Moving Day!

I’m moving the blog! The new blog is going to be found at:

http://www.hackznstuff.com

The last month of news posts has been moved to the new site along with your comments. Most everything should be in tact there. I will be adding new features like polls to the new site for some more fun and goofyness. Keep an eye out over there!

At Last!!

Not much of a post and probably not real interesting to the general public but the true geeks who read shall be rejoicing loudly. Go out and have your self a $5 beer tonight in celebration. Oh wait…I guess I should tell you why first.

Well for the longest time our good penguin friend while supporting the wide spectrum of technologies out there has been limited in many ways from fully supporting the creatures that come from the hostile land that Microsoft supports and maintains much like the same way the boys at Blizzard keep WoW on it’s feet. The biggest thing Microsoft had created that wasn’t fully supported was the NTFS file system. While Linux had been able to support read access for many a year the mythical write access was just out of reach. Similar to efforts to turn lead in to gold. However unlike those crazy chemists of old the Linux community finally triumphed! ntfs-3g is the project that made this happen. It took forever but there it is.

So that my friends is why you can tip back a high quality cold one tonight to celebrate this occasion. I am going to go home, tip one(pom fizz not beer), and get to installing FreeNAS on a box and centralizing all my storage at long last. Yay for open source! Microsoft now truly does all your base belong to Linux.

Brain Scatter

So today my brain is all over the place. I’m having trouble staying focused. This is pretty typical when I get immersed in such things as Zelda Twilight Princess, Mario Paper and Rampage: Total Destruction. I don’t know to many people who focus particularly well when sleep deprived. Is this a bad thing, I’m not sure. It does mean that I read a lot about many different things and so I’m left with a lot of little chunks of info to share.

The first thing is Linux/Geek related. Linux.com just featured an article on the freeNAS.org project. It’s based on BSD so you know it’s solid. It’s released under the BSD license so it’s free and the best part is that it’s small and fast. I just happened uppon a couple of router boards recently and had been looking at an NSLU2 from linksys. Now I don’t have to pick one up and my NAS can go wireless with easy. I’m sure I’ll post some info on how that project comes together.

Thanks to the InDigital video podcast that pointed me to what will probably become a focal point for my future media center if the Sling doesn’t work out so well. A company named TAVI makes this portable media player that looks a lot like a Gameboy Advance SP but is slightly larger and does a heck of a lot more. The new revision 030 is set to replace the 020 which looks like it all ready does the same thing. I’m sure there is some significant difference I missed but either way these things will play back almost anything and they will do it even at high def resolutions on your TV. Throw in 6 hours of video playback(thats 2.5-3 movies) and the thing isn’t to shabby on the road. How sweet is that?

As if I don’t have enough to play to keep me up nights there are still the likes of Call of Duty 3, Wario Ware Smooth Moves and I’ll probably try something different eventually like Trauma Center. Don’t get me started on DS games or PC games. What’s a guy to do? Oh thats right! Look to the future. Xbox 360 revision 2 is on the way with a new lower price, cooler running and DVI built in. Oh what fun! At the very least I’ll wait till Halo 3 comes out. We’ll see how long I can hold out once that happens. MS is also working on sweetening the deal with IP TV and tivo like features. Jinkys!

Well thats part of the jumble. Unfortunately I don’t have time to sort any other thoughts. I’ll try to come back in later and link things up real nice. Till then Google is your best friend. Peace!

You’re NOP going to believe this!

So there is this technology that has been coming for years and years and years and now it’s finally here and it’s good and sweet! Originally they were going to try to get broadband internet over power line to every one who was connected to the grid. For some reason that never played out. Any way…Some place in the ancient past. I think my stay at MidAmerican Energy. I picked up a 1mbps Network Over Powerline pci adapter kit. I though it was a brilliant idea but far to slow for the types of things I was doing with my network. Streaming video, playing video games things that could use some bandwidth. So the box sat and sat and sat.

This morning I was poking around the internet and stumbled on some video from CES. This particular video I started watching because I have a big interest in the SlingBox. I was pleasently suprised to find that Linksys has taken that old slow networking over powerline technology and gotten it up to 100mbps. That is just sweet! All you’re networked devices have to have power so why not get both from the same plug? It just makes sense and now it performs like it should. It’s still a little on the pricey side but I’m hoping the price comes down fast. If they want to really make this killer they gotta get the adapter price in to the same range as your average wifi card. That’s going to be tough to do with you’re mPCI wireless cards hitting as low as $17.

Talk about potential(yes thats an electricity joke)! Whew!