Archive for the ‘Random’ Category

Moving back to Vegas

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

So today marks my last day living and working in масиMarina del Rey, tomorrow morning I will be packing my car and moving back to Vegas. Hopefully this time around things work out better and are more enjoyable.

MSI Wind Desktop

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Since moving to my new place I have been trying to cut the power bill where ever I could. And one of the first things I figured could get trimmed out of the picture was my fileserver.
Since I can’t be with out a server, I ended up selling my old one and using that money towards the purchase of an MSI Wind PC Desktop.
The reasons I opted for the MSI Wind were as follows

  1. Its its tiny, and by tiny I mean close to the size of your cable box. And still has room for 2 drive bays
  2. Power usage, from what I have been reading it will max out at about 44watts at peak usage
  3. Bang for the buck. The specs of the MSI Wind are not that bad, it comes stock with an Intel 1.6ghz Atom proc. I opted to purchase 2gb of RAM for it as well as a 16gb Compact Flash card to install the OS onto.

I read of one issue on this machine. The CF card slot can only be accessed if you remove the motherboard from the case, not a biggy but it would be nice if it had easier access in case of an emergency.
I ended up install Ubuntu Server 8.10 on the PC since I have heard it works really well with the hardware and it was also what I was running before so the setup was easy….
When I bought the PC I was planning on using a USB Thumbdrive to install the OS on it, so I didn’t buy a SATA CD drive. Well that ended up being a few hour battle of creating new thumbdrives over and over again. Just when I finally thought I had a good thumbdrive installer …. I came to find out that somewhere during the OS install the boot record was written to the thumbdrive, so I couldn’t boot the machine with out the thumb drive plugged in. Just around that time I started to pull my hair out and decided to setup a PXE boot server with the Ubuntu Netinstall. The MSI Wind allows you to boot over the network.
I setup an Ubuntu Server 8.10 Virtual Box session and started up a server on it, downloaded the needed files and setup my DD-Wrt router to point to the new Virtual Box session for PXE booting. I setup the MSI Wind to boot over network… and it worked. Granted it took a few hours for the downloads (My Cox internet cable is anything but fast).
Now I have the OS installed on it. I just started messing with it this morning so I don’t have much feedback on the over all usage of it but from what I can tell its pretty snappy for what it is.

DD-WRT Issues

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

I noticed through some testing that DD-WRT v24-vpn does not have JFFS installed … Which means I cant use openvpn. I did some reading and there are some builds that people have made that have JFFS but lack such things as SNMP. Anyone know of a Firmware that will work on a WRT54GL that has the following

  • VPN Server
  • SNMP
  • Wireless Mac Address security
  • Also a web based GUI would be a plus.

I dont think its much to ask to have those type of settings. I was looking into OpenWRT but wasn’t sure what packages would be needed for something like this. If anyone can save me the legwork that would be fantastic.

Jon Henderson – R.I.P – 2.28.2008

Friday, February 29th, 2008

You will be missed brother. You were a good friend, and a great roommate. I will miss you always my friend.

Jon Henderson

Scarlett Johansson

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Scarlett JohanssonI came across this picture the other day and just felt the need to post it. I don’t think that I really need to include many details to why I am posting it, as the picture speaks for itself.  Please let me know if I am mistaken on thinking so.  You can click the image for a much larger version.