Comment The leaning tower of Austin! (Score 1) 141
Some of the perspectives are interesting.
Check the condo on the west side of Congress between 2nd and 3rd.
Some of the perspectives are interesting.
Check the condo on the west side of Congress between 2nd and 3rd.
inSSIDer
I've been pretty happy using that to help find the best channel for my WAPs in congested areas. If you really believe it might be a neighbor jumping online from 8:30 to 10, that could help. I haven't yet found a card it doesn't work with under windows (assuming you are running windows...)
If you are finding your fancy wifi card isn't supported by stumbler and other free channel overlap type tools . . . why not buy a cheap wifi card to use with those apps? You could always drop it back on craigslist/ebay (or even return it to the store claiming it doesn't match your curtains).
Unrealistic as it may seem, Griffin is real. She's in the Pajamachievements and does the comic over at RoosterTeeth.com
Rooster Teeth Shorts, Immersion (Pilot)
Not cool that Gizmodo didn't give them credit. These are the same guys that do the Red Vs Blue machinima.
Low cost hosting providers rarely guarantee backup and restoration services as part of the low cost package. It is often a separate item entirely that must be paid for in addition to the standard account. Not only this, many of the shared/virtual private server type providers do not offer any guaranteed recovery period if the server you happen to be on goes down. If you are experiencing an outage due to another user sharing your hardware being compromised and they take the server offline, often times the provider will do nothing to get your site back up and running quickly even if you have the data prepared to slam back onto a new system; You just end up having to wait. (First hand recent experience with a one-and-one vps: The hardware had a drive controller failure. We have full backups of the VPS via bacula and if they were willing to give us a second vps on a new server at the same IP, we could have slammed the data back onto the server and been back up within the hour. They instead made my customer wait 48 hours while they worked on trying to make that original server work.)
Regardless of who you pay for hosting, your data is your responsibility. Their backups are worthless if you never actually prove they are usable yourself. Plan for disaster ahead of time and you'll be better off. Plan it at several different levels: what happens when the data is corrupt? What do you do if the server catches on fire? What do you do if the city/region experiences a catastrophe? What do you do when Joe Constructionworker is installing sprinklers next door and puts their backhoe through the datalines feeding the center? If your provider is offering to cover any one of these with a solution (like paying them to backup the data for your restoration) find out how you get the databack and what kind of SLA's they have. If they back it up, but it's a 24 hour process just to get to the point where you can restore things, that may not work for you. Understanding your recovery process before you need to put it in place is one of the biggest failings of many users/companies offering web based service delivery.
Now, one of the more interesting lower cost providers I've run into lately is Linode. You have a bit more flexibility in dealing with scaling and failover and you can move your virtual private server to bigger and beefier hardware as your site grows. They are working on an inhouse backup solution, but realistically if you care enough about your data, you'll regularly backup offsite with scripts or your favorite backup program (bacula anyone?). Linode is targetted more towards those who can admin their systems themselves rather than needing pre-setup solutions with GUI's (not that you couldn't use something like Plesk yourself on it). You can slowly scale your system hardwarewise to machines that have less and less shared users and you can even use multiple virtual servers with virtual load balancers in front of it (they have some interesting support for having a private lan between your virtuals that keeps the traffic 'local' and won't count against your bandwidth usage. You could use multiple virtual nic's to do load balancing with LVS type setups if you wanted).
When it comes down to processor comparisons, I see very little compelling about this new AMD proc. The i7 920 is going to outperform it at most things, uses less power and is only 35 bucks more. Eventually for those of us always-on users, even the 10 watt savings of the i7 is going to kill the slight price advantage.
The only thing I see interesting here is the fact that you have more commodity boards to choose from, could do a slower upgrade (re-use your ddr2!) but this isn't any different than the currently line of quad proc amd chips, many of which can be had for cheaper and use less power.
Come on, AMD, you can do better.
LED lights are a cheap fun way to teach some basics. All you need is a battery (or even better, several different batteries with different voltages), an LED (or several LED's with different voltages), and a bunch of resistors.
You can get packs of green, red, and yellow LED's for less than 50 cents an LED. resistors are a buck for packs of 10. And batteries are batteries. Figuring out the resistor needed to light up an LED based on the voltage from a single battery or series of batteries can be neat.
If you want to take it a step further, bring in some 50 cent USB a-b cables. Slash them and toss out the B side, find the 5V and ground line, and have them figure out the resistor needed to light an LED for USB voltage (like a woot light!). USB power = 5V 100ma usually (it goes up to 500ma, but the driver usually has to negotiate it up; it should be 100ma; buy a cheap powered hub if you want to keep it safe from the computer). There are lots of links on how to figure out the voltage of an LED, this one is ok.
Has anyone noticed any large maid-like robotic entities in orbit? More importantly to our future, were there any winnebagos with wings nearby?
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman