Geek Toys - 2

Remember my new computer? Well, it's dead. It died a few weeks ago, and after some diagnostics it's clear that the CPU was completely cooked. Yes, the most expensive part of the build is the part that died.

I guess this is all part of the fun of the so-called bleeding edge.

After building the new computer and the arrival of the new monitors, it's been a while since I've been able to complete my “evil plan”. The final pieces of the puzzle arrived today, including a shiny new 30" HP ZR30w monitor (another S-IPS panel).

Following on from the new computer, two-thirds (or possibly one-half) of my monitors have arrived, finally! Backordering can be painful sometimes. They're two 20.1" Hewlett-Packard LP2065 monitors S-IPS panels; all part of my evil plan.

With a native resolution of 1600×1200, that should help with my desktop real estate issues (effectively 3200×1200). The anti-theft feature is a nice idea, but I really appreciate the dual dual-link DVI connectivity.

I have a bit of saving to do before this is done…

I've been holding back from buying a new PC for quite some time now. Actually, it's been years. My main PC has been a Toshiba Satellite M70 (1.6GHz Pentium M, 2GiB RAM, 60GB HDD, surprisingly good speakers, and an annoying DVD drive which cannot be flashed with RPC-1 firmware). It's a great little laptop, even today, and aside from the low-end GPU and slow HDD, it runs really well.

This poor thing has travelled the world with me, but it's about time I upgraded. For several projects I've been needing a lot more processing grunt, RAM, local storage, and (eventually) desktop real estate. Today most of the stuff has arrived, and it's taken so long because I've been very picky about what I wanted in the build. It's been a long time since I've built a PC, and a few people have asked me to show them the build…

Every Christmas, a whole bunch of presents arrive from our various vendors at the office, quite often chocolates, or some chocolate related theme.

I seem to wind up receiving a new toy to play with at the office around this time of the year too: Last year it was the Google Mini 2.0, and this year it's a pair of Sun Fire X4600 servers.

I've always had a penchant for Sun hardware, and while we're normally an HP shop at work, I was able to convince the powers-that-be that these two servers would be ideal to replace our horrible ML350 G4 based SQL server, which was chosen before my time.

Chumby!
He was once a little green slab of clay. Chumby!
You should see what Chumby can do today. Chumby!
He can walk into any book, with his pony pal Pokey, too.
If you've got a heart then Chumby's a part of you.

In the wee hours of the morning, I was privileged to receive an invitation to purchase a Chumby — not a Gumby — through their “Chumby Insider” product launch. Needless to say, I was excited!

Alas, it wasn't meant to be…

The one thing that occurs to me lately is that getting healthy can be very expensive. Oddly, I always knew that eating healthy was horribly expensive compared to buying junk food, but now I realise the cost of things to help you be healthy are equally expensive.

I love my empty calories, and as my metabolism is slowing down like the rest of my family, I'm regaining the pot-belly I once grew while I baked myself in the sun at a resort in Pattaya back in 1992. Get me another watermelon juice, slave!

It's time to put an end to all that, and get a bit of catabolism going, beyond just walking everywhere. I've been saying for months that I should start running, but I couldn't motivate myself. Cyclocity instead encouraged me to cycle, and unfortunately for them I wound up buying my own bike.

All is well in the world of smart-phones since Fring arrived not too long ago. Despite having a logo that looks like it was designed in a few seconds of fierce MS-Paint wiggling, this application is actually becoming pretty useful to me.

At the office, we recently received a Google Mini. We finally had some time to open the thing and start testing it out. After one week, we're already pretty impressed with the power and flexibility, but there are still some things missing.