Random Opinions
Synergy is a great little program for controlling multiple computers easily from a single keyboard/mouse. You still need the monitors lined up but it lets you use them as a single large virtual desktop, and behaves much better than win2vnc for automatic connection/disconnection.
With my new digital camera, I figured it was time to get dedicated and create a proper album on the web so everyone could look at it. Coppermine Gallery seemed the most popular so I now have it set up and working cialisviagras.net. The only downside is it really needs a mass-edit feature for captions and descriptions (I’m using MySQL Administrator at the moment, which is like crushing a walnut with a Ford Explorer).
Finally bit the bullet and upgraded my hosting to use a Virtual Private Server (using DEHE as my host) and have been having a lot of fun setting it up, thinking about what I can do with it, not to mention having 200G of transfer available. Been slowly moving all my hosted boards to it and working on setting up MUDs, BitTorrent hosting and all sorts of other creamy goodness.
The temporary move to San Jose is pretty much complete now. We have our computers all working in the 2nd bedroom and the hotel staff were nice enough to pull all the extra beds out of there so we have a lot of room to spread out, at least in the one room. Back on EQ2 again and should be caught up on all the progress we missed in the 2 weeks we were gone pretty soon now.
My new toy of the week is a mini-pc from AOpen which I managed to get through the purchasing department (ie wife) to replace the old Linux box we left behind in Pittsburgh. It really is a great little machine – 1.5 GHz Celeron, 1G DDR2 memory, 30G HDD with 250G external USB2 drive attached, gigabit ethernet, slot loading DVD/CDRW and all for just under $500. Honestly it’s pretty hard to complain about that sort of value – especially when it comes in a tiny little 6†square, 2†tall case. It’s really the perfect headless Linux box!
As expected, Gentoo went smoothly onto the machine and it compiled and ran in no time compared to my old 650MHz Duron box. I definitely love that distribution. Nothing like being able to compile your entire system from scratch specifically optimized for your CPU with a few simple “emerge†commands. Guess that’s the geek factor for you.
Nothing much else new (thankfully – not much time for anything else new). Still working on a way to get an externally visible IP address for stuff like custom web serving and MUD/MOO hosting – probably going to go with a VPS system from DEHE (who are a subsiduary of Solidhost, my current provider) so I can play around to my heart’s content!
My work PC and monitor was shipped via FedEx from Pittsburgh to San Jose. I just have to say that FedEx really knows how to beat the living crap out of packages. They really looked like they had been dropped 3 or 4 floors onto some irregular object. The most amazing thing was the stand for the LCD was actually sheared apart in two places on the base – definitely not something that casual mistreatment could possibly do.
On a side note – I’ve never seen UPS or even US Post treat packages that badly. Only FedEx.