Vector64 Blog
Here you'll find some stuff that interests me that's generally
unrelated to the Mozilla stuff. This is a low-budget blog in that it's
just a plain HTML file and isn't interactive. There is a one-click blog
program with this web server but I haven't had the time to look into
turning it on yet. Maybe someday in the future.
.
December 25, 2008
It's been a long time since my last update
consumed by work, working out, doing home maintenance and doing the
school thing with the kids. School is over for a few weeks and I have
the day off so I'm reorganizing my home desktop. I also want to clean
off my desk.
Home Desktop Reorganization
I
picked up a 1 TB
Western Digital MyBook to deal with my growing problem with disk space.
I had three disks on the system (2 internal, 1 external) at 320 GB SATA
X 2 and 160 GB IDE via USB2.0. The university course videos that I have
been downloading are taking very large amounts of space and I've been
scattering them across the three drives which is making existing drives
tight and making access harder. I use a FileZilla server so that the
household can get the videos and it doesn't work well over multiple
drives. One of the major problems with this setup is that I use the
system drive a lot for moving around large files and this kills
performance of a lot of applications which require use of the system
drive. The idea is to move all large files off of the system drive to
the new drive so that moving things around will not impact foreground
performance.
I
looked at getting a Western Digital Green Drive and an
enclosure but the pricing on the MyBook made more sense. The only
advantage going with separate solutions was that I could more closely
pick the specs on the drive but I figured that it wasn't worth it. I
was originally just going to get the internal disk but then I'd have a
320 GB disk that's unused and I hate to let space go to waste. My new
configuration will be 2x320 GB SATA internal and the MyBook 1 GB SATA
via USB 2.0 external. The MyBook has the nice feature of turning off
when the system turns off when using FireWire or USB. It has an ESATA
interface but that doesn't have the auto-turnoff feature. I would have
preferred FireWire 800 but they are not there yet. If it had FireWire
800, I'd consider one of these for my MacBook Pro for Windows x64
(yeah, maybe even with Vista). I will have an extra 160 GB external USB
2.0 drive out there and I'll have to figure out what to do with it. The
kids said that they really don't need additional space via an external
drive. I think that they'd love more space internally but that's not an
option right now.
Some
other things I need to do are to deinstall unused programs, run a
complete virus scan, run a complete anti-spyware scan and degrag the
disks.
University Courses
I continue to download courses. At the moment, I'm working on Signals and Systems from Berkeley.
Apple tunes in the car
I
bought a Griffin iTrip for the car to avoid the Christmas music on the
radio. This device is very small and turns your iPod into a small FM
transmitter and it works fairly well in my car but performance varies
all over the place depending on where your antenna is located. It hits
battery life by about 50% by my estimation.
Mozilla Builds
I
still have the x64 build to work on after I get my system reorganized.
I have toyed with the idea of a new desktop but it's hard to justify
right now. I'd ideally like a Core i7 Quad.
November 2008
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Updated August 29, 2009. For comments and questions, send email to
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