Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: GB

  • Some days you really want to slap someone at Microsoft….

    So, I was formatting a drive the other day. It’s an external hard drive that will need to be readable AND writable by both Mac and Windows XP machines. So, the only choice (without paying for MacDrive to read/write to HFS+) is really FAT32. The drive is in the 250GB-300GB ballpark. So, I reference the maximum filesystem size and see that FAT32 supports up to 2TB filesystems. No problem. I was doing this from the Windows XP machine that would be one of the drives “hosts” and after much scratching around created and attempted to format the FAT32 partition – a LONG verification process ensued 30 minutes – 1 hour. After which…. “volume size too big” eh? Well… the format tool under Windows XP/2000 is crippled…

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  • Multihead PC

    More than once I’ve wished for a second (or third) set of keyboard/mouse/video for my main desktop. Linux is a true multiuser operating system which means that it’s capable of hosting multiple graphical logins at the same time. For MOST things, a single, modern CPU is more than adequate to deal with this (memory is usually the limitation, but 1 GB ought to be enough.) So, I think all of this was prompted by a blurb about hubster which looks like it’s just a VGA-usb adapter. The company that makes it though bill it as a thin client of sorts. So, they’re essentially thinking thin-client over usb as opposed to thin-client over ethernet…

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  • Internet based filesystem with no transfer fees

    I thought this was a great idea…. rsync.net Okay for 2$ per GB of storage per month (or $24 per year for 1GB of storage) you can have your very own secure online storage drive. For you windows users think of a G: drive or a Z: drive that you could SECURELY connect to from a home machine and a work machine…. If you’re concerned about a catastrophic failure of one of their datacenters, then pay $3.50/GB/month for a more geographically dispersed plan (uses redundant data centers..) The best parts (I think) are this…. ssh encrypted connection to your drive and no transfer fees.

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  • Customized small download linux iso….

    This is a good idea…. let’s say you want a linux install, but you’re very particular. You’d like to have a certain setup out of the box, say a basic desktop with OpenOffice and Firefox/Thunderbird. Nothing fancy, just a basic desktop and you wanted to deploy over several systems. Some distributions give you the choice to save settings for a later install, but for most, this can be the start of a fairly tedious install-fest. Someone has come up with a good solution to this (and a solution to the multi-GB of iso downloads….) You go to a web page answer a few questions and then download a CUSTOMIZED linux install iso that then takes care of the whole process for you.

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  • Kdirstat to track space hogs

    I’m putting this under the Windows tech support category because I’ve used this on a boot cd before to do the same for Windows as I’m about to describe for Linux. I need to clean up and organize my hard drive(s). But when it comes to actually deleting things you really do want to get the biggest bang for the buck and go after the biggest files first. I remember an old Windows 95 utility I think it was called space Hog or something like that (more space 95??) Anyway, it would scan the disc and show the files sorted by size. Under linux (KDE desktop), there’s a similar (in many ways better) utility called kdirstat.

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  • Frontier Labs – nexblack

    I know it’s not an ipod… but I’m looking forward to hearing some word when Fronteir Labs releases their “Nexblack”. For background…. the nexblack is priced at around $89 (at the frontier labs store), but I’ve found $69 here. It’s a portable mp3/wma/wma with drm/ogg player (according to the spec sheet.) It uses AA batteries (2), has built-in recording, uses compactflash cards and according to the spec sheet will have a line-in (line-in recording as well). It also will have fm radio functions.

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  • iPod nano sales “staggering”

    Reuters has a story about how big the sales of the Apple iPod Nano such as the Apple 2 GB iPod Nano White, Apple 2 GB iPod Nano White, and Apple iPod Nano Armband Grey are exceeding expectations this holiday season. Amazon reported that the Apple 2 GB iPod Nano Black was the 6th biggest selling item in Electronic gadgets, while the White version above of the 2GB was 10th. There is, of course, also the Apple 4 GB iPod Nano White

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  • Qemu revisited

    I mentioned Qemu a short while back. I’ve used it in the past for testing linux livecds. After doing the writeup though I was encouraged to look at it again and see if/how much it’s improved since I last got an update. Wow….

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