On a recent visit to my local e-waste disposal place I noticed an open PC on the top of the pile with a pair of DIMMs that were begging to be removed. I also noticed three PCI Ethernet cards that were stacked in a manner that made them convenient to grab – possibly some nice […]
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Today I attended the Stop HRL demonstration [1]. The government plans to spend $100,000,000 of federal money and $50,000,000 of Victorian state money to build a new coal power station. The state government has imposed some unreasonable restrictions on renewable energy which includes allowing a single person who objects within 2Km of a wind […] Lindsay Holmwood has written about the benefits of a standing desk and how to buy one [1]. The case for avoiding sitting is strong, but I couldn’t stand up all day. One thing that’s been on my list of things to do if I had an unreasonably large amount of spare time or money is […] The Occupy Wall St blog has an informative summary of attempts to reclaim the American political process which has been pwned badly by financiers in recent times [1]. The basic concept is that people who represent the 99% of the population who aren’t super rich have protests in Wall St and now other business areas. […] A common question about hosting is whether to use a dedicated server or a virtual server. Dedicated Servers If you use a dedicated server then you will face the risk of problems which interrupt the boot process. It seems that all the affordable dedicated server offerings lack any good remote management, so when the server […] Hetzner have recently updated their offerings to include servers with 16G and 24G of RAM [1]. You can get a dedicated server with two 3TB SATA disks, an i7-2600 quad-core CPU, and 16G of RAM for E49 per month plus an E149 setup fee. That is a good deal and I’ll probably soon be running […] Wouter described how to get Akonadi (the back-end for KDE PIM) to use PostgreSQL [1]. I don’t agree with his “MySQL is a toy” sentiment. But inspired by his post I decided to convert some of my systems to use a MySQL instance running on a server instead of one instance for each user. In […] One of the reasons why I’m moving from a laptop to a cloud lifestyle [1] is that laptops suck nowadays. Engineering Trade-offs Laptops have always had disadvantages when compared to desktop systems. The screen has to be smaller, the keyboard is inconveniently small on the smaller laptops and netbooks, you don’t get PCI slots (CardBus […] My Laptop History In 1998 I bought my first laptop, it was a Thinkpad 385XD, it had a PentiumMMX 233MHz CPU, 96M of RAM, and an 800*600 display. This was less RAM than I could have afforded in a desktop system and the 800*600 display didn’t compare well to the 1280*1024 resolution 17 inch Trinitron […] Alex Steffen gave an interesting TED talk summarising the ways that greater urban density can reduce energy use while increasing our quality of life [1]. Geoffrey West gave an interesting TED talk about the way animals, corporations, and cities scale [2]. The main factor is the way that various variables scale in proportion to size. […] |
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