Damn, when I finally get around to building my own home theater PC I hope I can afford one of these…

See the details here. The bottom of the front panel flips open to expose ports like USB, Firewire etc.

I wiped my home file/print server that was running Fedora Core 3 a couple of months ago since I broke my Firefox install while trying to upgrade it. I decided to try another distro and chose Ubuntu version 6.06 (Dapper Drake). I was really impressed at the ease of install and the support in their forums is great.

One thing that drew me to this distro is that the root user is disabled by default. You login as a normal user and then sudo whenever you need to do something administrative.

I am scared that there are now consumer-level kilowatt power supplies. Remember when 250W was plenty? Now you can get 1000 watts of screaming power (and for only $370). To be fair this one has the cool new modular power connections so you don’t have all those useless cables coming out of your PS.

Newegg.com - ENERMAX GALAXY 1000W Power Supply

Holy moly, there are some serious kick-ass computer case mods in this contest. Being a car guy I like the Boss but the BF2142 is cool too and the WMD is just amazing. I don’t know which one I will vote for.

bit-tech.net | Mod of the Year 2006
(Make sure you scroll down to the drop-down list of mods to see details on each one).

Here’s a picture of the BF2142 mod to whet your appetite:

There were close to 200,000 headers to download for one of the binary groups and it’s taking a long time to get them so I think that means that the retention in that binary group must be much better than before.

/crosses fingers

***EDIT****
Oops, that was counting UP so it’s over a half-million headers for that group. With 64 groups to to full updates for it’s saying it will take over an hour at 350k (which isn’t really that fast but it ain’t nothing to sneeze at either).

Well, almost. Here’s a news story on their site about how they are working to improve newsgroups. I don’t want to pay for a premium news service (since I wouldn’t use it every month) but it was frustrating because Cox’s retention on binary groups was so short (just a couple of days usually). That’s why I was happy to read this:

Cox is working with Highwinds, an industry leader in newsgroup management, to:

* Increase retention by at least 30 days: Retention time for binary newsgroups is being increased from an average of 3 days to at least 30 days. Text groups will have even longer retention.
* Boost transfer speeds by more than 30%: Each Newsgroup user can utilize up to four connections to the server, and transfer speeds for each connection have been increased from up to 384 Kbps each to up to 512 Kbps each

The new newgroup servers are available to all customer effective October 24, 2006.

Then I read the next paragraph which pissed me off:

All newsgroup users should experience uninterrupted access to all newsgroups and the ability to enjoy all of the new enhancements.

Note: Value Tier Customers will not experience any change to newsgroup speeds. Value customer desiring to see increased speeds for Usenet are encouraged to upgrade to our Premier Service.

Now I had to stop and consider which type of account I have. I’m sure that at $40/month I must be a “Value” customer (translated as “low value”). I don’t see anywhere in my online account what type of service I have so I guess I’ll have to test with my newsreader and see how many concurrent connections I can have. I could have sworn I used to get at least four but it’s been a while.

Fast forward two minutes and I read this on the normal support FAQ part of the site:

How fast is Cox Newsgroup service?

Each Newsgroup user can utilize up to four connections to the server, and transfer speeds for each connection have been increased from up to 384 Kbps each to up to 512 Kbps each

So what gives?

Fast Forward a few more minutes and I’ve fired up GrabIt and am getting four concurrent connections for downloading group updates so it’s looking good so far. Next step: check the binary groups to see how old the oldest posts are.

Wow, the Cox automated IVR system for cable internet kicks ass. I was having very spotty connectivity since Friday. On Monday morning our connection went away entirely and the TV went, too. I called support and got a recording that they had a known outage in our area and had already rolled a truck.

On my way out to work I saw the truck coming around the corner. When I got home that night there was a truck near our house and the tech was on the radio with someone. TV was working now but internet connectivity still sucked.

The next day (Tuesday) our
 connection still sucked in the morning. When we walked the dogs at 6pm there was another Cox tech nearby and later that night our connection was back to normal (that as quick as a whip).

Sadly this morning our connection sucked again. Mind you for several days I was power cycling the cable modem and router multiple times per day with no effect. Tonight I called Cox support and it put me into the IVR
 system. Amazingly the system couldn’t ping my cable modem so it sent a reset to it, then it could ping. My connection was instantly back to its normal speed and I never had to talk to a human. I am going to have to Google for a way to send that reset command to the cable modem from my side to save even the phone call next time.

Ah, a new extension for Firefox. This one allows me to post sites here using the sidebar instead of the link on my toolbar. I like this better than the built-in Wordpress tool/URL that I used in my link bar since that tool pushed you to the posting page, then back to the source page. This made it impossible to reference the source page without opening a second window. Now I can type my post in the sidebar while reading the original page in the main pane. Excellent.

Thanks go to James who posted this story on his blog and to zilch_space who provided the fix that I was pointed to the wrong URL for the extension.

Boot a CD image in Qemu - for mounting ISO images in software before burning

CLI file transfer over SSH
Copy a file to host: cat FILE|ssh HOST “cat ->FILE’S-LOCATION-ON-HOST”
Copy a file from a host to current host: ssh HOST “cat FILE”|cat ->FILE’S-LOCATION-ON-CURRENT-HOST

Gentoo Handbook - supposed to be a good reference guide for any distro

Scan your *nix for rootkits

Firewall Ports and Samba File Sharing

This is amazing, some guy actually got a $106 refund for the Windows license that came with his laptop. He didn’t want to use Windows and sent a picture of him clicking the “I don’t agree” button in the Windows license screen and they coughed up the dough.

DailyTech - Dell Refunds OS Cost For Those Adopting Linux