It's a blog.
In: Computers|Materialism
10 Oct 2010At work, I came to be a Mac fan. It’s based on BSD, but adds a much more polished GUI. It’s got a very user-friendly interface, and yet it’s trivial for me to pull up the command line and do “real” things there. So when I decided to build a new desktop, I decided I [...]
In: Materialism
3 May 2009Great deals abound this week! 19″ Acer (1440×900 — not great), $89.98 at Staples. If you go through FatWallet and another site I’ve never heard of, you can get a little more taken off, but it looks to involve buying a coupon. 22″ Acer (X223Wbd, 1680×1050), $139.99 at Staples, online-only. Don’t think I’ve seen a [...]
In: Computers|Materialism
26 Apr 2009My post this week will probably reflect a clear bias towards good deals on LCDs, since I’m itching to pick up another one. There are some other good ones in here, too, though: Dell S2409W 24″ LCD, 1920×1080, for $199. (via FatWallet) HP W2338H 23.3″ LCD, 1920×1080, $220 minus $50 = $170 after coupon, at [...]
Thinking about a $22,000 lens got me thinking about “real” cameras a bit more. And it occurred to me that Canon is in kind of a weird spot right now. Their flagship camera has always been the EOS-1. With digital it was the 1D, which was followed by a 1Ds. The s designates that it’s [...]
I think you could say with relative accuracy that there are three main bottlenecks in a computer: CPU, memory, and disk. There are some outliers that people might try to pile in: video card performance, or network throughput if you’re tweaking interrupts on your 10GigE card. But the basic three are pretty universal. To cut [...]
In: Computers|Materialism
9 Aug 2008Kingston (who I never knew made CF cards) has a 4GB CompactFlash card for $24 at NewEgg. At 8MB writes and 10MB reads, it’s hardly blazing, but if you don’t do any high-volume activity, it’s not a bad deal. Actually, if you’re not looking for speed or name brands… 8GB CF card, $25.49 16GB CF [...]
A really random thought just popped into my head… UNIX systems have their “swap” partition, a disk partition where unused stuff in RAM is “swapped out” to disk to make room for newer stuff in RAM. Of course, no hard drive is as fast as RAM, so you obviously want lots of RAM so you [...]
I’d posted before about my interest in picking up a low-capacity SSD card for my laptop, to drastically speed up disk access. (This actually has nothing to do with my recent posts about slow hard drives…) Newegg seems to have a 64 GB SSD, 2.5″ SATA disk for $240 after rebate. Interestingly, from the specs, [...]
I keep coming across things like this eBay listing. Sun Enterprise 4500, 12 SPARC processors (400 MHz, 4MB cache) and 12 GB of RAM. This one looks to have a couple Gigabit fiber NICs, too. (Although it’s fiber, so you’d need a pricier switch to use it on a “normal” copper home LAN.) Even if [...]
In: Cool Links|Insanity|Interesting|Materialism|Photography|Rants & Raves
4 May 2008I came across Ken Rockwell’s site the other day, and, as I perused a lot, I came across his interesting mention of the Casio EX-F1. I’ve “graduated” from integrated point-and-shoots to digital SLRs, although this camera costs more than my digital SLR and three lenses put together. Photographically, it’s mediocre. 6 megapixels. Except you don’t [...]