Review: Zipit Wireless Messenger 2

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So I must thank my good friend Andrew C for picking one of these up for me at his local Target store and shipping it up to me in Canada.   The device itself is about the size and form factor of the Gameboy Advance SP, however there is a lot more under the hood.  The Zipit2 boasts a 320×240 colour display, 312MHz XScale (ARM), 32MB RAM, 8MB flash, Mini-SD expansion, backlit querty thumb keyboard, D_Pad and music controls, 802.11 B/G, and a 1000Mah LiOn battery. IMG_3034-1 The retail price is $49.99, but as you can see it was marked down to under $25!

For the casual consumer, this device allows for IM with AIM, Yahoo, and MSN.  It appears they also have a gateway to a wide range of US cell phone providers (and one Canadian – Fido) allowing for SMS messages to be sent / received.  It will play music and display photos from the Mini-SD card.  There is also support for internet radio.  While you need to use your own WiFi to connect to the internet, you are reliant on the zipitwireless.com site for the IM connectivity to the device.  The 1st year of service is free and after that its $29.95 a year.  If you’ve got teenagers and not enough computers, this is a great solution.  Another benefit is a side-effect of the limitations of the device – no malware or virus issues, constrained functionality results in a limited amount of mischief they can get into.

Oh yeah, and it runs Linux.  So of course the hacking community has has its way with this device and you can now get an “open” Linux build for it.  There is also a fairly dated wiki hosted by zipitwireless, however the irc logs seem to be fairly current.  I was particulary excited to see that the ScummVM was able to run Full Throttle – something I plan to setup as I actually own the original game.

I’ll update with another post once I’ve got the firmware modified – you knew that was coming right?

Firestarter

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My good friend Ken is in London this week, and today I get this image in my email along with:

Have no idea what this means. Some paper in the bar while I was having supper.

If this was printed locally, no doubt I’d arrive at the office to find it thoughtfully taped to the wall outside my office.

I suspect the paper was News of the World, as I found a very similar article here.  It seems that Wayne Rooney is often tagged with the nickname Roo – not bad company I suppose.

Review: WD Caviar Green 1TB

It was probably 2 years ago when I started talking about the terabyte club.  This was before 1TB drives were common (and cheap), the sweet spot for price/capacity was around 250Gb – but four of those would net you 1TB for under $500.  Considering I spent $2000 on my first 1Gb SCSI drive back in 1990 – being able to get 1000X the storage for a lot less, still makes me sit back and think wow.

I failed to properly join the terabyte club 2 years ago, I suspect that sometime in the last year or so the total sum capacity of my machines at home topped 1TB of storage – but just recently my purchase of a WD Caviar Green 1TB drive ensured that I was “in the club”.  (It also lives in my webserver, so its effectively “online”)

I had my eye on the Caviar Green series ever since I saw the Tom’s Hardware review that showed that the Green drives had real savings in power consumption.  While their power use under load is closer to typical – for the most part my server is idle (but always on).  At the larger capacities, I just don’t trust the even more power friendly laptop drives.

I watched the price canada page for the 1TB model over a couple of weeks, and once the price fell below $100 I knew it was inevitable I’d buy one.  Initially I was going to get it at PCCyber for $87.99 (the price has since dropped), but karma dictated that they were out of stock the day I was going to buy one.  I then decided to head off to Canada Computers where they had it for $84.99.  Wouldn’t you know it, when I got back from the store with my purchase in hand there was a NewEgg.ca deal for $79.99 (with free shipping).  It seems the best local price currently is $77.77.

The D945GCLF2D (dual core Atom system) that is my server has only 2 SATA ports, both which are full.  So I used the PCI to 4 port SATA card I had from a previous machine to host the new drive.  Sadly, after booting I noticed the following message(s) in the log:

Oct 24 14:47:03 lowtek kernel: [  246.357277] BUG: soft lockup – CPU#0 stuck for 11s! [kacpid:62]

Previous to this new hardware addition, my server had been up for 172 days – so it has been very reliable.  The other symptom of this was the kacpid process eating 100% CPU.   It turns out this is a known bug – and there is a work-around.  Strange how it was the addition of the PCI card which triggered the problem for me.  Simply disabling the System Fan Control in the BIOS remedied the problem, and the system seems solid once again.

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