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| Since I can't donate, some advice on getting a laptop, and some photoblogging by Senor Barborito 08/26/2003, 7:09am PDT | ||||
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| I can't give you a laptop, but I can tell you where I got a very serviceable one for $300. Specifically, this Ebay auction from the seller resourceconcepts. All their auctions are essentially a front end for their store, but if you're careful you can get some great deals - quite a few of their auctions are not listed in the 'laptops' section of the eBay directory, so only specific keyword searches will bring up the auction. For my laptop, the magic keyword was '14.1" TFT'. Assuming my experience was standard - and from the comments this appears so - resourceconcepts is absolutely fan-fucking-tastic to deal with as a company. The only 'catch' is that they will only ship to the address attached to your credit card in order to prevent fraud.
For those who can't be bothered to click over Dell Celeron 600 w/ 128MB of RAM 14.1" TFT @ 1024x768 (8MB non-shared-memory ATI Rage Mobility final generation), and 5GB HD. The perfect 'PDA on crack', which was basically what I wanted. Something to play Diablo/Planescape/other 2D games on when I'm bored on airplane flights or, say, nearly-non-stop 48 hour blitz drives across America. Something specifically for email/AIM/SSH/web-browsing-while-gaming. No copy of Windows or anything, but I have two upgrade copies of 98SE/95 full, which V and I don't use thanks to our two copies of XP Pro full (we wanted to stop using upgrade disc after upgrade disc, etc.). That's going in a small 2GB partition specifically for coding/non-WINE-gaming, and then (eventually) Gentoo Linux will be running on a seperate 3GB partition. Right now I just use Knoppix Linux (a boot-from-CD Linux distro with jaw-dropping compatibility work done by its dev team) while I try to figure out why the hell it's fully compatible with the video card but Gentoo won't work. Oh, free network card, and the extra-large box for this move, heh. I figured I'd throw up a picture of it, but, looking around the apartment and realizing it would be mostly gone in two weeks decided I'd snap a few pictures of the final configuration of SB's Caltrops Hosting Farm/Apartment the way Creexul did of his room. What you are about to see is not just everything V and I have in life outside of this car in this color looking exactly like this picture - it's pretty much everything we ever want to have in life, outside of a few upgrades to our computers (we don't really want to own the car, so I didn't take a picture of it). WARNING: THE REST READS LIKE A TONY POST. JUST LOOK AT THE PICTURES UNLESS YOU WANT TO HERE ALL THE WEIRD DETAILS ABOUT OUR SHIT, THANKS. Starting from the laptop and zooming out: Pic 1: 
In the foreground, my exhibitionist gerbils who insist on being in every picture we take while they're out of their cage posing on the laptop. Point camera at laptop, they will run on top of it. It's running Knoppix at the moment. Next to it is my fifth pint of tea since I woke up at 6PM, the wireless crap CompUSA keyboard that I only use because every other keyboard had the 'wrong' key configuration (holiness is a small backspace, big enter, with the backslash right next to the backspace - six standard insert/delete/home/end keys, and none of this 'shut down' key crap I keep seeing these days. Jesus). The only things in this apartment that aren't ebay/bargain-basement pricing stuff, really, are my monitor and headphones. I'm an absolute prude about my 'interface to the virtual world' or something, so there's the hulking 75lb. monolith from IBM, dual-input (handy for the servers), flat-screen brilliant apeture grille and now unreplaceable thanks to being discontinued. There's also the nice Sennheiser gaming-specific headphones. I suppose I will strech 'upgrades to the computers' just this once and add better Sennheisers to the list of things I wouldn't mind having, but generally an expensive hobby like audiophilia is beyond our means. I don't care much in this case - I gather other, more expensive Sennheisers can't take the constant 'crack, THOOM' of gaming as well. The wireless headphones in pic 2, btw, have like miniature preamps or something built into each ear (hence the double assload of batteries/recharging required), and generally get better audio if there's a clear signal. With that monitor and 6 computers there is NEVER a clear signal, so they pretty much hang there lonely. There's a bunch of computers in the background I'll talk about in pic 2, and some games/books/our 6 DVDs above them. Pic 2: 
Ah, the fun image. I spend 16 hours a day here, every day for the past year, really. I'll get the computers out of the way, first. A: Defunct Pentium 166 with 64MB of EDO RAM, used to be the OpenBSD firewall. That millionaire 'godfather' kinda guy I lived with at age 16 bought it for me as part of a $6000 system back then. The Cisco router for our DSL sits on top of it. B: 48-port HP hub salvaged from V's work. Only 10baseT but if I ever have any real-life friends that's actually perfect for gaming, as most games top out at a 10kbps stream, and 10baseT can support 50 of said streams C: Caltrops.com, for the moment. A Pentium3 700 with 192MB RAM running OpenBSD. I think there's actually a GeForce 2 in there, heh. The Netgear 5-port switch distributes the signal from the router to Caltrops.com and the firewall. Being a switch, we avoid collisions/duplicate traffic cluttering up the network. Hanging in front of this machine is a small $30 5-port Linksys hub linking my laptop and our two gaming machines to the firewall. Also sitting on top of the box are a 128MB stick of PC133 (propped up on some rubberbands to avoid shock from the metal case), and a digital-to-analog converter for monitor cables. D: The fourth machine on the shelf, a Penium 200 with 128MB of EDO RAM, salvaged from V's works - current OpenBSD firewall. E: Supposed to be the new server, this is a 1.2GHz Athlon T-bird with 512MB of RAM and the 40GB HD ICJ gave me. I have no idea what the fuck to do with it now that we're getting external hosting, nor the Caltrops.com machine. Suggestions outside of 'give it to me'? They wouldn't be good for gaming due to the lack of decent graphics card. F: My personal machine - an Athlon 2800+ XP / 1GB DDR333 machine with a GeForce4 4400. I need a better videocard, but V has dibs on next upgrade by a mile. She doesn't game as much as me, nor play as demanding games as me, so I tend to get upgrades first. Not picture: V's machine, a 1.2GHz Tbird/512MB w/ GeForce3. Since the absolute most demanding thing she plays is Morrowind, and she has no real interest in other games (such a perfect woman, I tell ya) this is 'OK' for now. Also not pictured is a Pentium2 400 w/mothboard, currently sitting in a motherboard box because I have no spare ATX case. The phone is on the floor because I had to move the gerbil cage just to get them out of it. A chore every time I want to pet them. Bastards. On the middle shelf of books (the 'sci fi/programming' shelf, as opposed to the 'philosophy/socialist' top shelf) you can see my copy of Dune sitting at an odd angle. Just finished it for the second time - what a great fucking book. You might notice the cable running up the backside of the bookshelf in this picture - more on that in picture 3. There is also a poster on the wall now. Credit my sister with that - she found a poster with a great picture and an even better Emerson quote so I couldn't resist, damn her. Our all-white walls have been tainted. Pic 3: 
You're looking at the 'island' V and I attempt to recreate in every apartment we move to. Our two desks next to each other with the bookshelf off to my side for easy access to programming manuals/games. The axis the camera is staring down (the 'depth' of the apartment from this view) is 30'. Width is probaby 15'-16', so it's a really big living room for a single bedroom apartment - the apartment is otherwise completely without redemption, being generally grubby before we got here, desperately needing the entire bathroom/shower enclosure completely ripped out and redone and having 4 out of 10 sockets three-prong only after V and I made it a 'no deal' point if they didn't give us at least four. The living room is nice, though. You can now clearly see the wire suspended in mid-air complements of the 12 hooks in the ceiling the centurian 'plant-lady' who lived here before us left behind. On that wire flows, and has flowed, every bit of Caltrops data to date. It's actually two 30-foot sections of telephone cable (which I believe is the same as Cat-3) clipped together with a small Cat-3/Cat-5 splicer piece I picked up for 25 cents somewhere. Works perfectly since the only phonejack in the apartment is on the opposite side of the living room from two non-kitchen three-prongs (which is why all our computers are on the opposite side). You can see V's workstation next to mine - 8 hours every weekday and 16 hours every weekend day, there we are sitting side by side rarely saying a word to one another. It's an odd relationship but it works. In the foreground corners you can see the portable air-conditioner which is the only reason the servers didn't all give out long ago. In the opposite corner a laptop carrying case, a 30-gallon gerbil tank, and a broken TV with rabbit ears. If you want to steal the broken TV, btw - we have no real idea how to get rid of it properly, so go ahead. Better hurry, we're not here long. flipping the camera around 180 degrees: 
Final picture, and not much to say here. Some furniture we honestly haven't used in six months. It just . . . sits there. We don't even go to this half of the living room except to get the rats and come back. The extension cord is a wonderful byproduct of the lack of 3-prongs, and runs from the kitchen under the second, permanently closed door to the kitchen. The Christmas lights I never put up are still visible under the chair in the corner. Mostly I just took this picture to show you the rat cage - that's a cereal box right next to it for comparison, so yes it really is literally the size of a full oven-range. I put that thing together by bending 150 or so thick metal fasteners with pliers over the course of four hours. Unpleasant. V treats her pets pretty well, and I should know. That's about everything, really. So much for this place, as much as I disliked everything else about this apartment, this room was really a little slice of heaven for me this past year, and I needed it and my time in it more than I think even I appreciate. --SB |
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