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Fixed the pretty URLs and RSS feed (blasted mod_rewrite), added Gra­vatar sup­port, a tag cloud, and a down­load sys­tem that I may or may not ever use.

The Sub­ver­sion install/upgrade method wins again, bump­ing up to 2.7 was a sin­gle com­mand while logged in as www-data on my server and then accesing wp-admin/upgrade.php

I passed the test last week­end, but as of yes­ter­day I have a call­sign so I am offi­cially a licensed ama­teur radio oper­a­tor in the United States and any­where else where ama­teurs are gov­erned by the FCC or where the US has rec­i­p­ro­cal licens­ing agreements.

I don’t have any hard­ware yet, but I’m now look­ing for some starter gear and get­ting myself on Echolink.

Call­sign is KD8JQS

Since my par­ents are mov­ing away some time in the next few months, I went with them down to my aunt’s house for Thanks­giv­ing.  It has been a fun trip over­all, but since we drove the RV down that means in both direc­tions I have a ~9 hour span of count­ing the mile markers.

For the last few years I’ve had lap­tops so I can watch movies and play games on the go, but this time around I also have an internet-enabled cell phone, which has led to amaz­ing time killing.  Flash games, dis­cus­sion forums, and news sites are all read­ily avail­able.  If I’m near a major city the ser­vice is even fast enough that I can watch Youtube videos and the like.  As I type this mes­sage, we’re on I-70 head­ing East and clos­ing in on Indi­anapo­lis (I think).  The sign we just passed said 169 miles to Columbus.

If you travel often as a pas­sen­ger and have a lap­top, a mobile inter­net con­nec­tion is pos­si­bly one of the best things you can have in my opin­ion.  Depend­ing on the provider they can be had for as lit­tle as $10/mo for unlim­ited access, I pay a lit­tle over $50/mo for high-speed unlim­ited access from AT&T.  That’s prob­a­bly a bit too steep for the casual user, but for me it’s worth it since I also use that con­nec­tion to work from on a reg­u­lar basis.

This morn­ing, the EMI Group announced that they would begin offer­ing their music library for sale online with­out DRM. Not only that, but the DRM-free files would be encoded at a higher bitrate than their “pro­tected” coun­ter­parts. Of course, this comes with a cost. Rather than the now-standard $0.99 per song, these files (which cer­tainly do offer more to the con­sumer) would be priced at $1.29 per song.

As I was read­ing this, I began to think about what the real value of a dig­i­tal music pur­chase is and whether the cur­rent pric­ing model makes sense, so I looked up the num­bers. What fol­lows are my results. Read the rest of this entry »

In his recent Home Media Server Guide, Brian Won of Ars Tech­nica briefly dis­cusses the heat and space issues involved with pack­ing lots of hard dri­ves in to a per­sonal server. Since these prob­lems are han­dled nicely by cases such as the Cooler Mas­ter “Stacker” line and the Antec Nine Hun­dred, I started think­ing about power consumption.

My ques­tion then became whether it would make sense from a finan­cial per­spec­tive to pay extra for larger hard dri­ves which you could then use less of, thus burn­ing less power.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just updated this site with new pages telling about the things I love and a bit about myself as well. Links are at the top of the page.

I’m also try­ing out a new tem­plate which I really like.  I think I’ll keep it.

A week ago, I finally filled the gap I’ve had since giv­ing up my Power­book G4 back in May and I bought a base model MacBook.

• 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
• 512MB (2x256MB) DDR2-667
• 60GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Disk
• Slot Load DVD/CD-RW
• Air­port Extreme
• Blue­tooth 2.0+EDR
• Mac OS X 10.4

All that and a 2GB iPod for $1049 using the stu­dent pur­chase pro­gram. I financed it through Apple Credit, which was a bit of a has­sle (more on that some other time), but it allowed me to get this nice note­book for $25 a month rather than fork­ing over $1000 in one shot.

As a two time pre­vi­ous Mac owner, I’m not going to go in to detail about the “switch­ing” process, since I alreay had it planned out and most of my appli­ca­tions were avail­able for Mac anyways.

The hard­ware that makes up the Mac­Book is leaps and bounds above the pre­vi­ous iBook mod­els. Cowork­ers of mine have both second-generation G3 and G4 iBooks, and nei­ther hold a can­dle to this. It feels like a qual­ity piece of hard­ware, on par with an IBM Thinkpad or upper-level Dell. The Core Duo is also an amaz­ing chip. When com­par­ing pure CPU per­for­mance, this note­book can hold its own against my 2GHz AMD Athlon X2 desk­top, though the faster hard dri­ves and quadru­pled RAM give the desk­top the advan­tage in all real-world situations.

The unusual key­board and glossy screen were con­cerns of mine before pur­chase, but at this point I can say that nei­ther have turned out to be real prob­lems in day to day use. I’m sure I’ll find some sit­u­a­tion where the glossy screen gets annoy­ing, but hon­estly none of my past note­books have been very usable out­doors either.

Right now, the only upgrade I an cer­tain to do to this machine is max­ing out the RAM to 2GB. Like all mod­ern OSes, OS X loves mem­ory, and 512MB just isn’t enough. It is my opin­ion that even the low­est of low end com­put­ers should have at least 1GB nowa­days, and 2GB is a start­ing point for enthu­si­ast machines (gamers, mul­ti­me­dia, etc.). I am con­sid­er­ing a hard drive upgrade, but it seems more likely that I will just upgrade the drive in my desk­top and place the old one in a Firewire enclo­sure to use as an over­grown floppy disk and backup medium for all my computers.