33.6 Modem Unearthed in My Office

So I was digging around in my office looking for some coax cable when I came across this:

From way back when Windows95 was the absolute pinnacle of technology...if it ever was. The back of the box was full of promises of how the web was not at your fingertips with this blazing speed and even touted the fact that you could send faxes from this modem!

It's amazing to think of how far we've come in the last decade or so.

Building an MSI Wind Nettop

I had the pleasure of building a MSI Wind nettop barebones just recently. I purchased the barebones setup from newegg.com for $139.99-$10 rebate and I also popped in a 500GB Western Digital hard drive, 2GB of DDR2 and a Sata DVD-R/W. The total cost of this system was about $230. I had a spare usb wireless adapter laying around so I didn't have to fork over more for that feature.

The build itself was simplistic and putting it together was a matter of unscrewing a few screws and pulling the case off. The build took about 30 minutes and the install of Windows XP went smoothly. This barebones does come with a Compact Flash slot in case you want to run your operating system from a CF card. I opted for the standard SATA harddrive because I wanted the extra speed.

The machine is powered by an Intel Atom 1.6GHZ processor which is actually very speedy for just about any of your "normal" tasks. By normal I mean this thing handles just about everything I throw at it. Currently my wife is watching an HDTV xVid and it's working absolutely fine. For running office applications, web surfing and streaming torrents this thing is fantastic. I currently have it tucked away behind my 42 inch LCD and I can't hear it or see it...just the way it's supposed to be.

I'm extremely happy with my MSI Wind nettop and would recommend it as a pseudo media center to anyone looking for a cheap way to get those torrents streaming on a big screen.

My Top 3 Adobe Air Applications

Adobe Air is basically a multi-platform extension of Adobe flash for outside your web browser. I've been using several different air based applications for quite some time now and am very happy with it's stability, usefulness and ability to be cross-platform and OS independent. First off you might want to visit adobe's air website and install Adobe Air, then feel free to check out some of these websites.

1.) MiniTask is a fantastic little to-do list/manager. I use it on almost every PC that I own, both at work and at home to organize my day and projects. It's straightforward, unobtrusive and does well on slower machines. I'm hoping as the program matures it's memory usage will be just a little less and maybe a few color themes will be included.

2.) Pandora Desktop If Pandora radio's desktop application for accessing what you normally would access at Pandora's main website. It's incredibly convenient to be able to launch Pandora radio from an icon and be able to minimize it. I no longer accidentally close it when I'm organizing tabs in my web browser.

3.) Thwirl is a very nice desktop Twitter client that also works for laconica based micro blog sites and also identica. It's becoming more stable every build and I use it on an almost daily basis to update my Twitter feed and also to keep in touch with my friend at army.twit.tv.

There are a few other Adobe Air applications that I've had a chance to play with but these are definitely the standouts in my opinion. Try them out and feel free to drop me a line if you find them useful.

8 Month Old Baby+Wireless Keyboard Receiver=Disaster

Well..I've learned yet another new thing. An 8 month old enjoys grabbing onto things and putting all their weight on them. The receiver for my Logitech LX710 cordless desktop set is now completely snapped in 2. Sure, sure..it was partially my fault for placing it in the front USB port of my home theater computer. But in my defense the reception was so extremely fantastic when it was hooked up there. I guess it was too much for her to handle and she finally decided grab it and break it off.

Fortunately this served as a life lesson on USB device placement and also educated me on the fact that there isn't a need to buy a whole new cordless keyboard/mouse set when something like this happens. In fact you can order a just the wireless receiver for about $16 shipped directly from Logitech's website. Just find your product and there will be a link to "parts" if any are available to purchase.

Brooklynn isn't in so much trouble anymore...for now :)

Lays Baked Barbeque Chips

These things must be chemically engineered to taste fantastic. I'm not sure what it is about them but they're amazing.

I shared a bag of these with my family while we watched "The Lucky Ones" which was actually a decent movie. I hadn't seen Tim Robbins in years and it was refreshing to see him in a role suited for him.

I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend and that their upcoming week runs smoothly.