Uber Geeky! » Cheapskate

Paying the Microsoft Tax

Psylem — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 08:52:47 +0000

Since I’m always keeping an eye out for good deals on Netbooks, I stumbled upon this great little budget Toshiba laptop. It’s a Toshiba Satellite Pro L300 (PSLB9A-02L001). Not exactly what I’m looking for, but I decided to order one for my folks. For just $600, you can’t really go wrong. Here’s the specs…

Mobile Intel® Celeron® M 585 Processor (2.16GHz, 667MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache)
Mobile Intel® GL40 Express Chipset
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium 32bit SP1(OEM)
Hard Drive: 160GB 5400rpm 2.5″ SATA
RAM: 1GB DDR2 667 expandable to 2GB# (one slot used, one slot free)
Video 15.4″ Widescreen XGA TFT Active Matrix 200NIT (1280×800) resolution
Video Card Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator GL40
DVD SuperMulti Dual / Double Layer (DVD±R±RW,DVD±R(DL) DVD-RAM) Read: CD-ROM(24x), DVD-ROM(8x) Write: CD-R 24x, CD-RW 4x
10/100Mbps LAN
Integrated Atheros 802.11 b/g WLAN
Express card slot, RGB, 3 x USB 2.0, Headphone & microphone port, Bridge media Reader/Writer slot (SD, MMC, Memory Stick/Memory Stick Pro), Integrated microphone
Integrated Web Camera
Intel® High Definition Audio Sound
6 cell Lithium-Ion battery (up to 3 hours)
Dimensions 362mm(W) x 267mm(D) x 33/37.7mm(H)
Weight 2.6kg

The processor and video card are lame I know, but considering Mum is currently using an 8 year old PC with Windows 98 on it, I don’t think she’s going to notice. Still, this thing is badly under spec’d for running Vista. All the reviews I’ve read indicate this thing is going to be pretty hit and miss as far as getting a fully functional distro installed without too much bother, so it’s getting delivered here and I’m preparing to have some geeky fun with it. I’m also getting an additional 1GB of RAM delivered, so plan B is to just revert to Vista and surgically remove the guff to get some reasonable performance out of it before handing it over. Having successfully avoided ever touching Vista thus far, I’m actually curious to give plan B a go.

The main reason I still bought it despite the bad Linux reviews was some guys down in Melbourne who offer support services over the phone for this model and have listed “Linux Compatibility” as “Excellent”. My plan is to install the latest Ubuntu and then what ever doesn’t work, I’ll contact them and ask them to book me some time for a phone support call to sort out the rest. I’m happy to pay $40 for 1/2 hour of support, that’s more than reasonable if it saves me half a day.

What really bugs me is that I’m still sponsoring Microsoft out of all of this. I’m still indirectly paying for the crappy OEM Vista which is no doubt the main reason these laptops are now so drastically reduced in price. There is no refund available to me if I don’t want to use it. Hell, apparently I can’t even downgrade to Windows XP. Microsoft was advertising that as an option, but apparently it only applies under very strict circumstances. So this poor laptop has to suffer Vista on the consumer electronics market and hence it’s doomed to perform horrendously. Ok, I’m making a few assumptions based on very little at this stage (considering it hasn’t even been delivered yet). I certainly smell a follow up post or two.

Researching AGP Video Cards

Psylem — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:56 +0000

I’m currently trying to find a fanless AGP video card with dual monitor support for Ubuntu. My existing one is a bit temperamental and I’ve never been able to get dual monitors working properly with Ubuntu. Looks like it’s got to be either ATI or nVidia. I’ve always owned nVidia cards in the past and I’ve been reasonably happy with them, although there do seem to be some minor annoyances when using Compiz, and since the drivers are all closed source, long term support isn’t highly likely. The other problem is that nVidia don’t make AGP anymore so I have to find a supplier with some old stock or check out eBay if worse comes to worse.

Just about all the old ATI cards appear to have fans. I really don’t want a fan because they tend to break or get really noisy, particularly in the rather humid climate where I live. The Matrox cards look like exactly what I want, slow and reliable, but I don’t really trust their Linux support.

After a bit of searching looks like there are still a few vendors stocking generic models with vNidia GeForce 5xxx-6xxx chipsets and no fans. As for the ATI, looks like I can probably get the Radeon 9600 Pro, then try to clock it down so I can unplug the fan. I haven’t had any luck finding too many fanless ATI cards, which is a shame because they will have better Linux support in the long term thanks to their open source drivers.

This is for my home workstation, it’s only got about a year left in it before I seriously consider getting a new one. After that however I intend to use it as a home server. It’s got masses of RAM and other decent components, but like the AGP bus, all now obsolete. I can’t reuse anything other than maybe a couple of it’s SATA hard drives. I’ll probably replace the PSU and fans to quieten it down a little and boost it’s life span, then put CentOS on it just for something different.

Just a cheap video card is all I’m looking for. I’d like something that’s going to last a few years at least. I’m not sure if the motherboard will boot without a video card, I’ll have to check that out. Need to do a little more research. Perhaps I’ll get adventurous and go with the Radeon clocking option.

Hotlinking Picasa images

Psylem — Sat, 09 May 2009 14:38:07 +0000

It’s not made very clear, but apparently Picasa don’t allow hotlinking to full sized images, although they seem to make an exception for blogspot blogs. I’ve suspected something like this was the case for a while since the Android splash screen image in my first post tends not to render most of the time (until I’ve visited Picasa, and it gets cached). I just noticed that my dysfunctionally hotlinked image of the android splash screen is on page 2 of a Google image search and decided it was time to get to the bottom of this.

Visiting the image URL directly also always works, so I suspect they check the referrer URL, and if it doesn’t belong to Google, they return zilch. I got a bit of confirmation about this from the Picasa forum, and also found a solution (hopefully). If you click “Link to this photo” and look at the “Embed image ” html, you’ll get a scaled down thumbnail URL in there. You can also specify a larger size thumbnail up to 800 pixels in width. I’m now hoping the full size thumbnail URL I’m using will stay active.

Personally I’d like to keep using Picasa to manage all my images, but all this jumping through hoops is a bit out of control. If this method doesn’t work then I’m shifting to Flickr.