Xarg blog Archive

I clicked on my amazon gold box offer for the first time and found the Nesco American Harvest, BJW-1, Beef Jerky Works Kit was my personal treasure. It looks like a beef jerky caulk gun to me; I am now a true believer in Amazon's ability to see through to our darkest desires.

I bought a little Shuttle XPC box and installed gentoo linux on it. Gentoo is cool, it's sort of like debian but it's all compiled from source so you can compile everything optimized for your particular box. I would not say it's for the faint of heart and the install summary has about 35 steps but it all worked for me in the end. The package install tool is nice and it's pretty easy to install dev packages (like gimp 1.3.21).

It took a few days to compile everything and it's astonishing to consider how complex the full build was but I do feel like I got my money's worth out of the cpu.

As soon as I get dual screens working on the shuttle box I am going to switch to using it as my desktop box and stick my current (very noisy) tower in the garage as my db/dev/fileserver box.

There is a story on CNN about a company selling personal submarines for $845k. I would like one but what I really really want is the Deep Rover which is amazing, it's two hemispheres of acrylic, has pretty much 360 degree visibility, and can dive to 1000m. No price on the website for that one though. (here's another page with some more photos).

I recently did to installs here, Windows XP (since bit rot had afflicted the windows ME install on the kids machine and it would not stay up for more than a few hours at a time), and Debian + Oracle since the hard drive on my db machine died. I expected Windows to install smoothly and I expected oracle + debian to be the usual eyeball stabbing fun (especially since I had not installed either debian or 9i before).

In a shocking turn of events the Debian install was easy, Oracle was the same as it always is, and the XP install was a hellish nightmare with me having to update the BIOS, pull out all the cards but the video card, and fiddle with memory before it would allow itself to install on the box (and I still am not sure what the problem was). I think Windows ultimate downfall will be it's increasingly annoying attempts to control the platform (with registration, DRM, hardware requirements, etc) while open source platforms like Debian will continue to get easier to use and more robust (and will support legacy hardware not stamped with the Windows logo). Anyway, I am pleased with Debian, although I might try out gentoo as well.