Okay, so everybody remembers playing The Oregon Trail. Wonderful game, really. You are trucking your way across the wilderness when BAM! You or one of your crew comes down with some nasty disease that will probably kill them in the next 50 miles. Well this blog was trucking its way across the WWW when BAM... No need for details, its self-explanatory. Frack, I knew I should have been a doctor! No matter, a few meds and hours for them to kick in and I'll be as good as new. No dying in this version. If Fed-Ex drops by with some sweet cardboard for me, well, the day will be salvaged! Now cross your fingers... I cant have an oxen die on me now!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
GAAA!!! ...sniff...
Okay, so everybody remembers playing The Oregon Trail. Wonderful game, really. You are trucking your way across the wilderness when BAM! You or one of your crew comes down with some nasty disease that will probably kill them in the next 50 miles. Well this blog was trucking its way across the WWW when BAM... No need for details, its self-explanatory. Frack, I knew I should have been a doctor! No matter, a few meds and hours for them to kick in and I'll be as good as new. No dying in this version. If Fed-Ex drops by with some sweet cardboard for me, well, the day will be salvaged! Now cross your fingers... I cant have an oxen die on me now!
Cookie Cantenna
I was out on Y2K last night repairing my shared wireless connection when I remembered I had promised to do a post on its special directional antenna. This "cantenna," different from conventional omnidirectional antennas, focuses the receive (or broadcast) power in a narrow band rather than a full 360 degrees. With it I can zero in on wireless signals coming from several blocks away! When done right it can also be mounted on a standard camera tripod for the easiest setup and direction tweaking ever.Its way cool, easy to build, very inexpensive (yes Big Spender), and the best part.... you get to eat COOKIES (yes COOKIES!) while you build!
Check it out here!
Better give it some mobility... Here is an eBay search for the cable. Remember: the longer the cable, the greater the signal loss, so modesty is golden here. I find about a 6' (72") cable works the best for mobility/performance.
Oh, quick note: In general, this is used with wireless cards with some sort of external wireless antenna connector (like most PCI desktop wireless adapters). Some laptops even have an external wireless antenna connection, but most do not. Even most USB adapters don't have them. Check your system out first, but even if you lack the connector, don't let that stop you from picking up a can of cookies anyways! That's where I'm headed!
Monday, September 28, 2009
Meet the fam
The power behind the MasterW publishing! Glorious. Just decided to post some pics of the current towers used to bring these posts to you.
The main box, Amy. Powered by an old outdated Athlon64 3200+ @ 2.4 GHz, she has the power and storage to do this stuff. She is one of the reasons this XPS 420 project came up... Fast as she is, a dual core system would be SOOO much nicer.... Most of the time when new stuff shows up here, its her fault.
This is Y2K, my free frankenputer. Thriving since 1998, so long plants start growing on top of it. Running nothing else but Windows 2000 on a PIII 1 GHz @ 1.3 GHz, it only possesses the power to manage the wireless and LAN networks. It occupies a friendly corner in the man-cave, er, garage. This is the tower the XPS 420 will be replacing.
Neglected in a corner is Tower-Of-Power, the superhorse of the fleet. Sporting the i7 920 cruising at 4.0 GHz with 6GB of DDR3 RAM, it has the Wheaties. It also has no RAM now... I was showing off at the PC Gamers LAN party... and burnt it up (sheepish look.) Yey warranties! (Thanks OCZ!)... However this power comes at a cost of about $80/mo alone, so it VERY rarely runs. The XPS 420 hopefully will be a 24/7 warrior.
The hungriest camera in the world, the Olympus FE-115 has the power to keep you scrambling for batteries! Culprit for all the dirt, unless I can con my generous girlfriend into letting my use her Canon (mmm... drools*). That right there is the best example of bathroom-mirror-photography I could muster :P. Look for more great fuzzzzy pictures coming to a blog near you!
The main box, Amy. Powered by an old outdated Athlon64 3200+ @ 2.4 GHz, she has the power and storage to do this stuff. She is one of the reasons this XPS 420 project came up... Fast as she is, a dual core system would be SOOO much nicer.... Most of the time when new stuff shows up here, its her fault.
This is Y2K, my free frankenputer. Thriving since 1998, so long plants start growing on top of it. Running nothing else but Windows 2000 on a PIII 1 GHz @ 1.3 GHz, it only possesses the power to manage the wireless and LAN networks. It occupies a friendly corner in the man-cave, er, garage. This is the tower the XPS 420 will be replacing.
Neglected in a corner is Tower-Of-Power, the superhorse of the fleet. Sporting the i7 920 cruising at 4.0 GHz with 6GB of DDR3 RAM, it has the Wheaties. It also has no RAM now... I was showing off at the PC Gamers LAN party... and burnt it up (sheepish look.) Yey warranties! (Thanks OCZ!)... However this power comes at a cost of about $80/mo alone, so it VERY rarely runs. The XPS 420 hopefully will be a 24/7 warrior.
The hungriest camera in the world, the Olympus FE-115 has the power to keep you scrambling for batteries! Culprit for all the dirt, unless I can con my generous girlfriend into letting my use her Canon (mmm... drools*). That right there is the best example of bathroom-mirror-photography I could muster :P. Look for more great fuzzzzy pictures coming to a blog near you!
Break the new blogspace in
Ya know, I have been thinking ever since I created this space (bad thing I know.) After choosing all the flashy colors (black) for this thing, I realized I had yet to figure just how to START a blog. Breaking the ice is definitely the hardest thing. Cool. I am over that. We can move on now. If you are tuning in, you are quite the circuithead. Sweet! Its almost like I have friends now... Anyways, I trip through my life of electronics, cool projects, and of course, some humor and complete randomness. The master project: a Dell XPS 420, built from scratch, and detailed how to squeeze mo' power outta my Big Spender budget. Keep posted and thanks for checkin this out!
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