I have started using the online photo service Flickr to share my photos with friends and family. It has some really nice features, like viewing security, excellent slide show in your browser and these cool Flickr badges (check out the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist in the sidebar) . The service is free if you can live with a 20MB per month upload limit, although you can pay $24.95 per year to increase this limit to 2GB per month (and they remove the adds from your pages). I’m using the free service. I wish the slide show images were a little larger and the UI could be a little less confusing to someone who hasn’t seen it before, but all in all it’s a great service.
Flickr
June 15, 2005
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ASUS CT-479
June 10, 2005
Still on my quest to build an ultra quiet, lower power consuming server using a Pentium M chip, I have found this socket 478-to-479 converter from ASUS. It allows a standard ASUS motherboard to run a Pentium M chip.
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Systm
June 10, 2005
I first heard about this new Internet-TV show on the “This Week In Tech (TWiT)” Podcast. Kevin Rose, one of the presenters of Systm is a regular guest on TwiT. Systm just released their 2nd episode. This episode is all about building a Linux based MythTV PVR. They go into quite a lot of detail and explain stuff quite well. The first episode showed how to build a box of tricks that would pick up wireless video cameras. This show is very cool and is very professionally produced despite being free to download. You will need a Bittorrent client to download the show, I’d recommend Azureus. If you like Systm you should also check out From The Shadows.
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Nokia 770
June 8, 2005
Nokia have launched yet another really interesting device, the Nokia 770. They describe this device as an “Internet Tablet” because it doesn’t actually include a phone! For connectivity it just supports WiFi and Bluetooth. For me, the most surprising fact about this device is that it runs Linux. Considering they describe it as a tablet I was surprised how small it is. I was expecting something around the size of a table PC but instead it looks just a bit bigger than a phone and more like a PDA. It is due to ship around autumn this year.
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New Home Server
June 8, 2005
For a few months now I have been looking into building a new server for home. It will have a couple of big disks configured for RAID and will host all our photos, MP3’s and videos. Its got to be quiet, its got to be power efficient so as not to drive up our electricity bills and I’d quite like it to be small. I have been looking at the VIA Mini-ITX motherboards and cases like this one from Serener. Only trouble is that I can’t find this case for sale anywhere in the UK.
It’s seems the whole PC industry is suddenly waking up to lower power consumption, low heat and low noise as being critical. Apple’s announced this week that they will switch from PowerPC to Intel Pentium M processors for just these reasons. So this got me thinking, if Apple can make machines based on Pentium M then why can’t I ? A quick bit of googling turned up a couple of suitable motherboards from Aopen. Now all I need to do is find somewhere to buy the board and a Pentium M processor and price up the whole thing.
EarthCore Rocks!
June 8, 2005
I’ve discovered a new Podcast called EarthCore. It’s not like all the amateur radio shows, it’s a talking book distributed a chapter or two at a time as a Podcast. The story is a kind of sci-fi horror with plenty of people comming to not so pleasent ends. It is read by the author Scott Sigler and he makes a great job of bringing the characters to life. Check it out, I can’t wait until the next episode.
