Grammerjack

I've just had a chance to use a Nehalem HP Z600 workstation with 2 Xeon E5520 CPUs. The machine has 8 cores, 16 hardware threads, and an absurd 12 GB of RAM. It's very fast. It's about 2.5 times as fast (when building the Android sources) as the previously fastest machine I'd used, which was an HP xw6600 with a single Xeon E5420 CPU. The machine's relatively small, no larger than an ordinary ATX tower. One way that HP kept the case small is by making the motherboard an odd shape: it is "C" shaped, with a cutout that leaves room for the DVD drive.

The other day my wife said to me, "Jack, we're going on a road trip soon. Is there any way we could hook up our MP3 player to the car stereo, so that the kids could listen to their favorite songs during the trip?" Twenty hours of web research and $250 later we've got a new car stereo. It's a Dual XHD7714 from Crutchfield . I'm getting it installed by Best Buy tomorrow. Let's hope their AV installers do a good job! First, why did I get a new stereo at all? Well, all I wanted to do was hook up an MP3 player. But there was no easy way to do that. My 2005 minivan came with a factory installed stereo that didn't have an auxiliary input. There are cheap FM transmitter systems that work with any radio, but they look clunky and the sound quality is supposed to be poor. A lot of web searching turned up some aftermarket accessories that allow hooking up either an audio input jack ($75 + $50 installation = $125) or an MP3 player and/or iPod ($125 + $50 = $175.)...

I frequently switch between Mac and Linux, and it's been troublesome to remember to type Command-whatever on the Mac, but Control-whatever on Linux. (For copy-and paste, for example.) I did a quick web search and found out that it's easy to make Ubuntu Linux recognize the Command keys as an extra set of control keys : Choose menu: System : Preferences : Keyboard Select the Layouts tab Choose "Layout Options" Open the "Alt / Win Key Behaviour" tab Check the "Control is mapped to the Win-keys" checkbox.