Author: Matt Croydon

Via PCLinuxOnline, Linuxbeginner points to RetroBox.  RetroBox is a website that sells old computer gear for amazingly reasonable prices.  And by amazingly reasonable prices, I’m talking about $25 or so for a solid PII with some RAM and a decent hard drive.  It’s definitely enough to run a fairly modern Linux system on.

They also have amazing prices on used Sparc and UltraSparc systems.  For just under or just over a hundred bucks, you can pick up a solid UltraSparc system.

The only drawback is shipping costs.  I wonder how much gear one would have to buy to make a field trip to Columbus worthwhile…

Jason Bell’s new P900 has arrived.

*drool*

Leo Laporte is now going to be the tech guy for KFI 640AM  in LA.  His new gig from 12-3 on Saturday and Sunday make for a 7 day work week, but what work it is!  It’s wonderful that technology is to the point where someone can do a three hour radio broadcast from their home most of the time.

Speaking of tech, their live stream works just fine from across the country.

Fool.com:

Though the holidays and their emphasis on packages are almost behind us, FedEx (NYSE: FDX) is still in a buying mood. Today, the company announced that it is shelling out $2.4 billion in cash to buy privately held business services provider Kinko’s. The deal is set to close in the first quarter of 2004.

Wow, that’s kinda cool and kinda scary.  I tend to feel pretty ripped off every time I leave a Kinko’s.  This is probably a good move by FedEx.  It will allow them to compete with all of the Mail Boxes, Etc. that are now UPS Stores.

Overall it has been a quiet weekend, but I have managed to post two things over at Mobitopia this weekend:

• Motorola V300 in short supply… wait for the V600? (posted Saturday, updated Sunday)
• Used N-Gage games trickle in

Via James Robertson (who in turn found it through ISerializable), Dropload allows you to drop off files to be picked up by someone else.  Files expire after 48 hours.  Very cool!

Wow, has it been 10 years already?  I don’t think I was around at its inception, but I’m pretty sure that I started dropping by a year or so after photo.net went online.  I’m glad to still see a picture of George on the photo.net index page today, just like I remember it years ago.

Thanks, Phillip.

Werner Vogels got a rocking Archos AV380 for Christmas.  These gadgets are not cheap, but the quality of video and audio is amazing.

Merry Christmas to all that celebrate!  Except for my cat-induced 4am postings, I will probably be spending most of the day offline.

Happy holidays!

Jeremy Zawodny took advantage of the holidays and did some back seat wardriving yesterday.  It’s reall amazing how different wireless ecosystems can be from one small region to another.  For example, in most residential parts of Montgomery County, Maryland that I’ve casually explored, Linksys access points outnumber all others by a pretty good number.  Almost all of those Linksys APs broadcast thei SSID, hand out IPs to anyone who strolls by, and have no security.

Doc Searls‘ slow-mo wardriving is quite easy around here.  Pick yourself a random residential road in pretty much any lower-middle class neighborhood or upward.  Start sniffing.  Start driving at 5-10 MPH or so.  Within a block or two you should have a Linksys AP calling out to you and offering you an IP when you ask for it.  Of course if it doesn’t give you an IP, setting your IP to 192.168.0.something usually does the trick.  I have found that for the most part, these totally open access points are usually attached to a Comcast cable modem.  I’m not sure if DSL customers are any smarter, or if they just have a lower tendancy towards wireless networking.

Of course wardriving in commercial parts of Montgomery County tend to yield tons of T-Mobile hotspots (there is a Starbucks every few blocks after all) and mostly well-configured access points with some form of encryption.  Of course I said mostly.

Overall this county seems to be pretty wardriver-friendly.

While trying to find the port of PuTTY for the Nokia Communicator, I stumbled on excellent news from a few days ago: PuTTY for Symbian OS released a port of Putty for Series 60!

Note that this release is marked as beta, so if you’ve never crashed your phone before or if the idea of crashing you phone scares you, wait for a final release.  I wasn’t able to connect to anything, but I’ll try again later when I’m in a more GPRS-rich area.

Even though the 9290 lacks GPRS, I’ve found that it is quite useful as an SSH terminal.  The jury is still out on the usefulness of SSH on something with a whacky keypad like the 3650, but we will see.

From the antiquated bleeding edge department comes the announcement of my purchase of a Nokia 9290.  Despite its lack of essential things like Bluetooth and GPRS, it’s an awesome little toy, er, tool.

The 9290 that I picked up seems to be about 90% functional: it works as a phone (in such a brickish way), but the speakerphone and speaker from within the Symbian environment (the same thing, I’m sure) are not functional.

The darn thing is quite usable and super fun even without that functionality, and will probably remain so, as it looks like a major repair on this thing would involve about $175 if I sent it off to Nokia.

A few quickies for reference sake:

• To do a really really hard reboot and format the C: drive, remove the battery, then replace it.  Open the Communicator and when the Nokia reaching out picture (that I’m sick of) comes up, hit CTRL-SHIFT-F.  It will ask if you’d like to format your C: drive.  You will have to plug the phone in or have the battery fully charged in order to do this.  On my phone, once the C: drive was formatted, I was left with just the bare essentials.  All of the stoftware that ships with the phone should be on CD you can be downloaded from Nokia.  Don’t be a moron like myself and click on each file, say yes to the EULA, and then save to my hard drive.  Scroll down to the bottom and just download the file that says ‘All Data.’
• *#0000# will tell you your version number, just like my 3650.  I’m currently running 3.35.  5.07 is the current release.  Is there any way I can have my phone upgraded and if so is it worth it?
• Ewan pointed me towards Psiloc, who have some excellent utilities for the Communicator, included Extended Internet which allows you to access the internet via IR from another device.  (Think 3650 GPRS -> IR -> 9290)

CNet:

The new Athlon 64 3000+ runs at 2GHz, the same as the existing Athlon 64 3200+, but it only comes with a 512KB secondary cache, according to an AMD spokesman.

I’d love to have a meg of L2 cache just like the next guy, but these lower end Athlon64’s bring the price point down, I’m all for it.  Right now, prices of this new chip seem to be hovering in the just over $200 price range, but time lowers all chip prices.

Netcraft brings the bad news: Sun has EOL‘d the Cobalt RaQ’s and Qubes.  Maybe we’ll see a better and lower priced selection of those cute littel Qubes on Ebay.