I’m waiting for some fun pieces of hardware to be delivered. I’ve ordered a1 gig CF card for my digital camera, a Max Media Launcher and a GBA Movie Player.

The CF card goes in my camera, the old CF card goes in the GBA Movie Player which goes into my Nintendo DS. The Max Media Launcher also goes into my DS. Code I write goes on my CF card and the Media Launcher makes my DS run it. Of course first I need to “update” the firmware in the GBAMP first so this works.

Nothing like a simple way to write software, is there? I like the way these separate pieces of hardware can be combined, slightly modified and end up with something that’ll make my DS run Linux.

Wow, what a braindamaged computer I own!

I took the lid off with the intention of quickly screwing the HDDs in properly. Only first I had to remove the HDD cage.

Which, due to this case and motherboard’s fantastic design, meant I had to remove ALL the RAM, the CPU heatsink and my graphics card!

What kinds of people design cases? Are they given prizes based on the amount of PC you have to remove just to do something so simple as putting a HDD in?

I bet they get paid extra for sharpening the edges of all the metal. I swear it’s sharper than my knife!

My server now has everything screwed down with the correct number of screws. All holes that aren’t airvents are covered with parcel tape, and I built a little ducting system from some cardboard to make the heat rise up into the PSU’s fan and not to the top of the case.

Those modifications, plus taping and tieing down all loose wires, and standing the case on my carpeted floor has seemed to have made the computer quieter. I can’t hear the HDDs whining at me any more. My laptop makes more noise.

Fun

I got bored with the standard grey of my Playstation… so I changed it a little. Follow the link below to see what I did.

The Jaguar I won on ebay arrived today So did my Playstation Xplorer cart. Just waiting for Defender 2000 now…

I also bought a Dreamcast from Game. I had a go at writing CDs for it, but the best I can manage is something that makes the dreamcast think it’s an audio CD. Got four coffee mats now :/

The PSX Xplorer cart worked though. I connected it to a PC, finally got it talking, and proceeded to flash the required stuff onto it. All appeared to go well, and I pushed the PSX’s reset button…

The cart booted and I got a menu… That was in Japanese… Which is one of the many languages I cannot speak, read, or understand. After a bit of googling I found a way of switching it to English.

I then uploaded a little test game to it and it ran! External code, sent to the PSX from my PC actually ran! Now to get the Mips R3000 gcc cross-compiler and try and make my own stuff.

Also got a “coding cable” for my Dreamcast, however first I need a booting CD with the transfer software on. I hope I can get this working ‘cos it’ll mean I can play cool things on it.

I rebooted my firewall… 267 days uptime… new record I screwed the NAT tables up on it to such an extent that any outgoing SSH packets were sent straight back at me! Decided now was a good time to put a second network card in and move my ADSL box across the room. I also upgraded its kernel (since I don’t keep 2.4.0 around).

I now have a sane network with a proper firewall. Now that uptime isn’t a big thing I’ll maybe upgrade the rest of it to Slackware 8.1. I want to do that to my desktop PC, but can’t be bothered right now, it’s too much hassle. Plus GNOME 2 is out and I want to try that.

I’ve just found the expert mode in my ADSL box

It appears to run some sort of UNIX (or something with the same commands anyway). It has various commands like “fdisk” “mkdir” and “rmdir”. All that’s missing is a copy of vi

Oh, and you can ftp into it…