Code Chaos!

I just found that on the interwebs, and it made my day. It summarizes exactly what I thought about the GPL license and why I’m very reluctant to license anything under it.
youtube video

As some of you may know, I bought an ALIX 1D from PC Engines some time ago. Then I purchased some USB Harddisks to convert it into a fileserver.

ALIX 1D from http://pcengines.ch

At first, I hoped to use it as a SSH Server to access my Machines at home from outside. And a fileserver. And a mediaserver. And a stereo. And a media server. And a coffee maker. And sliced bread. By now I know that the little cute ALIX 1D can handle Samba well, but SSH works only 2MB/s fast… because 500MHz is just too frickin slow.

Long story short, I will keep the ALIX for GIT, SSH, maybe MPD. But for all the multimedia stuff like watching TV I will give up or knuckle under. I decided to stop messing around with recompiling mplayer or ffmpeg libraries. I am looking at alternatives for a media center:

• Playstation 3
• Xbox 360
• Intel Atom board

There are several advantages and disadvantages for all the options.

• A Playstation has a cool interface and it works very well with several media formats (or so I heard). And it can play wicked awesome games with stunning graphics. Additionally I can install Yellowdog Linux on it … (but I heard it’s very loud)
• The Xbox has similar advantages, although i can hardly stand the Microsoft taint in my room… (and it’s fucking loud, and about that i know about)
• The Intel Atom has the advantage of supporting practically any Linux distro. But it can’t play games… (except for some emulators i would suppose)

Since one of my highest priorities is to have less noise in my room, my interests are geared towards the Intel solution.

If I bought the set, I’d still have to set it up which results in about an afternoon/evening of tweaking and tuning. At least I could use Archlinux again instead of Ubuntu…

(although, just for the record, i have been quite happy with Ubuntu on my ALIX server, very nice, clean and stable, once you kick out all the unnecessary stuff)

I quickly threw together a wholesale solution:

Point of View ION, Intel Atom N330 CHF 174.-

Point of View Atom N330, ION

Kingston HyperX 2×2GB SODIMM, 200Pin, DDR2-667, CL4 CHF 78.-

Kingston HyperX 2x2GB SODIMM, 200Pin, DDR2-667, CL4

Which would total in as CHF 252.-

sounds fair to me (I heard it can play HD1080p, which would be awesome )

EDIT: I forgot the power supply… brb

and i just got informed that the WII also has some sort of multimedia capabilities… I’ll look into that

EDIT2: the wii can’t do HD, so it’s out.

and about the power supply:

This is a test whether the XML-RPC Interface works.

cheers, Phil

EDIT: It does

I can recommend almost all videos of Youtube user Thunderf00t, but this video sums up nicely how amazing and important science has become to our society

this seems to be my first post on this shiny new wordpress installation

neat…