Monday, May 31, 2010

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Mini-ITX

I just ordered my first Mini-ITX board! I did some figuring and the electricity cost difference between a computer burning less than 20 watts, and my current server ~300W was enough to justify the purchase. The processor speed is almost identical, but the new one has a two core ATOM chip (four threads). So it should do much better, than the old single core Athalon it's replacing.

The old computer I'm going to try to give away to the owners of a horse Gretchen is breaking. They have a 13 year old daughter, and she will be needing a computer for school. That old machine has served me well for years, and it's still useful, just not what I need any more. That's one of the advantages of living in a small town. There are plenty of people to give my old computers to. This will be, I think, the third that I've given away.

I wonder how giving a computer away could benefit my taxes? Maybe I should be giving them to a charity. - But I'd be concerned that they'd just end up in a land fill. When I give one to a friend or neighbor, I just ask them to give it back when they are done so I can have it recycled...

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Old Man Time

An unremarked moment passed, just this Saturday sometime shortly before 9:00am; I think I was still asleep.

What my sleeping mind did not wake me for was the moment when I was 365.242199 months old.

I am now older than one month for every day of the year;

and I'm ok with that.

But it's a good a time as any for a new beginning. So I've decided (again) to become a programmer. Not to worry I'm not giving up my current career, I'm just going to reorganize my free time. and dedicate some of it to expanding my programming ability.

In that regard I spent three hours this evening watching and listening to lectures:
Linus Torvalds - git
Luis Von Ahn - Human Computation
Richard Hipp - SQLite

Tomorrow I'm going to mess around with QEMU, with OpenVZ on deck.