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I am the operator
Of my pocket calculator
A Heterogeneous Agglomeration of Thisa and Thata
Ok,so every self-respecting geek has to have some kind of
catalog,bragsheet,paean to the muse of technology,whatever you want to
call it. So,without further ado,here's mine.
I've almost always had some kind of technological froofra around
me. From childhood memories of the Teletype
ASR-33 Dad had at home,right up until the present day and its piles of
archaic laptops,fiercly-clung-to sound and video cards (Gravis
Ultrasound, anyone?) and PCs running 24/7 all over the house... I get
lonely without my little digital minions surrounding me,keeping the
universal angst and bad vibes away. That said,I *do* still have something
of a Luddite streak in me - my road bike doesn't even have indexed
shifting.
The Stuff I Use Pretty Much Every Day
- Home linux workstation
- Well,ok,I don't actually lug it around with me (I've got a work
supplied Thinkpad T61 for that),but Ispend an inordinate amount of time,work related and recreational,perched in front of the home machine,named
"penguin". Its latest incarnation,soon to be torn apart and upgraded:
- 900MHz AthlonXP
- 768MB RAM
- 9GB SCSI HD,80GB IDE HD
- CD burner
- DVD burner
- WinTV card
- GeForceFX 5700 w/128MB
- 24" HP flat panel
- Ubuntu Linux
- Home fileserver
- The server's getting plenty long in the tooth:
- K6-2-400
- 128MB RAM
- 80GB IDE HD for system and noncritical files
- 2x80GB mirrored IDE HD for backups and critical files
- CD burner
- Red Hat 7.3 [ed.note - yes it's ancient]
I've got a new server a-building and almost ready to deploy. Only snag is I
have two 1TB SATA drives for mirroring,but only one SATA power connector on
the new box's power supply. Soon as my next Computer Geeks order arrives I can install
everything and get the box off the office coffee table,thus appeasing the
wife.
- Athlon 650
- 512MB RAM
- 80GB IDE HD for system
- 2x1TB SATA HD for mirrored file storage
- CD burner
- Ubuntu Server 8.04
- Palm T|X
- Thanks to my darling bride,my trusty old Visor Pro was retired in favor
of this little gem- 128MB memory,hi-res rotatable color screen,virtual
Graffiti area,SD slot (loaded w/1GB SD card),built-in Bluetooth and
WiFi,so-far-seems-good battery life,excellent sound quality... this was my
second attempt to move off the good ol' Visors,and went much better than
the abortive flirtation with the Zaurus. The TX is my "daily driver" PDA,which I use for the usual calendar/phonelist/diary/to-do,book reader,notepad,etc. Here's the software I find indispensible:
- Kenwood TH-22AT 2 meter HT
- I've got to have some kind of ham radio gear with me
everywhere. I recently ordered a new front half of the plastic housing; the
unit looks much better now without all the paint splatters,nicks and
scratches. I need to find a better duck for it.
The Stuff I Don't Cart Around with Me or Use Very Often
- Sharp Zaurus SL-5500
- I really did have such high hopes for this linux-based PDA. The screen is flat
dazzling,the thumbstyle keyboard works well,and with CF and SD slots it's
infinitely (well sort of) expandable. It's a marvelous book reader,wireless web browser,mp3 player,video player,game machine (I can run Doom
on it! :-)
, but, thanks to braindead organizer software, it's a lousy PDA.
I replaced the Sharp supplied software with OpenZaurus but to no avail; the
calendar and to-do list software just don't compare to DateBook 5 on PalmOS.
Still, I haven't gotten rid of it, hoping against hope that the Angstrom project would
return its attention to the SL-5500 series Zaurus, but it's looking more
and more like it's been orphaned.
- Tandy Model 102
- I can live (barely) with the 40 column display and somewhat limited
software. It's got really really long battery life, a great keyboard, and
prettymuch armorplated durability. I use it for ham radio logging when I'm
operating portable. It runs for about 16 hours straight on 4 AA batteries.
Tough to beat that. The Tandy hasn't gotten much use lately owing to the
display starting to show signs of dying, and the $40 that Club100 wants for a new display is
constantly being plowed into other computer projects around the house.
- Poqet PC
- This little gem is a fullblown PC XT running DOS 3.3 from ROM, and a
whopping 512KB (yes, as in kilobytes of RAM. The kicker? It's about
the size of a VHS video cassette, and runs for 24 hours straight on a pair
of AA batteries. And it's got a readable (in good light - need one of those
IttyBitty Book Lights for night use) 80x25 screen. Downside? It uses
somewhat-scarce 3V PCMCIA SRAM cards for rw media. Gotta find me a couple
of them before the thing is really useful to me.
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