Archive January 2009

My "What Sucks"-List

January 31, 2009 in Daily Life

What sucks to me: (I’m b0red, ya know… mostly inspired by public transportation…)

Delayed public transportation
Ugly people in public transportation
Stinky people in public transportation
Teens talking about stupid stuff in public transportation
Unfriendly bus drivers
Bad weather + No.1
Empty iPod on a long bus ride
Retirees in the supermarket line
Retirees paying with cents (though I sometimes do so, too )
Beatniks

My New Router

January 31, 2009 in Computer, Hardware

After my almost 10 years old P3/500 Compaq Deskpro EN made some ugly noises a few weeks ago I felt like I should replace it Especially because it’s my gateway to the Internet.

The old one

This old boy is big, noisy and probably wasted a lot of energy, but it ran more than just well as a dsl router, a vpn gateway, a packet filter, a proxy, a dns server, a ntp server and possibly other things for the last three years and for almost one year without even a reboot using OpenBSD 4.2.

Nevertheless it was time for something new. I wanted something smaller, something more quiet and something with less power comsumption. I came accross these new Intel Atom CPU’s. But after a lot of research I have not found a suiteable (small, low-power, fanless, inexpensive) Implementation of this CPU.

So I bought this one: Intel D945GCLF2. It has an Intel Atom 330 CPU with a TDP of 8W and an Intel 945GC chipset with a TDP of 22W . If you look at the pictures you can see a fan. This fan doesn’t cool the CPU, it cools the Northbridge! But hey! it’s available for less than 70€… a totally fanless board like the MSI IM-945GSE-A costs almost 200€.

Combine the D945GCLF2 with a case, a PSU, some RAM, a CF-Card and an additional NIC and you’ve got a nice and small router. Read more…

A trip to Tenerife back in Spring 2007

January 27, 2009 in My Photos, Photography, Travels

I was just able to restore some of my photos of a trip to Tenerife in 2007

View Slideshow or View Set.
All pictures were taken with a Fuji Finepix 4700 Zoom. An even in 2007 totally outdated camera with 2.4mpixel

My favourite…

Blogging about this blog – The Third

January 21, 2009 in Daily Life

reading tux No, this blog is not dead again, I was just pretty busy during the last few days learning for school and searching for addition schools for the next year which is why I put this blog a bit on the back burner

I also recently recieved some hardware for my new router which is what the next post is about

Site moved!

January 14, 2009 in Daily Life

O.K. I migrated my WordPress installation and other stuff to a new Server.
It doesn’t have much RAM and is pretty slow, so this is only a temporary solution.
The funny thing is that the site does now even load slower on this dedicated server, than it did when hosted on my home server at my flat with a DSL3000 link. There is something strange going on…

Reachabilty problems of the last few days

January 11, 2009 in Daily Life

work-in-progress

I noticed pretty strange DNS issues within the last few days. Since this site is connected through a DSL link with dynamic IP addresses, it has to update the A-Record every day. The last few years that worked very reliable to me, but all of a sudden became unreliable. The A-Record still gets updated (just lookup www.chrisk.de at ns.inwx.de), but your (yeah your!!!) providers DNS caches somehow do not notice the changes. The Google/Yahoo/whatever Crawlers can still index me. I got reports of T-Online DSL, Arcor DSL, Alice DSL and AT&T Cable users that this site is unreachable.

I ordered a new server and will move the site to a real data-center (e.g. not my flat) soon.

Family Guy – Brian over…

January 10, 2009 in Funny Stuff

Muahahaha

6 months with a Dell XPS M1530

January 4, 2009 in Computer, Hardware

dell_logo After 6 months of excessively using my XPS M1530 I’d just like to share a few thoughts.
I transported it in my bag without any shielding, I used it in trains, I used it in buses, I even forgot it outside when it started to rain (very light rain of course)… nothing. No scratches. No Damages.

Cons first:

The display could be easier to open
The display mounting doesn’t always close well
The fan is very noisy with latest BIOS versions (thanks to the faulty nVidia GPU chipsets)
The optical drive is pretty noisy, too
NO GBIT LAN!!! (I really miss this feature two or three times a month…)
The touchpad sometimes just hangs (until I press the right button)
The battery runtime is “only” about 120min with the 6-Cell pack

And the Pros:

All in all build quality is pretty good
It runs very stable (Not a single crash. Not even in summer)
I love my LED display with its 1920×1200 pixels
The integrated bluetooth is nice
Altough the integrated webcam has a very small sensor it’s quality is pretty decent
The integrated cardreader is very useful but I need CompactFlash!!!
HDMI out is very useful to me

I contacted Dell’s very(!) good (german) support because of the noisy fan and Read more…

My Backup Strategy

January 3, 2009 in Computer, Software, Unix

Now that a new year is here I really need to finish some points of my To-Do list! Here we go…
As I said few weeks ago, maybe a little bit delayed, here comes how I backup all my stuff. This post is not a how-to. It’s just a configuration example. If you want a howto use this link. Read more…