Some observations on newer laptops

Well, so In that last two weeks I've setup Fedora Core 3 on a thinkpad x40 and a dell inspiron 6000, the IBM works fine, though for me it doesn't have enough display to be usable.

I've surveyed several modern distributions on the dell (fc3, fc4 test 3, man(drake/driva) 10.2. and I must say the honeymoon was pretty short lived. I still haven't figured out how to make the thing sleep which is pretty much a non-starter for me. display is nice, the thing isn't significantly bigger than the inspiron 4150, though it is wider.

Some urls

japanese ass poking
http://outpostnine.com/editorials/teacher1.html

more ass poking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kancho

some guy who builds huge cardboard airplanes...
http://kancho.muncho.org/gal_f104.html
http://kancho.muncho.org/index.html

some observations

Camera vendor:
http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news_9561.html

Ugly light that might be cool
http://www.gnr8.biz/automata.html
Another one...
http://www.gnr8.biz/globo.html

Disks...

So uh... I have 24 x 400GB seagate drives, 8 x 73GB sata WD raptors all for the same box.

getting acpi sleep (s3) to work on thinkpad x40 fedora core 3

add:

acpi_sleep=s3_bios

to kernel line in /etc/grub.conf

create /etc/acpi/events/ lid.conf and sleep.conf

event=button/sleep
action=/usr/local/bin/x40-suspend.sh

event=button/lid
action=/usr/local/bin/x40-suspend.sh

create script /usr/local/bin/x40-suspend.sh

#!/bin/bash
rmmod ehci_hcd
rmmod ath_pci
echo 3 >/proc/acpi/sleep
modprobe echi_hcd
modprobe ath_pci

take a look at:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/Fedora-Core-on-Thinkpad-X40/

some urls

http://www.whitehouse.org/news/2005/041905.asp

I hate...

Europeans who smoke like they have a divine right to pollute the atmosphere. This little fat portugese dude was here a half an hour ago smoking, and he came back to the lobby (from outside), just to smoke.

Theses are the same people who are concerned about gmo foods, immoral wars, green power, and driving high mileage cars but, giving everyone around them cancer apparently isn't a problem... I hope you die a horrible lung wracking death and people use your tar filled sack of a body to poison feral dogs you little french cigarette smoking shit.

Smoking portugese guy...

So um...

In a couple hours I shove off from Mozambique via the South African Airways aluminum tube mailer.

I have a couple thoughts and how far that african isp situation has come since I first came to .za 6 years ago. connectivty is nowhere near as thin now, there are more options, bust in general the serive is really better. This is compound of the problems the rest of us face as well, spam, bot infested machines, aging slightly unsuitable hardware, and good old fashioned half-assed african engineering. We have people who packet shape their exchange point connections... We have people who shape tcp connections both directions over satellite links... We have all sorts of crazy port filtering... We have double nats... We have transparent proxy servers that don't deliver webpages... We have isp operators who spend all day tweaking their packet shapers and port filtering in search of imagionary performance gains...

It's a strange world we live in.

joelja-out

Shopping for a laptop

Want three things critically.

A large display with a pixel count equal or great to the current one (1600x1200)

Acpi sleep to work in linux.

Battery life somewhere north of about 5 hours from the batteries in the box...

Said laptop doesn't appear to exist, but if it did, it appears that it wouldn't have a pci-express ati graphics chipset. it appears that nvidia has spent some time working on at least some acpi support. The one that will probably work best is the intel media accelerator 915 (maybe) at the expense of being really slow (maybe).

In terms of decent sized displays, Dell latitude d810/Precision Worstation m70 (nvidia) look like the best option, maybe the older d800 (agp nvida) or the inspiron 6000 (intel) are in the right range as well. the inspiron 9300 might with with it's top of the line graphics accelerator but not the lesser ones. the latitudes can hold a second battery, but the remainder probably aren't really all that great.

I've recently entertained the notion of a 17" powerbook but it just seems to silly, not enough pixels, one button mouse, no support for the airport extreme (broadcom) wireless in linux, the fact that it's not an x86 etc.

seal of the republic of mazombique

ied

Some URLs

guy follows cosplay girls around
http://www.juergenspecht.com/truestories/?number=5&page=1

more flooring
http://www.coveringsetc.com/pages/subcat_listing.jsp?i=153

Some url's

This application frankly looking pretty badass as a monitoring tool for windows boxen...

So...

Things were so dire towards the end of thelast week that on thursday I was watching a mad dutchman pour milk onto the central shaft of a cpu fan because as he asserted it might provide adequate lubrication. The only thing more shocking than the circumstances, would have been it had worked (it didn't).

Removing the fans to expose the heatsink, and reducing the fsb 133mhz to 66mhz basically making them pIII-366's instead of pIII-733's got us some thing like 20 more stable machines, before other people started to show up with rented pc's or additional loaners... In total in the last week we probably cycled through a 100 machines just to get 50.

PIII with heatsink exposed.


dead pc photos

VIMTO

Tastes like nothing else one earth. Purple.

Ants!

So the ants here are working fairly hard at tearing the building appart... look for anything wood, and you may find that it's hollow. The piles of sawdust are in and of themselves impressive...



And here's the little bugger in question.

Distance you have to travel from the hotel in order to get mugged in Mozambique

About a 100 meters according to a member of our party who had the opportunity to try it out. Note to self, take cab to cross the damn street.

So Here's a story...

Some Italian call center company swaps out the pc's as they age and become unreliable... When they get a big pile of them together they ship them off to a non-profit that donates them to a project that places pc's in schools in countries like say Mozambique...

The company takes a tax write-off on whatever their remaining depreciated value is (probably as functional hardware), rather than paying to have them disposed of or recycled (lifecycle management). The folks in Mozambique get, you guessed it, broken pc's. Out of 65 in the batch currently sitting here maybe 20, possibly less were in working order. The most common problem is burned out cpu fans, some machines also have bad capictors, a few don't boot for varoius reasons, a couple are just dead...

So Africa is like the world's dumping ground for dead computer hardware. It's not like they can be demanufactured here, beyond the expedient of recovering the major steel and aluminum components. Thanks european jackasses, keep your own trash next time, save the rest of us some work.

Some Notes

the fxs equipment we're using for the non-ip phones in .mz is grandstream handytone 286 one port analog fxs $70

http://www.voipsupply.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=12&products_id=35

First picture from Mozambique:

MAME console photos

grabbed these a couple days ago: