I installed the 1GB DDR 400 RAM I bought from newegg for $24.98 after shipping. That’s why I had 2 cents left on one of the Visa gift cards, which I then couldn’t add to PayPal. The machine initially wouldn’t POST, but I moved it to the other open slot and it worked. I haven’t found the time to run memtest on it, but it decreased my Linux boot time by 2 seconds. I hope I don’t understand bootvis, because it seemed to increase my Windows boot time by 3 seconds! Framerates were unaffected in Lost Coast and CSS stress tests at recommended settings. The framerate went up by .5 for Lost Coast, and went down 1.4 for CSS, and because I only ran each test once, I guess it’s statistically nothing. Hopefully this will help with slowdown during memory-intensive things.
Networking Wierdness
I moved a machine from Dad’s to Mom’s, and updated the static IP configuration. First I realized I spelled gateway wrong. Then I realized I put the wrong IP under network. I still couldn’t contact hostnames. I went DHCP, and it started working, and continued working when I switched back to static. It wasn’t fun to be doing this over SSH and absently running network stops instead of restarts. I guess I’m used to messing with networking locally.
Credit Cards
I was given two Visa gift cards for christmas, and now that I’ve used them, I can’t help but feel that not only is Visa happy about the 2 cents on one of the cards I am seemingly unable to spend, but now that I’ve spent almost $50 with credit cards, I am clearer than ever on how to use them. Easy step from the gift card to the card, right? It’s disturbing.
EDIT: Not to mention it’s an inconvenient gift for shopping, much more for online than brick-and-mortar. I can spend up to $25, and I can’t spend more than that even if I add more of my own money, at least online.
Dr. Horrible and VirtualBox
I downloaded the Dr. Horrible soundtrack on Amazon. I had to use the Amazon MP3 downloader to buy an album as a single unit, and the Ubuntu version was for 7.10. (Old!) They had one for Debian Etch, so, being stubborn and not using XP, I brought up a VirtualBox Etch instance and downloaded the album from there. To get the shared folders to work I had to do the Install Additions thing. The install additions button mounts a disk image of the installers. The Linux version was a bash script and required the GNU compiler(s? I just installed both and it was fine) and kernel headers. It installed a kernel module, necessitating a reboot, and then I could successfully mount my shared folder as described in the manual. (Link is pdf.) Hooray stubbornness!
RAM
Thanks to lshw, I avoided buying too much RAM for my motherboard. I wanted to know for sure what type of RAM I was running, and luckily it also listed my motherboard RAM capacity: 2GB. It lists loads of other stuff too: detailed information on system devices, (PCI, USB) BIOS, and even disk partitions! This is more about my machine than I ever knew. I really wish I could find a manual for my eMachine’s motherboard. I’m not sure if it even came with one. I’m saving up to replace this with a self-built machine, but it’s going slowly.
Dyson
I discovered this amazingly well-done freeware indy game: Dyson. The player controls seedlings, which are spawned from Dyson trees. Dyson trees, as well as bomb-wielding defensive trees, grow on asteroids. The goal is to spread to other asteroids and defeat AI-controlled enemies. (No multiplayer.) It’s a very asthetically pleasing game. The interface is refreshingly simplistic. The dev team says updates are on the way, which is nice because currently there are some nagging deficiencies. It’s not possible to get anything but a very abstract idea of how long until additional seedlings grow ripe and fall off the tree. This can make it a waiting game. It’s also possible to take over an asteroid without destroying all the trees on it, which can very quickly eliminate a huge investment. Hopefully, as has been suggested in their forums, the game will soon require that all trees be destroyed before an asteroid can be captured.
Lenny
I installed Debian Lenny RC 1 on my 2GHz Pentium 4 that I just bought from dad. It boots from GRUB in about 18 seconds! That’s just out of the box, and I think I’m happy with that. One of the nice things I noticed is that it disables the netinstall CD in sources.list before rebooting. One of the surprising things is that it beeps for a bit before bringing up the main menu. Not sure why. It’ll probably be a BOINC Zombie and occasional game server.
Typing!
I found this typing program, Amphetype, that doesn’t care about your typing methods. I learned that I get around 60WPM. That might be a bit low, though, because I think I type faster when I don’t think about typing.
Switch Fan
My Netgear gigabit switch didn’t come with a fan, (“Silent operation!”) then requested to be kept in moving air. Jerks. I bought a 120mm from Vertex, and just now got around to setting it up. Zombie 3 gave up its CD drive so that the molex could reach outside the case.
I was reminded of my hasty job crimping the server cable when it went down with seemingly any nudge. -_-
I initially pointed it the wrong way because I didn’t bother to check the arrows, but the end result is a 120mm case fan taped to the top of the case adjacent to the switch with a partial boxboard air duct.
Fallout 3
I got Fallout 3. Unfortunately, because I was given a boxed copy, I am unable to tie it to my Steam account. I’ll get the disappointing things out of the way first: the animation is still stiff and unbelievable and it still isn’t funny. I would like more well-done humor in my games. It’s post apocalyptic, and dark humor should work very well. On the good side, the scale of the world is amazing, and I look forward to getting further in the game.