here and on Twitter. What do you think? Anything too hard to read? Too orange? Too grey?
Also I managed to crash my Chrome Notebook in Tumblr’s theme garden. Good thing it isn’t my only computer.
New Case
Today I replaced my cheap old Antec case with a new Lian-Li PCA05 one. I love how much easier it is to get to everything in the new case and it is much quieter than the old one. The two Lian-Li 120mm fans that it came with are pretty quiet but I have two Scythe fans that I might replace them with for even more quiet.
Here is the output from sensors -f:
fan1: 1566 RPM (min = 0 RPM)...
Here is a new picture of Lizzie at almost 7 months old. She is getting so big.
Tax Return
I got my tax return today and I can’t think of anything to spend it on. I have three things I am considering right now:
-iMac
-Macbook Air
-Lenovo x201 or t series
I don’t really need any of those though. So I’m losing my mind trying to find something to spend some money on.
I am still considering another dog for Lizzie to play with. I’m not sure I could handle two...
January 2011
6 posts
New Toy
On Thursday I came home to find an unexpected package on my doorstep. It turned out to be a Google Chrome notebook from the pilot program. I had signed up back in December and hadn’t heard anything from Google about whether or not I was getting the notebook.
I was impressed with the ease of setup. It was pretty much just connect it to the Wi-fi and sign in with my Google account. The...
Desktop back up
Tonight I was bored so I unhooked my Mac mini and set my homebrew desktop back up. I’ve got it running Xubuntu 10.10 and I’m quite happy with it. I forgot how fast this computer is. I know it could’ve easily handled Gnome but I love XFCE. I can’t wait to see if version 4.8 comes to Xubuntu 11.04.
Geeky Stuff
Yesterday I got irssi up and running on my router in DD-WRT. However it was pointed out to me that since the default account on DD-WRT is root it probably isn’t a great idea to use it for IRC. I then realized that I had an EeePC 701 sitting around gathering dust and it would be perfect for a low power irssi machine. I updated it to Xubuntu 10.04.1 LTR and installed SSH and irssi on it. Now...
December 2010
12 posts
DD-WRT
I gave DD-WRT a try on my Linsys E3000 today. I like how customizable it is and all the stats and info it provides are very neat. It made me feel quite geeky running it.
However I am now back on the stock firmware for the router. I found that every 5 minutes or so it was dropping the wireless connections on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. I think it might have been due to the router overheating...
Post
The Mac mini just got upgraded to 8GB of RAM because I love having a machine this small with specs that are overkill for what I need.
On January 5th I’ll be getting my two wisdom teeth pulled. I’m hoping I can ask one of the great people at the dog park to help me take care of Lizzie for a bit while I’m hopped up on Vicodin while recovering.
Speaking of Lizzie she is going...
Upgrades for my Macs
Tonight I upgraded the hard drives in my Macbook and Mac mini. For the Macbook I went with my 64GB Crucial CT64M225 SSD even though OS X doesn’t yet support TRIM. It is quite quick and hopefully the speed doesn’t degrade too much.
On the mini I upgraded it from the slow 500GB 5400RPM drive to a Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB 7200RPM. The old hard drive is going into an enclosure...