Summer vacation in Greece offcourse!

As most of my readers (my friends) will allready know, the next few weeks I will be in Greece for my summer vacation. I will be visiting my girls parents for a week first in Thessaloniki then go for a weekend to Pilion, an area in Greece where we have been multiple times before and fell in love with the first time I saw it.

After that we will be flying to Zakynthos, an island on the west coast of Greece where neither of us has been before. We have head great things about this island and we are anxious to see if it can live up to expectations.

Over the next weeks I will probably post some pictures of Thessaloniki and of the places we go.

//Z

To Aleksej: I hope you had a good flight! Give your mom my greetings (ofcourse also of D.) and i hope everything works out businesswise!

Building your own linux server on Bit-tech

A site I follow for years allready, bit-tech.net has a nice article up about building your own linux server. After the first installment they also have the second article up.

Interesting read about how to approach this fear as a newbie. I will be installing a new server soon too, my old desktop will fulfil this function. Webmin seems like a way to go, interesting...

//Z

I have succumed

Since seeing iTunes working a couple of times I succumed to the idea of installing it. Before I have been able to say NO, but today I will install it..

Update: Well I have to admit, iTunes works well under windows, it is a keeper i think.

Although after finding out it is not possible to run iTunes under linux and playing a bit with different clones I have not found the linux substitue for me yet. The quest is not over yet.

//Z

Streaming MP3's with Gnump3d

For a friend of mine I am looking into software for streaming MP3's across the internet. He will be abroad the next weeks and wants to be able to listen to his own MP3's when he is away. He runs a Mac so I don't think it will be so hard to find something.

I did some research and a couple of likely candidates show up: A linux.com article and a Newsforge.com article seem to point in the right direction.

Especially GNUMP3d looks to be interesting, I will let him know about it and we will see if he likes it and gets it to run..

**Update: We have installed it yesterday and got it working. Streaming works like it should, we just have to look into the security settings before hooking it to the internet.

//Z

Choosing the right hardware IV, Conclusion

As you can read in the last installments of this series (I II & III) I was looking for some new hardware for my desktop. Since the last installment I have chosen and bought the hardware but I had not updated the blog to reflect this yet.

Choosing the right chipset for the job at hand

For first, I have very good experience with Asus as a manufacturor. At work we prefer Asus and at home I have a lot of Asus boards so the choice for a boardmanufacturor is easy. For the chipset it goed between Nvidia and Amd/Ati at the moment since they deliver the best bang for the buck featurewise. Nvidea as well as Ati would give me the features I need but the AMD boards are a little cheaper. The AMD 690G will be it, a very modern chipset, fully featured and the ability to hook it up to my tv in the future (when I buy a new tv with DVI-in). For memory I chose a pair of 1Gb Dimms which were on sale from a respectable manufacturor, Kingston. So the partlist for now comes to:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz HT 1MB AM2 65W Boxed
Asus M2A-VM
2x 1Gb Kingston Valueram

Other hardware

This would give me everything required to build my new desktop but I decided to also order a harddisk and a videocard since they were cheap and I had the money for it after my mum also kindly donated cash to the cause! So after looking into harddisks I chose the cheapest 250 Gb harddisk available in the shop, a Maxtor DiamondMax 21 250Gb Sata300 8Mb cache (STM3250820AS) was added along with a Asus PCI-e Radeon X550 TC 512MB to be able to use 2 screens (and if surroundview works: 3, in combination with the buildin VGA). And when the gear got delivered I noticed that the PSU I wanted to use from my old desktop did not have enough power to power the motherboard so I got a new PSU too, an Enermax 350 Watt which they had locally on sale for 30 euro.

Putting it all together

Building it all into my old case went like a dream, no problems whatsoever so now I have a new desktop to play with. Installing an operating system is the next task and will be described in a next post. All in all I am very happy with my new pc!

//Z

Designing and making a modular alarmclock I

I have some cool ideas to wake me up in the morning. There should be a way to be able to wake up alone and not wake up my girl in the morning when she does not have to wake up as early as I. My idea for accomplishing this is a vibrating wristband wirelessly connected to the alarmclock. This would give me the option of waking up with music, with my vibrating wristband or a combination.

The wireless communication between the alarmclock and the wristband can be implimented a multitude of different ways. For example a RF link, Wifi or a bluetooth connection come to mind. The bluetooth seems like a very interesting option since all (new) phones come with bluetooth so the device would also be able to communicate with a phone.

The idea is to take a normal alarmclock to begin with and replace the switch of the (music)alarm with a wireless module so the alarm would trigger a little motor with a non-symmetrical contra-weight attached to the wristband. This will give you a vibrating wristband usable with a generic alarmclock. When I get this working I can expand the idea to include working from a mobile phone so you can just use your alarmclock on your phone to wake you up.

Sparkfun sells a bluetooth serial modem which is kinda pricey. They also sell a 2,4 Ghz tranceiver which costs a lot less but does not offer the easy integration with other services of the bluetooth solution.

I see in my head allready an Arduino with bluetooth connectivity which you use as an alarmclock, then a wristband with bluetoothreceiver and a phone to do the updating.

Interesting I think, let's see if I can come up with a design.

//Z

Virtual Dimension

The Core Dump Blog I recently discovered had a article about virtual desktops on windows. I have always seen this as a area in windows which is missing!

At the moment I am using virtual desktop from free-soft which has limited possibilities so I will be sure to try out Virtual Dimension!

//Z

Update: This rules, Virtual dimension replaces virtual desktop!

Building with Balls :)

Wow, cool idea! Maybe I can use this idea somewhere..

//Z