Category: Computing

The Optimal eBay Experience

A couple of years ago I picked up a used laptop (Gateway Solo 5150) for a great price.  Sound doesn’t work, but paired up with a wifi card it makes a great remote terminal for Jenn’s Mac Mini.  Sadly, the other day the hard drive packed it in.  Instead of treating this like an excuse to buy a laptop that has sound (and a lot more horse power) I thought it would be worth considering replacing the drive with a compact flash card – basically a DIY Solid State Drive (SSD).

Checking prices locally, it seemed I could pick up a CF to 2.5 IDE adapter for $24.  Considering a cheap 1Gig CF card was $13 – paying nearly double just to interface it seemed a bit steep.  Well, eBay to the rescue.

Yup, I was lucky enough to score one for a penny.  It sort of makes you want to pick up that penny the next time you see one on the ground.  While many of the 1 cent auctions seems to hit you on shipping, this one was really just $2.98 to Canada.  The amount that came off my credit card via PayPal was $3.05.

Shipping insurance was $1.50 – and while normally I do consider it worthwhile, this time I figured paying a 50% premium to insure it seemed silly.  Well it arrived safely today – after the expected delay due to shipping method and source (Hong Kong).

The seller on eBay was alpinetopline, which seems to be related to suntekstore.com.  I’ll certainly not hesitate to give these folk more business based on this transaction as it went smoothly and as expected.  If you wanted to avoid the eBay experience, you can buy exactly the same CF to 2.5 IDE adapter from suntekstore.com directly.

A little fiddling with the laptop CMOS setup to make an old 512MB CF card I had around detect properly, and a DOS boot floppy (yup, this laptop has a floppy) and I was good to go.  Now the fun of installing Puppy Linux on it again.

Turbo Slug

Well I finally got around to de-underclocking my NSLU2 (aka Slug).  It took about 10 minutes start to finish, so I really have no excuse for why it took me this long to get around to it.

The NSLU2 Linux wiki has very detailed directions on cracking the case open.  Go slowly to avoid snapping off the plastic tabs.

Now comes the fun part, modifying the hardware.  It turns out that for whatever reason the NSLU2 was underclocked, the wikipedia article discusses this and other interesting facts about this device.  While this is a discontinued device, they are readily available from amazon still.  All we need to do to allow the Slug to run at its native 266MHz is remove a resistor.  I used a pair of tweezers.

If you look closely, you’ll see the tiny resistor in the center of the palm of my hand.  I later dropped it onto the floor and lost sight of it.

Putting the unit back together isn’t documented as well on the wiki – I found that it was easier to insert the circuit board into the light grey “front” and then snap the back on.  Again, go slowly to avoid breaking any tabs off.

Having installed a version of Debian on it the other day, I was able to ssh into my new “turbo slug” and cat /proc/cpuinfo which showed me BogoMIPS: 266.24.  Success!  It does seem to be more responsive.  I’m tempted to try tinkering with doing a memory upgrade, but that may be beyond my soldering skill level.

Playlists

It seems some people are really into creating playlists.  I’m not one of them.  While I have a lot of nasty things to say about iTunes, the smart playlists feature has been the only way I’ve bothered to make playlists.  At least until now.

The other day I was thinking that while its nice to have iTunes recommend songs that you might want to buy that are similar to what you’re browsing in your music collection, and Amazon has lots of recommendations on what you might buy based on your previous purchases.  No one seemed to be harnessing the relationship between things that I already own.

Well, it turns out there is a bunch of stuff out there that does exactly that.

At first I ended up at wikipedia on music recommendation systems.  Further digging turned up something called The Filter which was blogged by Wired a while back, unfortunately it doesn’t seem quite ready for prime-time so I keep hunting around.   Then I came across MusicIP mixer, and a related comparison review article on lastfm.

MusicIP seemed like the best, most available candidate, so I gave it a shot.  The free version is limited, but not crippled.  It installs as a stand alone application, but is aware of iTunes and will read settings from there to figure out where (and what) your music collection is.  Out of the box, all you do is pick a song (or a few) and ask to make a mix.

I picked a random Haujobb track and asked for a mix of 75 songs (the limit for the free version).  The sample_mix was a fairly good selection of the music in my collection that I’d consider to be fairly compatible.  There were a few odd songs in the list that I trimmed out by indicating “less of this” and it shuffled things around (and I suspect remembered the error for later).

I then burned a MP3 CD for the car with these 75 songs (some 500MB).  As an aside, I’m terrible for updating my driving tunes, so what I had in the car was pretty stale.  Well, its been 2 days so far and I’m very pleased with the experience.  This is a much better mix set than the smart playlist I primarily use on my iPod.

One note about the MusicIP system, it needs a lot of processing time until it has consumed your music collection.  I ran my PC for well over 24hrs processing 3500 songs.  This is a one time hit, and I consider it a fair tax for the free version of the software – especially if it gives me an easy way to make new mix CDs, or new playlists for my iPod.

Be it through some social network, algorithm, or mixture of the two – I hope that this type of technology grows in popularity.  As we gather more and more media, we’re going to need better ways to interact with it – and insisting that we manually tag, sift and sort our data simply won’t scale.

Imagine if your email could be grouped and sifted based on how others had handled the same messages?  How about if your PVR could just record the same shows your friends are watching?  If you always answer “yes to all” on that dialog box, why not let me make it a sticky setting?