Last Dojo: Performing seppuku, one person at a time. :: March

Wed 29th Mar, 2006 - Back In Black

So my friend Carlos was about to throw away his old IBM Aptiva (500mhz, PIII, 10gb hd, 128mb ram) because it wouldn’t power up anymore. I told the man, do not throw it away, give it to me, I’ll find some use for it. Turns out it was a damaged power supply and a shot hard drive, everything else was intact. So I hooked it up with a 20 and 10 gb hard drives I had lying around, a 200 watt power supply from an old computer, upped the ram to 256mb and gave it a really good cleanup / black paint job. Now it’s dual booting Windows XP SP2, and PC-BSD (best UNIX distro out there based on FreeBsd) and running pretty smoothly. Next up for the computer is a bigger hard drive, a tv tuner card, a vga cable to hook it to my LCD (courtesy of Edu) and hopefully mythTV to turn it into a full fledged Tivo machine, that is if the 500mhz PIII is up to the task. If not, it will become network storage for my home network, so it’s all good. Thanks a lot to Carlos for remembering me when he was about to throw his computer away and my cousin Hector who supplies me with the hardware to resurrect other computers, keep ‘em coming people. Pictures follow.

Back In Black!!!

Bare Bones

The Inside

The Repair Kit

The Powerbook supplies the wireless internet

Running PC-BSD

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Sat 18th Mar, 2006 - Auto Installer Deluxe 3.0

I decided to upgrade my Xbox Dashboard and Applications since I was still running with a Slayer’s Evox installation. I couldn’t find any new releases from Slayer so I decided to use Auto Installer Deluxe 3.0
It’s just like Slayer’s version where everything is done for you, but it has a few perks. It has a backup feature where you can save C:, E:, Cache, Eprom, and Saves to a folder called Backup in E, F, or G which is really nice. It includes a Bios flasher feature, a selection of dashboards to install on C, E, F or G, and like 20 something apps and 30 something emulators. It also includes an iso update program so that you can add “packs” to the iso. For example, you can more skins, dummy files and music to listen while you do the install. Installation of the dashboards was a breeze, but I wasn’t able to install some of the apps, like the Xbox Media Center. I still don’t know why, but anyway, I always download XBMC and install the latest version. Also, I upgraded Evox by installing the Auto-Installer version over the old one. Some pics follow.

ISO Update Program

Backup Screen 1
Backup Screen 2

Backup Screen 2

Cache Backup

Menu and Xbox Info

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Thu 2nd Mar, 2006 - 4shared.com

While doing my friendly-neighborhood internet slinging I came across this site, 4shared.com At first I couldn’t believe it, free file sharing and data storage, 500MB. Well they made me a believer, it’s free and it’s 500MB. I signed up. Sign up couldn’t be simpler, just give an e-mail and a password, that’s it. What’s really cool about the file storage is the interface, it’s basically an XP window, and you get your choice of “folder” or “thumbnail” view like in windows. Very simple interface, maximum upload size is 25MB, although if you have a big file you can split into chunks. Multiple uploads are available for the first 5 days, after that, you have to pay if you want that feature. Now get this, there is no bandwidth limit but a user can only download one file at a time (on the free account.) You can stream video and music and share folders or specific files, either publicly or privately. They offer a lot more features on the paid accounts, but for me the free account works nicely. Plus there’s a forum and a community of file sharers from which you can search and download stuff. All in all, a very nice overall design. Although I wish it had some sort of .Mac app that would let me sync addresses, bookmarks, documents, etc. with ease.

Main Page

Folder View

Thumbnail View

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