soapbox

I was poking around yesterday reading about how to save energy with computers. It turns out that, under linux at least, you can do a huge amount to save power just by changing some kernel options.

Dactyl isn’t a powerful computer, the processor is an 800 MHz VIA C3. However, with some of the tweaks I just did, it now hangs out pretending that it’s a 400 MHz computer right up until it has to serve a web page or actually do something. That saves half of the energy it would have otherwise been using!

Side note: for dactyl, this isn’t that impressive… it’s like 3 watts instead of 5 watts.

So, it’s really just a matter of time before dactyl bites the dust. Given, that amount of time might be 3-5 years, but it’ll still die sometime.

Luckily, Intel just released something that makes me salivate… another mini-ITX motherboard with an Atom processor on it. (Atom is Intel’s line of very low power processors.) The board itself draws basically the same amount of power as dactyl, but has perhaps 10 times the performance and has some neat features like SATA and the ability to use real memory. It’s also cheaper than the motherboard for dactyl.

So fear not! If and when dactyl dies, something will rise from the ashes. (Oh, and the blog is backed up remotely on a regular basis too, so if dactyl dies, everything can be easily ported.)

I have a question for the people still back at Dartmouth. Does anyone want to be listed as the official contact for dactyl with the computer folks? After I graduated, Michael became the official contactee and we should probably switch to someone who’s actually on campus. The job doesn’t require any work at all, all the updating and administering of dactyl happens remotely.

Even though many of you already frequent the blog this link comes from, I still think it’s worthy of inclusion here. I found it amusing enough to steal the author’s best line for the link that follows.

Gary Gygax had a time machine, yo!

Fun! Woo-hoo, Platonic solids!

Michael made a post a while ago about the Eye-Fi memory card that can both store pictures in your camera and automatically send them to you. It turns out that they might not be such a bad idea, especially if you tend to lose things.

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0534545220080606

Basically, the woman had one of the cards in her camera and left the camera in a restaurant full of pictures of her baby eating its first food and other important pictures. The people who ended up taking the camera walked by an open wifi access point and all the pictures got emailed to the camera owner… along with pictures of the kids who took the camera.

(I’ll try not to get on my high horse about the fact that doing this basically requires that everyone be using unsecured wifi base stations named “linksys”…)

Western Digital announced a new line of 7200 rpm laptop drives today and I was checking them out when I noticed something interesting in the descriptions of interfaces for external drives.

The number that always gets thrown around with USB is 480 Mb/s and Firewire comes in 400 Mb/s and 800 Mb/s varies while eSATA is 3000 Mb/s.

The thing that I’d never seen before though were the words that followed those numbers… For USB it was “maximum burst transfer rate” and for the others it’s “maximum sustained transfer rate.” There’s a big difference between burst and sustained.

(1) What does the soapboxosphere know about the Roku? It’s kinda an iTV + Netflix thing, where for $99 you get a box that allows Netflix subscribers access to their entire ‘Watch Now’ movie database. No extra fees, no computer necessary. My take is that the aaplTV will provide new/hip/trendy things, while this Netflix things gives you good access to older/nonpremium films.

(2) A recent study concludes that even with HD-DVD defeated, BluRay hasn’t immediately taken off, in no small part due to the fact that Blu-Ray players still cost a billion dollars. Duh. (But I still want one).

(3) Two more uses for AirportExpress:

• play any kind of movie file on iTunes
• or play non-iTunes software over AirportExpress.

(4) Finally, if you’re traveling a lot, I don’t see how/why to not get one of these. Screw the Macbook Air, you can put your whole computer in your pocket, as long as you have a host computer to boot on. 160 Gig for $129, and measures in at 12.7 cm x 8.1 cm x 1.8 cm.

So I just this week had one of my credit cards (involuntarily) upgraded to a “smart” card - it has an RFID chip embedded, so you can use the card like speedpass or other proximity-scanned systems. Now it’s one thing to use this technology to be able to get into your dorm when both hands are full:

…but quite another to have your wallet broadcasting your credit card info. Especially given all the stuff I’ve read about how hackable RFID is (for example, here and here), I’m definitely considering resigning this card to at-home/only-only purchasing. Or maybe just line my wallet with aluminum foil?

Nathaniel, given your spouse’s experience with this sort of payment system (they say it speeds transaction times by 23 seconds and that average expenditures increase significantly with these things), any reassurance? Others? I know that Speedpass wands use encryption but I read an article recently saying that the encryption is pathetic and would take just a few seconds to break.