Archive for the ‘Hardware’ Category
Notes (week 6) - New wind is blowing
February 8th, 2008It’s been an interesting week. On Tuesday I got a pleasant delivery in form of a new laptop. It’s an Acer Aspire 5520. This model has AMD TL-58 processor, 2GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive and Nvidia 8400G GPU. It was 699€ which might be a bit expensive because the store I had to use (due to payment issues) is not the cheapest one. Anyway, it seems decent machine for the money so who cares. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium which I decided to keep using, at least for now. I might switch to Linux later but that’s not any time soon.
The work computer is now completely dedicated for work, which is good for productivity. Another good thing for productivity is my new eyeglasses. These are my first glasses so there is quite a learning ahead to get used to them. When using computer, the poor sight was making my eyes tired fast, which was affecting my concentration. My loss of far sight is due to long hours in from of a monitor. So if you use computer a lot and have good vision, try to keep it that way. It’s a good practice to focus your eyes to some distant spot every 30-45 minutes.
Anyway, there was some good progress with CE this week. The settings engine and options dialog are both up and running. Next week I’ll start adding more settings into the options dialog. Also I’ll do some cleaning of the code as it’s quite a mess right now. Here’s a SVN snapshot of the current progress:
CubicExplorer 0.90.0.982 (SVN Snapshot)
Installer (1.6MB)
Zip (1.5MB)
Notes (week 3) - The new hard drive
January 19th, 2008So, I finally got new hard drive (sweet!). It’s a 320GB Seagate (7200.10 - ST3320620AS). I chose this drive because I’ve heard good things about Seagate’s reliability. The manufacturer seems confident also since it came with 5 years warranty. It’s pretty quite, much quieter than my old Maxtor, also it’s faster. My motherboard (NF7-S) only supports SATA/150 so I’m not getting it’s full speed though.
Because of the new extra space, I installed Linux also. I’m using Ubuntu for now but will probably switch to Debian at some point. My goal is to eventually move completely to Linux and run Windows virtually. But that won’t happen until I get a new PC. This old Athlon 2600 is just too slow. Here’s the drive and image of the partition scheme I’m using:
On other news, I registered new address for CE (www.cubicexplorer.com). At the moment it just redirects to this site but that will change at some point. There has been no progress on the development of CE. The whole week has gone in reinstalling Windows and all the software. I had forgot how much work it actually is to reinstall everything. It took almost a day just to set up the environment where I’m building CE. Anyway, everything is now in place and the work can continue.
Progress notes and NAS
November 11th, 2007Well, I’m feeling better and ready to start work tomorrow. I’m still not sure how effective I can be but the new work schedule is helping a lot. Once I’ll get used to it, I’m sure these type of blocks can be avoided. Last week I was working with CubicViewer but didn’t get much done. Although, I was able to design the base structure of it’s plug-in engine, so it wasn’t complete waste of time. There’s still a lot to do and because CV is not on top of the priority list, it’s going to be some time before there’s anything to show.
Buffalo LinkStation Live (HS-DH500GL v2)
I bought Buffalo’s NAS device last week. I’ve been meaning to build a file server from my old 800Mhz machine but never got around on building the case for it. Also regular computer use quite a lot of power, so running it 24/7 shows on the electric bill. This NAS device is like a mini computer. It has 400Mhz Arm processor and 128Mb of RAM. The operating system is Linux. It’s power consumption is about 21 watts so it’s not going to be as big of an issue.
By default it only supports the basic NAS functionality of being a simple file storage. However I have some more advanced features in mind like SVN server and BitTorrent client. To make those features available you have to do a bit of hacking. I installed FreeLink which is a custom firmware containing the latest stable Debian build. After that you can install pretty much anything on the box.
SSH connection to the box after FreeLink upgrade:
Here’s a very good site that is dedicated on hacking Buffalo’s NAS devices. You can find FreeLink and many step by step instructions there.
NAS-Central
http://nas-central.org/