Category Archives: tech

Computer Solution

Yesterday, I’ve finally received my new computer, a Mac Mini (with an Apple Wireless Keyboard and .Mac for the curious). First thing I did was obviously to take it apart (a little), remove the measly 256mb and replace it with 1gb from DSP. Opening the case is neither terribly easy nor terribly hard as long as you take your time, don’t try to rush things and have the right tool for the job (a sharpened putty knife (plastic ones won’t work as they are too flexible)). That done, I hooked up the Dell 2005FPW display and booted it up. The set up procedure is easy, but I was impressed that it found the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard without me having to connect wired ones to set them up. Also very useful is the Firewire Target-Disk mode to copy all the settings and applications from my iBook.
That left me with about 3 weeks of accumulated data to sift through (external OneTouch II Firewire drive from Maxtor…). The only problem was how to install the iLife’05 applications from the MacMini install DVD on the iBook (which you are obviously not allowed to do ;)). The top-level installer will — correctly — refuse, but inside a hidden directory on the DVD are the installers for the individual applications, which work fine…
Exposé is a bit choppy (probably due to the lack of free video memory at 1680×1050), but overall the system feels a good bit faster than the 12″ iBook, which may be related to the faster CPU (1.42 vs. 1.2 Ghz) or the faster bus-speed (166Mhz vs. 133Mhz).
Oh, and the thing is quiet. The only thing I hear is the external hard-disk and the seeking of the hard-disk of my (passively) cooled server. Pictures:
New MacMini
Apple Wireless Keyboard
Old computer (check the book as size reference)

Computer Trouble

European Software Patents

iPod Shuffle

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I also received my 1gb iPod shuffle today (looking at watch: yesterday, actually). It’s tiny (about the volume of my older 256mb USB flash drive, but a bit longer and flatter), works well with iTunes (although reencoding the high-bitrate songs to 128kbit AAC slows it down quite a bit — I’ve turned that feature off in the hope that in a future version the reencoding threshold will be user-configurable) and plays music (full blast is louder than I would ever want to listen to).
And on the first auto-fill — I don’t know whether on purpose or by accident — iTunes selected exactly 240 songs to put on it (which is the exact number Apple quoted). 😀

Dell 2005FPW

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I got my Dell 2005FPW today, a 20″ widescreen flat panel display. This is not a huge step up from my old 18″ Compaq TFT8030 display in height, but it is much wider (having a resolution of 1680×1050). It has a normal VGA input, DVI (which I am using) as well as composite (used too) and S-Video, and last but not least a 4-port USB 2.0 hub.
By default, the display is very bright; I had to halve the brightness to not be blinded by my desktop. The image looks very good (no dead pixels) and is nearly viewpoint-independent (except for blacks which become some sort of dark red-ish brown at extreme (i.e. nigh-on sideways) angles). The response time is also very good (supposedly 16ms) and I can see no ghosting whatsoever.
The composite input is a lot sharper than what the Compaq display offered, but consequently is also a lot noisier, particularly in busy areas. The deinterlacing of the Compaq also seemed a bit better (but that may be due to its excessive softness as well). In a completely darkened room and with a black screen, you can see a bit of backlight bleeding on the Dell (i.e. the black is not completely uniform). This also happened with the Compaq (which had a smaller area to light) and neither is it apparent in normal use (i.e. screen not entirely black) or under brighter lighting conditions. This is on a revision A01, made in the UK in January 2005. There is quite a busy thread on the HardOCP forum where they are being returned left and right, but maybe their problems are more excessive.
All in all a very good purchase, in particular when Dell has one of their rebates on displays (which is the only reason I became interested in it).

Flippy’s BitTorrent Tracker

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Secondly, I’ve installed a version of “Flippy’s BitTorrent Tracker”, which in its entirety consists of 3 tiny php pages. I’ve looked through the code and it’s all very straightforward, as it only relies on writing a few data files to its own directory. It should be secure as it only opens particular filenames (allow, info-hashes). Unfortunately, it’s not developed (or even distributed) anymore. Googling for “FBT2.RAR” should do the trick, though. It also lives on in Down Hill Battle’s BlogTorrent.
Another interesting note: If one were to look for a tracker that allows anonymous torrents without registration, one could simply search for “flippy” and (“fbt” or “fbt2”) and check whether an “allow” files exists at the URL. If not, thanks for your bandwidth; the final URL should then be URL + announce.php… 😉

thoughts…

— forever in migration —