No mercy.

[reddragdiva]

• The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Note quotes that it's already happening. Military might can only take you so far.

• NECESARRY TEHCNOGOLY RAEDING.

• MEAT CARDS. Made from MEAT and LASERS.

• The Nokia 5800 explained in pictures.

• Wikimedia blog: Identifying expertise post-credentialism.

• NotN: cancer, Vatican, Twitter, Microsoft, copyright.

I'm not going to Vagabonds tonight — sleep-deprived, deeply buggerated and can't be arsed. Instead, it'll be a quiet night in's geek date with redcountess!

A household server is a vexing problem. The ancient Thinkpad 560X's fan keeps Liz awake (that or the lights). This, at £149, is nearly perfect — except it's not silent. But the next Atom chipset should be. This is way promising for the future. Any other recommendations for silent PCs?

The toilet floor is apparently made of chipboard. WELL THAT WAS CLEVER WASN'T IT. There's two ways to fix it: quickly or properly. The latter involves proper drains for the floors. Except our drains are fucked already. w00t!

arkady has commandeered the large purple albatross (Athlon XP, 1GB memory) I got from pndc. The fan bearings are going to give out any second. She's back playing Second Life, God help us.

Comments

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

The toilet floor is apparently made of chipboard.

*nod* As is our bathroom floor. Seems to be fairly standard in this country :/ we ripped up the lino, sealed it and then I put cork tiles down and 4 coats of heavy duty floor varnish to seal that. Then ran a bead of silicon sealant around the edges and the walls.

[reddragdiva]

WHAT IS IT WITH THESE ENGRISH. Bathrooms without a drain at the lowest point. Bathrooms without a lowest point. Bathrooms with CARPET. What the sodding fuck?

[pndc.livejournal.com]

Loo carpet is *Sodden* fuck, no?

It's how to get that lovely "pub carpet" feel without having to leave your own home.

[redcountess]

To be fair, I lived in a house with a carpeted bathroom in Melbourne (former doctor's surgery). We had mushrooms growing in it!

[themadcatlady.livejournal.com]

Bathrooms with carpet indeed. That IS so typical British, hehe. At least over here in the Canary Islands they got the right idea of tiling ALL the floors. Which is fantastically hygienic and easy to keep clean, but which of course wouldn´t be practical for cold and wet Britain unless you get underfloor heating installed!

[fluffymormegil.livejournal.com]

Stoicism, inertia, and fetishization of mediocrity.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Um, making fun of the 5800 is all well and good, but holding up the iPhone as some sterling paradigmatic beacon of user interface just makes me want to shove an iPhone into this person's nose.

[reddragdiva]

Oh, indeed. But it is true that merely sucking less is enough justification to sell a zillion phones at twice what should be the going rate.

[thorfinn]

At least the iPhone actually has *some* serious thought and testing put into UI, rather than none.

Besides, I defy anyone to come up with a much better interface than what's there, given the intended device size, primary target users (normal people, not geeks) and input method (touchscreen only).

If you want a Real Mini Computer, then the iPhone sure as heck isn't it - a touchscreen of that size isn't intended to do that job. Buy a netbook already.

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

Household swerver for what tasks? Anything involving crunching numbers for display, or just fileserving?
For the latter job I use an Asus EeePC thingie with external disks - cheap, utterly silent and has keyboard/monitor for emergencies built-in. Not sure if I'd recommend one around teenagers, though, as its cuteness factor is very high, indeed.

[reddragdiva]

An Eee 701 is pretty close to perfect for the job, but the linked nettop has lots of ports, which is useful. redcountess is also very taken with the idea of something smart enough to run MythTV.

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

What are you serving? Just files?

There was a £100 viglen thing on some of the Ubuntu blogs last year. You can also mod a NAS as a file server.

[thorfinn]

Yah, what exactly do you want a server for? If it's just for filesharing, just get some kind of NAS thing.

If you want a wireless network server too, get the Apple Airport Extreme (assuming you have existing USB2.0 capable disk). Does dual card g / n so you can have 802.11n and 802.11g with no slowdown.

As for MythTV... mmm. Wired network, NAS in another room, and then one of those fanless mini PCs. Or just buy a TiVo, if they've rolled them out in .uk yet.

Appliances is the way to go, unless you particularly want to have the fun of supporting the things, and at this point on the wheel of reincarnation, appliances in this space are not much more expensive than rolling your own custom PC.

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

Try this thread (http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=123962998832203&w=2). Which will apply will depend on what you want it for.

Personally I'm veering towards either a) quiet laptop - if you don't like the lights, put tape on them. b) one of the silent PCs linked or c) mini itx.

Currently I use a neostation 3000 (http://www.wedothose.co.uk/neostation3000.html), but as a fanless 300MHz pentium, it's far too slow for many modern purposes.