The utlimate keyboard...

No normal keys for this keyboard, every key is a mini LCD screen shoqing the letter/function assigned to it!

Wow!

Mark, this is definite birthday present material

I finally got round to moving to 802.11G tonight and thought I may as well use all the features and go for WPA2 encryption, after all my router supports it andmy nice shiny mac mini supports it. So i plug it in, conifgure it and hey preto on the internet!

Sadly the signal strength of 802.11G is way lower than 802.11B in Linksys kit... bad as my house is not wireless friendly anyway... so what to do? Well theres some nice guys at hyperwap who do a funky firmware for my WAP to boost the signa strength up to 10x its original strength... so I flashed the wap and it works! My transfer speeds went from about 2Mbps to 16Mbps

Next challenge was to get my Windows laptop on the wireless, I thought this would be easy... how wrong was I! After 20 mins of scratching my head when it wouldn't connect I found out that Windows XP needs a bloody hotfix to WPA2, WTF??!??!?! What happened to Windows XP SP2 being a modern OS??? Anyway, it also turns out my bridge can't do WPA2 either so I had to downgrade to WPA2/WPA1 mixed mode, not so good but better than the WEP I was running!

Anyway, enough of my networking moaning, time for some Halo 3 beta multiplayer fun

Farewell Fred Fish...

For all of you with an Amiga background, heres a sad piece of news... Mr Fred fish himself has passed away at the age of 54

If you don't know who he was you certainly never owned an Amiga...

Speaking of Amigas... two new models will be released this summer in the USA and possibly Europe, the entry model is about $500:

• Flex-ATX form factor motherboard based on the Freescale MPC8349E SoC. (400MHz to 667MHz depending on requirements and price target)
• 1 (one) DDR2 DIMM slot expandable to 1GB using unregistered DIMMs.
• 1 (one) 66MHz PCI slot for use with readily available graphics cards.
• 2 (two) 33MHz PCI slots for additional expansion.
• 2 (two) 10/100/1Gb Ethernet Ports.
• 4 (four) Hi Speed USB ports.
• 2 (two) serial ports.
• 4 (four) SATA ports provided by a Silicon Image Sil3114 controller.
• Onboard sound provided by a C-Media CMI8738.
• Socketed EEPROM for U-Boot firmware.
• Atmel ATC2408A serial EEPROM (1 kb of non-volatile storage)
• Dallas DS1339 RTC with battery holder.
• Standard ATX power supply connector.

The power user model is about $1500 and is:

• Based on the P.A. Semi PWRficient PA6T-1682M dual core 64 bit CPUs clocked at 2GHz.
• RoHS compliant ATX form factor.
• Four (4) DDR2 DIMM slots.
• One (1) PCI Express x16 slot for high performance graphics cards.
• One (1) PCI Express x2 slot for high performance I/O cards.
• One (1) PCI Express x1 slot for standard I/O cards.
• One (1) PCI 32 bit slot for legacy cards.
• Six (6) USB 2.0 ports.
• Two (2) Gb Ethernet ports.
• Two (2) UART ports for serial connectivity and debug.
• One 8Mb Flash EEPROM containing U-Boot firmware.
• Four (4) SATA II ports based on the Silicon Image SiI3132 (x2) .

Neother model includes a monitor, keyboard or mouse and no one knows what OS will work on these, besides the obvious Linux.

Should be an interesting summer in the world of archaic platforms!

I've gone to the white side...

After 9 months of indecision I finally bought myself a Mac on the weekend, a Mac Mini to be precise, and my Windows XP machine is currently being gutted ready to be sold on or stripped down for parts and sold. Considering the CPU is 4 years old its not done bad really!

The Mac is a breath of fresh air, bein gUnix based helps a lot given my liking (and career experience) of Linux and other Unixes. It feels very slick, very responsive when compared to Windows. Its also nice and quiet and very low power compared to my 550W beast of a PC which sounds a bit like Concorde on take off if its working hard!

So far (only 3 days in) I'm very very happy and glad to see the back of windows