The Smorgasbord

I’ve seen a lot of case mods, but this is a very unique one. It’s a smaller scale version of a drum (you know, like a rock star’s drum from a drum kit) modded out to accomodate a motherboard, fans, hard drive, optical drives, and it even has a header with usb/firewire jacks including audio with headphone and microphone. As a custom case mod the things that make this really cool are:

1. it’s not a one off (you can buy one)
2. the design is high quality long lasting materials
3. the components are VERY well cooled
4. the display is awesome from all angles!

If you’re a drummer – you have to get one of these…right now! If you’re a musician, get one too. I mean what are the chances of getting a guitar or bass case mod anyway? If you’re a music wannabe – even more perfect! The design is well thought out, and this could be your last PC case for many years. Visit Spotswood Custom Computers for more info. Oh – and here’s a video to give you a complete picture of what it looks like and how it goes together:

Gizmodo has a post about a Lenovo Solar Powered PC. On the one hand, it’s got a pretty high geek factor – a solar powered PC! But then I got to thinking, who has sunlight where their PC is (on the office or at home)? So now I have to move my desk by the window or something? In addition, if there is enough sunlight to power the PC, doesn’t that mean it will also be harder to see my monitor? The post says it can come with an “optional solar panel”, so maybe you can mount it outside or by your window or something – and then run the cord back to the PC. Well – it’s a step in the right direction anyway!

[tags]solar powered, computer, geek, lenovo[/tags]

I’ve build hundreds of PC’s and probably repaired even more computers over the last 10 years. For the most part – it’s always been cheaper to build a PC for someone that acually buy one outright. I often wonder – is that still the case? I’ve upgraded a thing or two here or there, but I haven’t done an entire “case build” computer in a couple years now. When I read the ExtremeTech article “Building Mom a $400 PC” – it pretty much answered my questions. Joel’s goal was to build a new computer for his mother (case and internals only), that would basically be a simple workstation for surfing the web, email, and printing out some greeting cards. Sounds like what most of the friends and family I built and repaired computers for do as well. And it really made me wonder, since you can get a complete computer with LCD monitor, laser mouse, keyword, and case for under $500-$600 brand new from Dell is it still worth building one?More…
The second page of the article lists the parts Joel bought, and he got out for just $379. Not bad considering he bought an $89 case and power supply. He got an Asus MB, a nice AMD Athlon 64 CPU, 2GB of DDR2, 256MB Sapphire graphics card, 80GB hard drive, and 18x DVD+/-RW for that same price as well. So far – I’m pretty impressed! As I read on in the article he describes how he put the old system hard drive in an empty external usb enclosure to get the data from when the new system was up and running, and the new build went pretty smoothly. The new PC went together, and everything seemed fine, for a few days. Then there was all kinds of crashing and issues, which he figured out through testing were both the graphics card and the ‘cheap’ memory he bought. One he returned the memory and graphics card – and went with a slightly better brand (of memory) and the motherboard onboard GPU, everything was rock solid stable and fine. His end cost was $348.

So I guess the answer is YES, you can still buy a very reasonable and stable custom computer and build it yourself. You MAY have to search for the best deals on some parts, BUT stick with better brands – cheaper is NOT always better. If you’re looking for parts to upgrade, or want to build a new one from the ground up – here are the some of the most reputable places I know of with good prices, quality service, and a decent return policy. Please, comment now to add your two cents in the mix!!

Tiger Direct

The TechGeek

Computer Parts on eBay

<a href=”http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/12/firefox_milestone/”>The Register</a> posted that Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser has reached the 400 Million download mile mark. Wow! That’s not bad for just 3 years time! Internet Explorer is at about 64% now and Firefox is about 17%. While it’s still primarily “the geek’s browser”, most of us “geeks” have turned our families and friends (and kids) into Firefox users as well, which is probably why the percentage went up about 6% from 2006-7. Internet Explorer works fine, and it now has browsing tab, but the 3rd party plugins, add-ons, plugins, and XUL applications are what sets it far apart from IE. And – it’s multi-platform working on Mac, Windows, and every flavor of Linux as well! Good job Firefox team, you had a great year. Here’s to next year being even better!

You get all kinds of emails talking about scams, and most of the time I immediantly check Snopes to make sure it’s legitimate or not (and usually it’s not). There was one going around about a year ago in forwarded email that talked about watching when you filled your car up with gas because gang members were hiding under cars, and they would slit the back of your ankle with a knife slicing your Achilles tendon so you couldn’t walk – and then hijacking your car. This was a fraudulent story that never happenned, an urban legend. There was another one that gave some special code to use to dial 911 on your cell phone, and yet another code to use to give your cell phone more battery life – all fraudulent.

But sometimes the stories seem all to real, and more and more the spam emails prey on people that are expecting an email. Now they send out emails regarding bonus checks for people signing on to a new job, or worse from their retirement account or something. If you were expecting such a check, the spam email might seem real to you. This official article from the United States FDIC warns of such a ‘cashier’s check scam’. Even though the bulletin was from 2002, I’ve seen emails like it this year.

This article from the United States FTC warns or being way about ‘sweepstakes winnings’. Most people have enough common sense to know that you never pay for sweepstakes winnings, but I’m sure we all know a relative or friend that doesn’t. Geeks unite – warn your friends and family about such things, we are often their first line of defense! Have you been scammed or known someone who has? Comment now…

Staying on the topic of Linux LiveCD’s, OPHCrack is a tool that you can use to break, crack, or retrieve any Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Vista password quickly and effectively. Here’s the background….in our house friends and family know we work on computers and can fix and repair them. It seem like every month one is dropped off for on reason or another. Usually the problems are the same – the computer is slow because of heavy surfing on the web and has some kind of virus or trojan. But we got one the other day with a really simple problem – they setup a password to login and forgot what it was. The computer was a couple years old and Windows XP.

Seems like someone dropped a computer because of a forgotten or lost password a few years back, and at that time the only solution I managed to find after hours and hours of searching was a linux boot floppy with some tools to reset the password by editing the registry and some other file. My son found OPHCrack for this time around, and he managed to crack and reveal the lost password in just minutes. All you have to do download and burn the LiveCD, and then bootup using it on the computer with the lost password – then use OPHCrack to crack it and you’re good to go! There are some Linux tools out there that allow you to reset a Windows password (like the one I used to have), but this one just flat out cracks the password for you. It worked well for us, we were very pleased. The program is free and legal – just don’t be using it for illegal or illicit purposes! Bookmark the page, you might forget your own password someday!

Here’s another nice resource I found stumbling around, a list of 315 Linux Live CD’s for download. LiveCD’s are great because you don’t have to install anything on your computer to run a complete operating system. Nice to use as a guest on someone else’s pc, but more importantly it’s a great way to try out a Linux distribution without having to install it on the hard drive. This list is sorted by number of votes, so the more popular ones are on the top. Also – if you’re into Linux you may not realize how many different kind of distros are out there. Like ones specifically for education, gaming, medical, security, home entertainment. You may be surprised to find out though, that many liveCD’s contain tools for specific purposes. Like computer forensic tools, firewall tools, diagnostic utilities, data recovery, server clustering, and of course OS replacement. Download a couple and try a new version of Linux today!

Here’s a list of top 25 Ubuntu Blogs that just came out the other day. A lot of times you get a “top list”, and it’s just somebody’s favorites. This list is hundreds of thousands of people’s favorites because the criteria to get on the list were to be in the google top 200 for the terms “ubuntu blog”, and then they were scored by google pagerank, alexa ranking, technorati score, and number of bloglines subscribers. All in all what you get a REALLY GOOD quality list of blogs about Ubuntu Linux. If you use Ubuntu you’ll want to bookmark that page and visit it again and again.

I’ve seen all kinds of things made from duct tape It seems to be an on and off again fad. My daughter loves to make all kinds of things out of duct tape. She’s made wallets, I think a pair of shoes once, a belt – apparently there are all kinds of web sites devoted to this type of thing. It’s funny to see oddball things people made from duct tape that you would never expect. I’ve seen a lot of really weird case mods in the last few years, and I don’t know if you could call this a case mod or not, but this team of guys actually an entire pc server case out of duct tape and installed a computer in it! They call it the “duct tape server”. They’ve got fans in it, and some really cool led stuff, and the page claims that it was made from only the computer parts and 4 rolls of regular duct tape, and one quarter roll of tranlucent duct tape. They sure have got quite an imagination and quite a bit of talent!

Here’s a link to the duct tape server home page, and here’s a short YouTube video showing the server in action:

“The Death of Software” is a great Infoworld article I read a couple of weeks back.

The subheading says:

A developer who’s seen it all believes the U.S. software industry is circling the drain ? and he knows who’s to blame.

It’s an op-ed piece about the ultimate demise of the software industry as a whole – sold out overseas just like every other American produced product that came before it. It talks about Bill Gates wringing his hands over the 60% dropoff in Computer Science grads, and yet he fails to acknowledge thousands and thousands of unemployed U.S. programmers that have the very talent he needs.

here’s a great excerpt:

From what I have seen since the year 2000, I would tell any youngster who sought my council that he or she would have to be as crazy as a bedbug to get into the software business today.

In fact, I did tell exactly this to one youngster: my nephew, Larry. But Larry doesn’t believe me. Larry comes from a rural area in south central Illinois, and all he ever saw of the software business was the hype and snazz. You know, fatuous TV shows and comic books where a boy genius hacker cracks a 64-character password in 15 seconds on his first try. Convinced his old uncle is all wet, Larry is doing just what Chairman Bill says is good for both Microsoft and the U.S. of A.; Larry is going ahead and getting a computer sciences degree. Poor kid. However, in a last ditch effort to save the lad, I did tell him to at least minor in a useful subject that has a future. Mortuary science, perhaps.

Larry probably wouldn’t be making this blunder if he had lived around Seattle or in the Bay Area. But living in the outback, Larry never saw the thousands of people — programmers and engineers, the very people Gates says he can’t find — given the sack during the Tech Wreck and who haven’t cut a line of code since. Larry never saw the men and women who created the best software on earth applying for food stamps. He never saw people he knew having their homes foreclosed and their belongings hauled away. Larry didn’t have neighbors who once made 80-odd thousand dollars a year now begging for jobs that pay a third of that. (Hey, ask your friendly Wal-Mart greeter what he or she did for a living back in, say, 2000.)

Be sure to read the whole article, it’s a good read for those that do any kind of coding for a living.

originally posted: 2005-10-19 23:13:21 -0400