Techiness
I'll clump web design talk and gadget talk here, I guess.
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Task difficulty: hard
I have a 486 laptop with 16 MB of memory. It has no floppy, no CD-ROM, no USB (except through PCMCIA) and only a PCMCIA ethernet card that can’t be booted from. Right now, it has command.com and a few associated .sys files on its 400 MB hard drive. I want to install Linux on it. Or full-fledged DOS. Or Win 3.1. Or Win NT 4.0. Or something appropriate to a 486, but I’m leaning towards Slackware. So. Without a bootable drive other than the hard drive, how do I get Linux on it? The idea came to mind to get a 2.5 inch hard drive adapter and just load…
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Tech phobia?
So I have this thing. I keep social bookmarks on del.icio.us. I use Google Reader for RSS feeds. I’ve started using LibraryThing for my books. But I’m finding myself feeling possessive of my books. I want a [free, of course] local solution that I can greedily keep at hand, that isn’t dependent on some random service being available. Hell, I’d even take a PHP solution here on irrsinn dot net. Strangely, I want a solution that’s more dependent on my availability than some other entities’. I suspect this reflects on my perfectionist, over-achieving, over-controlling personality. That said, the feature set I want is most cheaply and easily (and nicely) available…
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Thorn makes me say “oi”.
The Thorn (newspaper) server hard drive crashed beautifully on Friday morning, just post-production. The damned thing sounded like a metronome. It was ugly. So I’ve spent part of my afternoon and evening trying to get the damn thing running again with the new hard drive I unhappily purchased today. Oh, and the new DVD-R/RW drive, since the last one put gummy shit all over every disc I put in there and stopped ejecting. Yeah, DVD drives that don’t let me put in, take out, or read discs aren’t very useful. Neither are hard drives that don’t read. Thank god drives are cheaper now, all around. I anticipate a rough week…
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Laptop irkage
As a senior this year, I see all sorts of people treating their laptops like crap (nothing new), happily proclaiming that the pieces of shit only have to last them a few more months before they can be destroyed. After all, they’ll be getting a new laptop or desktop after they graduate. (Insert smug smile here.) My question of the day: who’s buying this new magically-appearing computer? I hear enough people express this sentiment that I know some of them mofos have student loans. I don’t think big-ticket spending in the 6 months before the bill comes in is a smart way to go. Some of them are going into…
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Bandwidth restriction!
Dude, I’m totally on bandwidth restriction! 56 Kb/s for a week. Awesome! What’s interesting is that they pulled out shit from my freshman year (like my downloads of Linux) as evidence that I’ve busted bandwidth limits repeatedly. It was definitely an automated email, but I’ve been told that Linux downloads would be considered excused. *shrug* Pretty much sure I don’t care, but this is my first time getting put on restriction.