Author: Cody

PEI’s last independent ISP has recently been acquired by the local cable monopoly, Eastlink. Eastlink is no longer taking new dialup subscriptions and plans to phase out dialup in the next year or so. Sad to think that the only choice for rural dialup customers like my folks is now Aliant (Bell).

I’ve been a casual observer of the Nokia N series internet tablets since the N770 came out. They’ve seemed like a great idea but the price has always been a little too much for me. Last week I found the N800 on tigerdirect.ca for $225 CDN! I assume this is to sell off old model inventory as the N810 is the latest and greatest version. The only feature that the N810 has over the N800 that I would like is the flip down keyboard. Although there is an iPhone clone keyboard for the N800 and bluetooth keyboards are supported so I don’t foresee this being a real problem. Now if only UPS would deliver my package! Grrr. More updates when I receive my N800.

So, I’ve been using a macbook as my main workstation for 6 months now, having shelved my Inspiron 8200 for the time being. I’ve really grown to like OS X as it is really a super usable Unix desktop OS. I can have all my unixy goodness and a hassle free desktop environment.

One thing that has bothered me for a while is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a simple light weight music player app for OSX that just plays music. Itunes tries to control everything and is a resource hog to boot. I’ve compiled xmms on OSX but using esound for sound output makes it use half the cpu on my machine which is silly since playing mp3’s is something my pentium 75 could do in 1996.

Anyway, tonight while googling for itunes replacements I stumbled on cog. This is an excellent little music player that plays my CD’s. mp3’s and pretty much everything else. Anyone looking to play music on OS X without using itunes should try cog.

Today I “retired” an old external drive from a sun machine at work. It was starting to show bad sectors and I/O errors so I set off to replace it with something newer. When I got the old external drive down to the lab I decided to rescue the SCSI enclosure as they are often useful. When I opened it up I saw a full height monster of a drive, the Seagate Elite 3.

The elite 3 dates back to 1992, at the time 2.9 GB of space would have been an amazing amount. I had 850mb in my new pentium 75mhz machine in early 1996 and I thought that was quite a bit. Skip ahead to today, it’s amazing that a drive like that can survive for that many years, in production! It has 11 disk platters inside and weighs an amazing 7.9 lbs!

Imagine a drive of similar size but with today’s perpendicular recording, I’m sure you could cram several TB in the same form factor. This elite 3 will make a great desk item for my office.