Tag: linux
Dell Laptop Saga: Part 1
January 13th, 2005, No Comments
My ancient IBM Thinkpad 750C (a 486 CPU and tiny little 10″ LCD) is finally going to be retired. I wanted something reasonably fast with a widescreen that would run Linux. If money were no object I would’ve opted for one of the G4 PowerBooks with 15.4″ screen. Unfortunately, they cost way too much. So [...]
Kenneth Brown and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
May 19th, 2004, No Comments
I’m sure everyone is aware by now that Kenneth Brown, and the other dim-wit lackeys of Microsoft at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution have published a book claiming that Linus didn’t write the original Linux kernel. We’ve come to expect poorly researched, badly reasoned crap from the pen of Ken Brown, but this isn’t even [...]
Glowing Lizards and Libertarians
May 5th, 2004, No Comments
I ran across another odd eBay action: One dozen lizards that glow in the dark. Everyone loves glowing lizards. They’re educational and fun! But be careful – no tech support is provided. I wonder if these are anything like the stink lizards from Futurama? Since I stumbled across the site meetup.com a while back and [...]
Linux NQC for the Lego Spybotics Brick
March 31st, 2004, No Comments
When Frys was dumping Lego Spybotics hardware a while back for $29, quite a few DRPG people grabbed one or two of them. So we have a whole pile lying around and nobody knows quite what to do with them. The Spybotics brick is a bit more limited than the original RCX brick and, to [...]
The demise of Red Hat Linux
November 20th, 2003, No Comments
We’ve run Red Hat Linux on our servers since version 5. Now we’re contemplating what distro to use in the future since Red Hat has announced the end of Red Hat Linux. They will continue to make their high-end Enterprise Linux but it’ll cost $1500 – $2500 per server per year. And they’re using security [...]
Buying a Mini-ITX
October 26th, 2003, No Comments
After playing with the VIA Technologies Mini-ITX board for the robots.net review, I decided to buy one and put together a system for NCC to try out as a Linux server. I immediately ran into a problem – it’s hard to find anyplace to buy one. We normally buy our hardware through Tech Data, a [...]
Mini-ITX Boards
October 19th, 2003, No Comments
I’ve been catching up on my ToDo list the last couple of weeks. Most of it was boring work-related stuff. But among the fun things, I finally got the review of VIA Technologies Mini-ITX board posted on robots.net. The board will now pass on to the DPRG where it will hopefully end up in a [...]
Staring at the Sun and other Follies
June 11th, 2002, No Comments
As I got on the highway driving home last night, I was heading west and looking right into the sun around sunset. This is fairly normal. What isn’t normal is that there was a solar eclipse going on. A fairly amazing one with about a quarter of the sun’s disc covered. Yeah, yeah, I know, [...]
