Category: Computer bits

Two broken Visors means lots of spare bits lying around. Anybody wanna buy my stuff?

• Handspring Visor USB cradle (Black) – $10
• Handspring Visor Serial cradle (Ice) – $10
• Handspring Visor Edge USB charging cradle – $10
• SmartMedia Memplug Springboard module – $15
• Handspring Visor Platinum – Used, case shows some wear. Digitizer is messed up, but could probably be fixed with a replacement screen. Button board recently replaced. Comes with or without a broken in Vaja case (missing belt clip) – $40
• Handspring Visor Edge – Broken screen, but can be scavenged for parts. – $40

I think I may even have a few extra Styli for the Platinum that I can throw in.

Prices negotiable. All items will be shipped USPS Priority Mail upon receipt of payment. Payment via Paypal accepted. Email or leave a comment if interested.

Tech Report reviews 3 pretty sweet looking dual Opteron mobos.

I coud definitely do some serious number crunching with any of these motherboards. When it comes to working with large datasets, I’ll bet the Tyan Thunder with a suitable NUMA-aware OS and over 9 GB/s memory bandwidth would run circles around most other workstations out there.

I need one for my next computer…Let’s go shopping on Pricewatch

Part	Quant	Price	Total
Tyan Thunder K8W	1	$430.50	$430.50
Opteron 246 2 GHz	2	$675	$1350
512MB Corsair CM72D512RLP	4	$146	$584
Gigabyte 256MB Geforce 5950 Ultra	1	$391	$391
Maxtor 250GB SATA HD	2	$185.70	$371.40
Sony DRU-530A DVD+/-RW	1	$135	$135
Thermaltake V1000D case	1	$128	$128
Samsung 193S 19″ LCD	1	$577	$577
Enermax EG651P-VE Power Supply	1	$133.50	$133.50
Extras		$100	$100

Total cost: $4200.40

I’d better start saving my pennies. Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my chin.

During the course of doing literature searches, I frequently find myself looking for back issues of Medical Physics. That means looking them up online or making a trip to the library to dig up the articles I’m looking for.

Fortunately, there are ISO images of Medical Physics availble for 1997-2002 (hopefully 2003) soon, which you can download and burn onto CD (and which I have done already). Then you have to remember where you put those darned CDs. And if you’re anything like me, that ends up being in the desk drawer with a bucket load of other things, and they end up getting all scratched up.

Then I stumbled on a couple of articles about building a virtual CD jukebox. What a fabulous idea!! And it’s so easy to do! So that’s just what I did. Took a while to FTP over a gig worth of ISO images to my Linux server, but once they were there it was a piece of cake.

And thanks to Samba, I have quick and easy access to 6 years worth of Medical Physics mapped to a network drive on my Windows computer. If I need to go any further back, I’ll have to go online or to the library, but usually I’m not pulling anything from much later than 1997 anyway.

I suppose getting the article I’m looking for online isn’t much more difficult. Just a few clicks away on the website. The virtual CD jukebox method doesn’t really get me any more ease of use, but it is neat, and I did learn something from it. This has a higher geek factor I think.

Samba is a very cool tool, especially if you have a mix of Windows and *nix servers and clients. But it seems like every time I have to do anything with Samba, it’s like pulling hair and teeth to get everything to work properly. On paper, Samba is easy to set up and configure. In real life, I always end up wanting to pitch the Windows box out the window.
You read through the Samba man page, set up smb.conf to do what you want and then go to the Windows box and try to map the share you just set up. Then all you get are message boxes from Windows claiming the username and password are invalid. Or it works fine on one Windows box, but doesn’t work on any other ones. Or only one account works, but none of the others. Nothing wrong with what you put into smb.conf. Works just fine on the server with smbclient. Just the stupid Windows boxes refuse to work properly.
Argh.
Update: Ok, finally got things to work nicely. Upgrading to Samba 3.0.2 did the trick. I guess the docs I was using and the Samba version I had installed didn’t quite match up. Still want to pitch my Windows box out the window though.