Intel Mini: Underwhelmed

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

The Intel Mini leaves me feeling a little disappointed. For one thing the price is up, not down. The low end Intel model is $100 more than the low end G4 model was. For another, although A/V functionality has improved somewhat, it’s still not ready to replace my cable box or Tivo or DVD. I’ll probably still buy one of the lowend models to replace the old Dell running this site like I was planning, but I won’t buy an extra one to hook up to my TV like I was considering, and I may wait a little while to buy the first one if this Dell continues to hold out.

Yahoo Ads Beta Flops; Moving Back to Google

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

I agreed to participate in the beta for Yahoo Ads because they would let me put ads in the feeds, unlike Google; but it was clearly not ready. The targeted ads were incredibly poorly targetted compared to Google AdSense. Perhaps that was just a function of fewer advertisers. I don’t know. However there were two problems that were definitely Yahoo’s fault and convinced me it just isn’t as smart a company as Google:
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It’s Freezing In Here

Monday, February 27th, 2006

It’s -2°C outside, (the warmest it’s been all day) and after turning the heaters all the way up, removing the window air conditioner, replacing the windows with new, more tightly sealed ones, the temperature in my office has now reached an invigorating 21°C. Later today I’m shopping for warmer socks and a ski mask. I love New York, but days like today make me think seriously about moving to California.

How Many Cylons are There?

Sunday, February 26th, 2006

If we can trust Number 6 (and I’m not at all sure we can) there are exactly twelve “skin job” Cylon models. So far by my count we’ve seen 6. (Warning: spoilers follow.)
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Number 6 is Not What I Thought

Sunday, February 26th, 2006

After watching Friday’s Battlestar Galactica, I think I have to change my opinion of just what’s up with Gaius Baltar and Number 6. (Warning: spoilers follow.)
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Ubuntu runs on the PowerMac? Who knew?

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

Probably everybody but me. Here I’ve been waiting patiently for the ISO release of Yellow Dog Linux 4.1 to resurrect my old G3 as a backup server (Yes, I know I could have just installed YellowDog 4.0, but it seemed pointless to do it now and then have to upgrade in a few weeks.) when I could have just installed what’s my preferred Linux distro these days in the first place.

However my initial efforts failed. The live CD was unable to boot my Blue & White G3. I am now burning an install CD to see if that will work. Apparently the newer models of Mac are a lot more reliable about this than the older models. Still there are a lot of problems getting set up compared to what would be expected on whitebox X86 hardware. The live CD started to boot my PowerMac dual G5 but hung.

I may also try NetBSD and see if that works.