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Compaq Mini 110 - part 3

So far the little netbook has been ambling along nicely, improving with every little step of risks that I take in tinkering with it,

• Sleep is now functioning. The satisfaction of closing the lid and have the thing shut down properly is ...unsettling.


• Ethernet and WLAN are still not working. So far the theories out there have stretched from hardware oddness and particular distributions of OS X being flawed in one way or another. I've resorted to using a USB dongle in the meantime, so nyeh to that.

It served me well during my stay in Helsinki, so I guess that my initial irritations concerning the little tike are becoming invalid.

Compaq Mini 110 woes

Gah! Apparently ethernet is going to be a problem.

In short, the ethernet chipset is not (yet?) supported while the wireless chipset's stellar support is being marred by the fact that the former isn't working. That's a problem to say the least.

There's a free mini pci slot somewhere in that thing, so I suppose adding a card and rewiring the antenna is one thing to consider. However, the mini is notorious for blacklisting "unsupported" cards. Gah...

Compaq Mini 110, meet OS X

I'm a rather happy Macbook Pro user, but occasionally I get the tickles and feel like I must ...tinker. The previous Hackintosh was pretty much complete (an Intel D945GCLF2-based little monster with FW800 and eSATA -it does alarmingly well at being a simple music and web server), so I really needed something new to obsess over and tinker with until it works.

I found this:



So far it has been one fundamental pain in the ass. Where video and audio were previously the focus of sinister practices, they just worked. Except that the screen is not the usual 1024x600 -it's 576 pixels high. So that gets rounded off to about 480 pixels during setup -which has two freaky side-effects:

1. You cannot see, let alone *click* the bloody buttons that are vital to installation. You need to blindly tab your way around the GUI, press space and hope you don't screw things up.


2. On a plus, you don't get the smug introduction to OS X because -get this- the screen is too small for the awesome bullshit!

But I never considered that not only Wireless but Wired LAN as well are in no way working right now.

I'm re-reading the third InsanelyMac thread about networking and I cannot fathom how people ever managed to get anything done. Nothing works.

It sure feels like the holidays are coming

Just like last time I was going to be off for quiet shores, my laptop has decided to show character flaws -this time in the shape of my optical drive failing to read discs.

This wholeheartedly sucks. not because this occurred while I was feeding bacon into the drive, but because the people at the genius Bar will most likely try to get away with claiming something of that magnitude anyway.

So far, my dealings with plain old proper Applecare-covered issues has not been great:

1. Magsafe battery charger starting to fray. Apple eventually akonwledged the problem. That didn't stop the blackshirts from refuting my claims since this was clearly a case of using the Magsafe adapter as a Batarang or whatever they were fantasizing about (*)


2. GeForce 8600GTM chip failing. Not even Apple was safe from a generation-wide screwup from Nvidia -and it failed by the book (or KB article, as it were). However, the blackshirts tried to peg thaton a dent in the casing of my macbook instead, one they dismissed as being "cosmetic at best" the time I brought it in for inspection. Only after I pointed that out did they replace the faulty logic board under warranty rather than at the cost of 1200 euros.

So yeah. I'm not really happy to have to deal with the slanderous disinterest that they call the Genius bar in any hurry. I'm pretty sure they'll blame this one on Michael Jackson's death upsetting the gravitational pull of the moon.

Buying albums -physical media or digital download?

Shopping around for some CDs, I came across the following conundrum. Buy the CD for €6.49 or buy the digital download equivalent for €10.49 instead? Hmmm.

I'm probably a tad more proficient with the issue of ripping an audio CD than the average shopper, but why would I consider buying a degraded version of the debatable lossless version at almost twice the price?

Surely the novelty of digital distribution has gone the way of floppy discs by now? I mean, I can't for the life of me imagine that the production costs, printing costs, physical labor and distribution have plummeted to the point that even brand new popular albums from exemplary bad examples of talent (or lack thereof) are available for less than the digital lossy-encoded alternative. (Note that I am not in any way implying that Rex The Dog is anything but good. I love his music beyond modesty -it's just that his album was available at such a depressing ratio that he's made an example of).

This is weird. This is like warping to the late 1980s and being charged more for a cassette than a CD. Granted, people readily had Walkmans, so the format was more convenient for on-the-go music, but nobody in their right mind would pony up more for the cassette than the CD. Not even with a deviant taste in hair styles and music.

So I wonder, who in their right mind would buy a lossy encoded version of an album they might as well archive lossless on their computer?

Disclaimer portion: I am not a wooden-knob audiophile

I won't try to bullshit myself believing I can discern between the original recording and anything encoded on more than 192kpbs, but I sure as hell won't be inclined to transcode a lossy file with the same vigor as with an original CD.

Moreover, I started out with a rip from, say, CNCD's self-titled album ten years ago at 128kpbs ...then upgraded to 192kpbs a while later ...then some -aps VBR version and recently I upgraded my whole music collection to lossless rips.

There was never any quality concern at play here -diskspace was. In 1999, my system had a 8GB harddisk and the idea to have lossless encodings of my collection alongside other data and software installs was, ...hilarious. But I never had to worry about future-proofing my audio purchase, since hey -the source I purchased was lossless after all.

Fact remains: being charged more for what you can churn out from the original source yourself than the original itself is nothing short of ridiculous.

We now return to our regular programme.

Whoops. Turns out that you actually can forget about rehosting your blog for over 8 months. Anyway, back on track. The old koru.nl URL will probably start redirecting towards this new URL in the following week.

Last night I was amused to see that the W3C has been forced to scrap the codecs from the HTML5 spec because the browser vendors were perpetually bitchfighting over what codec standard they were to implement (i.e. "not yours").

In short: third party plugins for audio and video will probably have to be used for a long time running and HTML5 just lost its prize pony. Shame about the former, but sue me for not having a bleeding heart over the latter.