It's Geek Toy Month!
It all started with a comment I made in ladyeuthanasia's LJ last month about how utterly cool it is that the combination of USB, flash memory and MP3 players has made it possible to carry one's entire music collection around wherever one goes. While it would be nice to get a new car stereo and stop playing the "which CDs should I keep in the car this month?" game, spending $350 or so to put a new stereo in a seven year old car just doesn't feel like a reasonable thing to do. So it goes.
A couple of weeks ago I was wandering idly through Tiger Direct's PC and flash memory selections and somehow ran across this MP3/MP4 player that would read micro SD cards as well as its own internal memory. $55 Hm. What with the Treo and the eee and stuff in general, I'm starting to accumulate a small cache of micro SD cards and adapters. And oh look! there's one of those adapters that lets you pipe the output of a headphone jack through a cassette deck, which my car has one of...
That order included those two items plus a USB to serial converter[1], an utterly cute (to a geek) USB hub designed to get dragged around with a laptop and enough memory to max out the Vaio and the eee.[2]
The MP3/MP4 player is really nice, though I can't set it to use both the internal flash and the micro SD card on random play. I have to pick one or the other. Gonna need a larger micro SD card... at which point the house server's chipset fan started making far more noise than you'd expect from such a small thing[3] and Tiger had a deep discount on a 24" LCD monitor I'd been eyeing. So there's order number two for the month.
Yes, there's an order number three brewing, because I ran out of time Saturday researching memory for the house server.[4][5] Bah.
[1] Most modern laptops do not have a serial port. This can be incredibly annoying when you need to connect something that can act as a dumb terminal to the serial port of some server.
[2] With the eee, I just wanted to, though for the Vaio it was more than time. Turns out I ordered the wrong memory for the Vaio (Tiger Direct doesn't even carry what I needed- I had to order the micro DIMM not a SODIMM dammit from Kingston). Yes, both laptops are much happier now ;)
[3] Kinda like the way kittens purr really, REALLY loud.
[4] Kremvax2 has started grumbling because my new office Sun is so much spiffier. It's going to have to be satisfied with a new monitor and more memory (and the new chipset fan); I'm not replacing its Athlon chip with an Opteron just yet.
[5] About that memory- I had to spend entirely too much time looking up what the hell single and double rank DIMMs[6] are so I could read the memory table in the motherboard manual and figure out why the various online memory configurators were telling me things that didn't quite make sense. They make sense now, yeah.
[6] http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/serverzone/pdf_files/Mem_ranks_ENG.pdf
A couple of weeks ago I was wandering idly through Tiger Direct's PC and flash memory selections and somehow ran across this MP3/MP4 player that would read micro SD cards as well as its own internal memory. $55 Hm. What with the Treo and the eee and stuff in general, I'm starting to accumulate a small cache of micro SD cards and adapters. And oh look! there's one of those adapters that lets you pipe the output of a headphone jack through a cassette deck, which my car has one of...
That order included those two items plus a USB to serial converter[1], an utterly cute (to a geek) USB hub designed to get dragged around with a laptop and enough memory to max out the Vaio and the eee.[2]
The MP3/MP4 player is really nice, though I can't set it to use both the internal flash and the micro SD card on random play. I have to pick one or the other. Gonna need a larger micro SD card... at which point the house server's chipset fan started making far more noise than you'd expect from such a small thing[3] and Tiger had a deep discount on a 24" LCD monitor I'd been eyeing. So there's order number two for the month.
Yes, there's an order number three brewing, because I ran out of time Saturday researching memory for the house server.[4][5] Bah.
[1] Most modern laptops do not have a serial port. This can be incredibly annoying when you need to connect something that can act as a dumb terminal to the serial port of some server.
[2] With the eee, I just wanted to, though for the Vaio it was more than time. Turns out I ordered the wrong memory for the Vaio (Tiger Direct doesn't even carry what I needed- I had to order the micro DIMM not a SODIMM dammit from Kingston). Yes, both laptops are much happier now ;)
[3] Kinda like the way kittens purr really, REALLY loud.
[4] Kremvax2 has started grumbling because my new office Sun is so much spiffier. It's going to have to be satisfied with a new monitor and more memory (and the new chipset fan); I'm not replacing its Athlon chip with an Opteron just yet.
[5] About that memory- I had to spend entirely too much time looking up what the hell single and double rank DIMMs[6] are so I could read the memory table in the motherboard manual and figure out why the various online memory configurators were telling me things that didn't quite make sense. They make sense now, yeah.
[6] http://www.kingston.com/ukroot/serverzone/pdf_files/Mem_ranks_ENG.pdf