Rubénerd Blog :)

Hardware

My current kit is my venerable first generation MacBook Pro, a ThinkPad X40, a homebrew E8400 desktop, a 16GiB iPhone 3G, my pocket-rocket Nikon D60 with a couple of DX lenses, and a Stonehenge of external hard drives. Oh yeah and a ridiculously amazing Unicomp bucking spring keyboard!

Wednesday 17th March 2010

Only enabling 16 bit PCMCIA in a FreeBSD kernel?

A retro Xircom Ethernet PCMCIA card

As you’re probably aware by now, my current pet project is installing FreeBSD on my new (a relative term!) Libretto 70CT, and on today’s agenda is building a custom kernel with the right PCMCIA card support.

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Tuesday 16th March 2010

Kudos to Dick Smith Electronics in Adelaide

Dick Smith

It’s so rare for me these days to have an excellent customer support experience that when it does happen I feel compelled to tell as many people about it as possible.

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A combination lock USB key?

From the I Can’t Believe They’re Serious department, Bruce Schneier has blogged about a hilarious memory key product (link fixed) that doesn’t get its security from sound, well implemented cryptography, but from.. get this… a two wheel physical combination lock that hides the contact pins!

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Saturday 13th March 2010

FreeBSD 8.0 boots on a Toshiba Libretto 70CT

And it works! Yays! ^_^ I’ll be detailing how on Sunday when I have more time, suffice to say it was far more complex and time consuming than I imagined it would be. The Windows 95 partition has also been preserved, albeit in a smaller partition.

It may be a nerdy thing to admit, but working on puzzles like this and solving them is just about the greatest feeling in the world. ^_^

Saturday 06th March 2010

I can honestly say I didn’t expect that result!

Search for Toshiba Libretto returned Bangladesh Nationalist Party

From Wikia’s search page.

Tuesday 02nd March 2010

A case study in why features != usability

I don’t know how I ended up at this review site, but I was less surprised by the fact the unit they were discussing was so shamelessly ripping off the iPod (right down to the headphones), but rather the reviewer actually liked it. Were they wearing those beer glasses Bart Simpson tried on?

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Sunday 28th February 2010

A Japanese Dell makes it with a Mac Mini

Japanese Dell advertisement

It’s as if a Mac Mini made it with a bento box. Some pretty respectable specs, too bad for that last line, and the fact it’s a Dell. Does Dell offer free Windows downgrades or refunds? Sabayon or FreeBSD would match it so well, even down to the colour schemes.

Don’t you just love my posts with disparate sentences strung together without any cohesive train of thought? Train and Thought start with the same Romaji. Wait, is Th and T considered separate? I think I’ll stop now while I’m ahead.

Friday 26th February 2010

Apple’s unfortunate environment backstep

Photo Copyright Apple Inc.

It seems Apple’s much publicised environmental focus which they’ve heavily advertised and proudly featured in their demonstration videos will be the furthest extent of their openness. From FastCompany.com:

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Thursday 18th February 2010

SuperDrive likes FreeBSD, scared by Fedora

Your CD cannot be burnt error

I didn’t have this much trouble burning FreeBSD 8.0. Its interesting it’s not afraid to burn a CD with a daemon logo, but slap a blue hat on a guy and suddenly it freaks out. I suppose though it’s an improvement that it’s not telling me to talk to myself!

Wednesday 10th February 2010

Aperture 3 signalling end of 32-bit support?

Apple Aperture 3

Having just spoken about photography, a few hours ago Apple released Aperture 3. One thing of note is the white box instead of black, shock of horrors! Of note for my own personal circumstances was the phrasing of the system requirements:

Aperture 3, which runs as a 64-bit application on Intel Core 2 Duo Macs running Mac OS X Snow Leopard [...]

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Dedicated to my groovy late mum Debra Schade.