Grammerjack

I just bought a Buffalo LinkStation Mini 500GB Networked Attached Storage (NAS) device. It's a very small fanless Linux file server with two 250 GB hard drives, 128 MB of RAM, a 266 MHz ARM CPU and a gigabit Ethernet port. My reasons for buying a NAS I wanted to provide a reliable backup of family photos and documents, and I was getting tired of burning CDs and DVDs. I wanted a small Linux-based server I could play with. My reason for buying the LinkStation Mini It's fanless. It's tiny. Buffalo has a good reputation for NAS quality. There is a decent sized Buffalo NAS hacking community. Fry's had it on sale. :-) Setting it up Setup was very easy -- I unpacked the box, pluged everything in, and installed a CD of utility programs. The main feature of the utility program is that it helps find the IP address of the NAS. All the actual administration of the NAS is done via a Web UI. To RAID or not to RAID The LinkStation Mini comes with two identical drives...

I went to the Computer History Museum today. I saw the Visual Storage exhibit, which is a collection of famous computers, the Babbage Difference Engine, which is a very elaborate reproduction of a never-actually-built Victorian era mechanical calculator, and the PDP-1 demo. This last demo was very special to me, because I finally got to play the original Spacewar! game, and meet and chat with Steve Russell , the main developer. (Perusing Wikipedia I now realize that Steve was also an early Lisp hacker. D'Oh!, I was going to ask a question about Lisp on the PDP-1, but I got distracted.) There's a Java Spacewar! emulator , but it doesn't properly convey the look of the PDP-1 radar-scope-based display. The scope displays individual dots, 20,000 times per second. Each dot starts as a fuzzy bright blue-white dot, but then fades quickly to a dim yellow-green spot, which takes another 10 seconds to fade to black. This means that dim yell0w-green trails form behind the ships as ...

I recently spent a lot of time using two different in-flight entertainment systems: one on Eva Air, and another on Virgin Atlantic. For people who haven't flown recently, I should explain that these systems consist of a touch-sensitive TV monitor combined with a remote-control-sized controller. The systems typically offer music, TV, movies, flight status, and video games. I believe both systems were based on Linux. I saw the Eva system crash and reboot, and the Virgin Air system has a number of Linux freeware games. The GUI frameworks were pretty weak -- both systems made poor use of the touch screen and had obvious graphical polish issues. The Virgin system was much higher resolution, and was 16:9 aspect ratio. I expect it was running on slightly higher-spec hardware. Both systems worked pretty well for playing music and watching TV or movies. The media controls were pretty limited - neither system allowed seeking to a particular point in a movie, or even reliably fast forwarding....