Thursday, October 30, 2008

I bought a new monitor an LG 19" widescreen monitor

I bought an LG monitor model W1952TQ-TF and may buy a second one in a few months.

I bought two Kingston 2 GB sticks for my new PC for 4 GB of RAM. I may buy 4 more GB now.

I was able to get 4 GB of RAM and install it in the PC. I may buy 4 more GB of RAM today. All I need to buy now is the CPU. I damaged the head of the screws for a case fan I bought. I am worried now that the case fan will rattle. I may have to forcibly remove the fan and take it back to the store.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Backups happening. Labeling the last set of the DVD's and backing up email.

I spent some time labeling three DVD's of the Macbook Documents folder from 2007 fall. I have six copies each of these three DVD's. I still have many more DVD's to label. I also bought another 50 blank 4.7 GB DVD's to continue the process and prepare to start backing up 2008 in a couple of months.

I also used one of the LaCie hard drives to back up my email and that was successful.

The eMac DVD drive opens again.

One sign that I may be able to keep using this eMac for another few years, the DVD drive opens now. I will now just need to be careful with running too many applications on it at the same time. I will also not use the DVD drive too much.

I installed Eve Monitor on my Macbook under Windows XP and uninstalled a lot of Microsoft software

I uninstalled Microsoft SQL client and Visual Studio 2005 from my Macbook on the XP side. This gave me about 2 GB extra space on the windows hard drive. I then installed EveMon and got it working just fine.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

So Eve Monitor stopped working.

I got an new API key for the game Eve Online and my Eve Monitor software became broken. I have been spending hours this past half year playing this multiplayer online role playing game. I have a lot of friends in the game now. It is a very cooperative game.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Technology consumer goods prices are always going down so as long as something does not leave the market, it always better to wait

The Wolfdale CPU I had wanted, the 8400 is down in price to around 170$ now. It had been at 180$ I will not be buying it this week most likely. But perhaps two weeks and a few days from now. RAM prices are also going down. I plan to buy either 533 or 800 DDR2 RAM although the mother board manual says only 533 can be used for 8 GB of RAM. This would be about 160$. Those are the main remaining pieces in the computer. I have now started wanting a new LCD monitor or even two and a stand for two monitors. This would be about 600 dollars more on this project but one monitor could work with the Mac Mini. The Mac Mini would be 1000$ so perhaps an iMac for a few hundred more might be better.

Friday, October 10, 2008

My eMac is getting to be slow

I do most of my computing on a late 2005 eMac. It is becoming slow and I can no longer open the DVD drive. I leave it on all day sleeping. It has seen a lot of use. But it still runs Second Life just fine and is able to surf the net. All my email stores are on this machine. I need to transfer email to another newer machine. The easiest transfer would be to my Macbook. This would also reduce energy use of I started to do all my email on the Macbook.

Another plan is to upgrade to an iMac. An even cheaper plan would be to upgrade to a Mac Mini. This might also allow me to use the planned upgraded monitors that are going to be the monitors for the new PC. I am looking at refurbished 22 inch HP w2207 on sale at Future Shop. These are selling for 199 right now and I think of buying two monitors and placing them on a stand. I could switch one monitor back and forth between the PC and the Mac Mini.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Java installs all around

I have Java installed on all my computers now. Today I installed Java on the two windows installations I have. So on both my Macbook running XP and on my IBM ThinkCentre running Vista I have installed Java 6. I needed to install my professor's software ABC model and failed to install this on Vista but have just been successful installing it on the Macbook running XP.

Missing blogs and numerous accounts all over the web.

I started a couple of word press blogs I never use. Today I signed up for www.mryl.com a virtual worlds integration project. But it is some commercial project. I had a gmail account too for my Second Life avatar but can not log in now. I also have forgotten about the inworld blogging system I had installed in Second Life. I also left the socioprano forum behind. There is a similar PHP forum for users of manual focus lens on digital cameras I joined this summer. I should go back there now and up date my signature file and read some more there. I have a hosted web space on yahoo with three blogs that get some updates. I have lost access to one blog I used to update daily. It was an semi anonymous blog. I use non anonymous email lists to fill that void now. I also opened a my experiment account and have open sourced some spreadsheets and also some R code there. That site is non-commercial, in fact, an open source government site based and funded in the UK. Mostly it is for bioinformatics.

Yes I have lost a number of accounts within my busy digital life

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

I have a network storage hard drive working now. It is my music storage device.

These linksys storage bays finally went on sale and I bought one. I installed my first SATA drive in this. It is a 120 GB drive. I got the drive used from a computer swap. Eventually I will put two 1 TB drives in this storage bay. So I now have network storage.

I am running the iTunes storage folders on my eMac and on my Vista computer from this network drive. This size 120 GB will also perfectly match the new iPods if I ever get back into iPods. My new workplace is not a place where I listen to music so I do not listen to music all day like I could last year.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

I bought the power supply for the new PC

Here is the link to the Sea Sonic M12 power supply I bought for my new PC. It is installed now as are the new Samsung DVD burner and an old 100 MB zip drive. The floppy is also wired up and the back port plate is installed. Also two more USB ports are now connected on the front of the case.