Kinda slow here...

[elfs]

It has been a quiet couple of days here at the Villa Sternberg. I took Wednesday off so that Omaha and I and the children could celebrate the solstice day and night together, and we chose to open our presents on the morning after the longest night of the year, but first we gathered around a candle and sang a song to wish the new sun a happy birthday and hope that it brings us shorter days as the year runs on.

I made pancakes for breakfast and paid close attention to them, using a splash of vinegar inside the mixing bowl for the egg whites and making sure that I gave the dough the rest time needed, and they came out wonderfully. Then we opened gifts.

I got several nifty things; FallenPegasus found me a copy of Walking To Babylon, one of the few novels not written by Iain Banks that everyone who has read it agrees is a Culture novel. I have to say that Mrs. Orman has quite the imagination; her introduction is magnificent in the way it describes a war between time-travelling cultures with serious anomie.

Omaha got me two very nifty things: a pressure washer and a new laptop. The laptop is an IBM T23; I slapped in a 50MB hard drive and it's up and running, and it is indeed very nifty. I have almost everything working on it under linux: it suspends nicely and resumes fine, the wireless networking and the USB ports work, the PCMCIA works, even the keyboard "night light" works. What's especially nice about is a little utility you can find on-line called s3switch that allows you to pipe your video out to your television: very, very cool. I hooked up my nifty laptop to our TV set and played movies and video games (look, Sonic the Hedgehog the way it was meant to be played: on a TV, with a joystick). It needs a seperate tool called xrandr to get the dimensions right, but it is way, way cool. The monitor is very nice and I don't understand why everyone thinks it's too slow to play movies; I watched Spirited Away on it just fine. I even got IR working. The battery is apparently fresh; it holds about a 2-hour charge when fully loaded, and unlike the 600E battery it knows to stop charging when the battery is full.

The pressure washer is a good buy because there are a lot of things around here than can use it: the deck, the fence, the driveway, the roof. The man part of me can't wait to try it out.

We invited FallenPegasus over for dinner while the girls fiddled with their arts and crafts stuff. Omaha made a fabulous dinner of spiral-cut ham, scalloped potatoes, and green beans with toasted pine nuts, and I chipped in with some dinner rolls made with simply unbelievable amounts of butter.

And somewhere in this house is a bottle of peach massage oil, but neither Omaha nor I remember where it is, dammit...

Comments

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

50MB hard drive? Whereever did you find one that small? :-)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

50GB, dammit.

But don't joke. The other day I was cleaing out my junk box and found an 8MB hard drive.

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

50GB is an odd size, I'm used to them being 20GB incriments these days.

8MB? Damn - was it an old full-height too?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

In was a standard 3" half-height, actually. Just like what you find in all desktops these days. I probably could have plugged it in and see what was on it. Western Digital, 8455KB.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Weird. I thought the smallest hard drives made for PCs were 10MB.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

And somewhere in this house is a bottle of peach massage oil, but neither Omaha nor I remember where it is, dammit...

Elf, you hedonist... :)

T23s seem to be everywhere all of a sudden

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Elf;

Wonderful to hear about the laptop upgrade, may it serve you well for many years -- and many Journal Entries! I have one, my wife has one... and I'd swear everyone I've seen recently with a ThinkPad has the T23.

I'm curious: (As I sit here typing this on a 2647-4MU model) You mention wireless... is it built-in or PC Card? I wanted to get a mini-PCI WiFi/Bluetooth card for mine, but it's apparently not an option as my model don't seem to have the antenna connectors. I think.

I somehow don't expect the 'night light' to be much use for you... what with your ability to type with your eyes closed and all that. It sure does come in useful at times for me, though.

Side note: Ever make pancakes with eggnog (the grocery store version that comes in cartons) instead of milk? Or, perhaps more sanely, half milk and half eggnog? (They come out a bit on the rich side when it's all eggnog.) I do like how they come out when I do that -- and when I can get eggnog to do it.

All the best to you and yours,
Bryan.

Re: T23s seem to be everywhere all of a sudden

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I understand that the reason for the appearance of so many T23s on the market can be traced to the release of the T43. Thinkpads are mostly considered business machines and most of them are leased with a service plan, rather than sold outright, to corporations. Corporations lease them by the truckload, so when there's turnover it's massive. The company I work for recently went through an upgrade spike and all of the T23s disappeared within a few months to be replaced by T43s.

Like a leased car, a leased computer loses most of its value during the initial leasing period. The T23s are considered obsolete overstock and are resold to refurbishers that fix and resell them. And like a leased car, a leased computer "at the end of its life" is worth about 20% of its original value. But the corporate notion of "end of life" and the personal notion, especially when you can extract a few extra ergs out of the thing with Linux, make the T23 an especially sweet deal nowadays.

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

Be sure to position the pressure washer away from flammable material. I've seen houses burnt down by fires inadvertently started by the hot exhaust from the compressor.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

It's electrically powered. It's small and light-duty, not something I'd worry about burning down the house.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

acelightning spotted this and alerted me! Hope you enjoy WTB. I wrote it before reading any of the Culture novels, as a semi-sequel to one of the Doctor Who novels, The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch, which I hugely recommend if you've not already read it. I got a shock when I finally started reading the Culture books and realised how much I had pinched by proxy!

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

IMB is a scot! You're thinking of Joseph Banks. :-)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[fallenpegasus]

The one that elfs just got was one of the ones you just recently directly sold to me.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

*grin* I did wonder if there might be a connection.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[fallenpegasus]

I'd heard that, but I usually just think I'm one of the special effects.

(Probably mainly because it makes me extremely pissed off to be accused of being from Central Casting, especially when I'm in a flamefest with someone and either get accused of parrotting conservative talking points by a liberal, or accused of being a liberal scum by some social conservative.)

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[fallenpegasus]

I had not realized that the T23 had S3 video analog out until you posted this. What cable are you using?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Just as standard S3 cable. It's the outport on the right-hand side of the box on the back. Should be a straight plug-in to the monitor.