Category Archives: Personal

The End of an Era – Selling the Mac Mini!

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Tonight I finished cleaning all of my personal data off of my first Apple Macintosh.  The hard drive was wiped, and the operating system reload is in progress.  It’s time to put the little beastie up for sale, and get some more modern hardware!

This was a big purchase for me back when I started messing around with my Canon HF100 HD video camera.  iMovie ’09 worked great with my video camera, and it made sense to purchase a Mac Mini (and then upgrade it) to handle all of my video editing and storage duties.

The machine I purchased was a Mid 2007 Mac Mini, which had an Intel Core2Duo 2.0Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB internal hard drive.  I immediately upgraded the system to 4GB of RAM and installed a 500GB Western Digital 5400RPM SATA drive.  Massive improvements in speed, video editing capabilities, and storage in one easy afternoon.

The system has served me well as a workstation in general, and working with video through iMovie.  Sadly, the time has come to upgrade to something more modern, with a little more RAM and some more CPU power to handle the longer videos I’d like to shoot.  Also, the 500GB drive was full, and I’d rather not try to stuff a 1TB drive in the system.  External drives work great, but are much slower.  I have outgrown this system.

What will I get to replace this system?  I doubt I will get another Mac, since video editing capabilities under Linux have caught up to (and surpassed in some areas) iMovie, and i can get a LOT more storage space, CPU, and RAM by building my own system instead of paying for another Mac.  I’ve had a lot of success editing the raw files from my video camera under a couple different video editors in Linux, so I’m comfortable leaving the Mac behind at this point.

Not sure what the specs will be on the new system.  I have to sell off the Mac Mini first to help fund the new hardware.  That will be another blog post in the near future.  :-)

Direct Energy – follow up post

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It’s been a while since I wrote about Direct Energy, an energy supplier here in the state of Illinois.  I thought it was a scam, but have since learned they’re actually a legitimate business, and even have competition here in Illinois.

I refused to sign up with them, even with the two representatives pressuring me about how I would save money with their company.  They wouldn’t tell me what my rate would be for electricity, only that with deregulation comes higher prices, and that energy costs are very volatile these days.

So far none of their dire price predictions have come true.  I’m glad I made the choice to not deal with Direct Energy, or any of the other alternative suppliers for natural gas or electricity.  Getting locked into a fixed rate while prices are going down (over time/averaged out year to year) doesn’t seem like a smart move.

Some more articles regarding these energy retailers:

http://www.suntimes.com/business/4175776-420/comed-no-longer-the-only-game-in-town.html

http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20110706/business/707069973/

http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/ciElectric_cubfacts_alternativesuppliers.html

Here’s how Direct Energy did when they attempted to switch folks over for natural gas:

http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/ags40.php

In Illinois, 95% of people who switched to an alternative provider for natural gas paid more than they did with their original gas supplier (since 2003):

http://www.citizensutilityboard.org/GasMarketMonitor.php

Hopefully the players in the deregulated energy markets can get everything figured out, and actually become competitive AND trustworthy to us consumers.

Woo, updates!

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I took a look at Google Analytics for this site today, and decided I needed to make a few changes.  One thing led to another, and now the site is running with an updated theme (Twentyeleven, from WordPress), some tweaked W3 Total Cache settings, and some new header graphics that I shot this evening in the basement.

The Google ads have been temporarily removed, while I rework that whole mess.  Sadly, the ads slow down the site quite a bit, so I don’t know if I want to keep them or not.  I think I may try to only show ads when you view individual stories/posts.  Removing ads from the front page will keep things looking sharp, and running fast.

In tech related news, I finally got around to installing NetBSD (hpcmips) 5.1 on a 4GB CF card on an IBM Workpad z/50 system.  It’s a little netbook-ish type laptop that ran Windows CE years before netbooks got popular.  Yes, it’s the “hipster-book”.  While a fun project, it is very limited by the 16MB of RAM, so there’s not a lot I can do with it at the moment.

This evening also saw the i-Opener go under the knife to get a hard drive upgrade, and NetBSD (i386) 5.1 loaded as well.  I need to find a USB network adapter to make this system useable.  This i-Opener has been upgraded to 128MB of RAM, a 30GB internal 2.5″ IDE drive, and an IDT WinChip 200Mhz processor (passively cooled).  The only moving part on this machine is the hard drive’s internals.

That’s all for now.  More updates to come as I upgrade another machine this week in preparation for Windows 7 and some new games.  :-)

EDIT:  Well, the Google Ads are back after screwing around with some of the AdSense plugins for WordPress.  We’re back in business!

Zip, zilch, nadda!

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Not much to report on the home front these days.  This time of year is super busy where I work, and the hours have been long.

I recently traveled to San Francisco, CA for work.  The weather wasn’t great (by SF standards), but I managed to do a decent amount of walking around the city.  Met some interesting folks, and got a lot of work done.

Getting ready for Black Friday site traffic, and the usual pilgrimage to Fry’s early in the morning on Black Friday for more computer crap I don’t need at home.  ’Tis the season!