Spider Web Pictures

Anybody living in the Greater Vancouver Regional District will know that it was rather foggy a week ago. UBC was no exception, with the fog rolling in to a visibility of around 500 meters. This humidity in the air had the effect of depositing a layer of "dew" on everything around, including spider webbing. I took my camera and tripod outside to the walkway that connects my building with the commons block, and set it up to take various photos of the dew-drenched spider webs. Most people who passed were curious and astonished at what I was doing, and most thought I was a little "strange". After taking photos of the webs, I coerced Byron to join me and go down to Wreck Beach and we took photos of the cliffs, the breakwall, and the surf. I have put all the photos of that day on my webserver, with a link page here. The link page is a simple html, but it in turn links to the original, unscaled 5.1 megapixel images, so you have been warned. These pictures have not been Gimped in any way, and the first image in the set is from a different day (in case you were wondering about the lack of fog in that photo).

How Microsoft Tricks Its Users

Man, sometimes you just have to laugh when you use Microsoft and their software. I'm home for the Canadian Thanksgiving Weekend, which means I upgrade software and clean up my parents Windows XP computer. Today I visited Windows Update to get all the latest fixes (that aren't done in the auto updates), and the first page said that I had to download the latest version of the Windows Updater software. Among the list of advantages to this new version were things like resuming downloads, smaller download sizes, Windows and Office downloads in one program, and other features that I can't remember. I looked specifically if they were adding any copy protection or piracy checking, and that was not in the list. When I downloaded this new version of the software it downloaded only one package, called "Windows Genuine Advantage Validation Tool (KB892130)". I just love how Microsoft lied to me, saying it was this all new improved version of the updater tool, mentioned nothing about piracy checking, and then loads up a tool that serves no purpose but to check if my Windows is pirated.

Don't worry, I have the corporate version of Windows, which means they do no checking anyways.

Google Talk

You've probably heard of Google's instant messaging / voice messaging software called "Google Talk". I've seen more and more screenshots of people using Google Talk, either to test it out, or to use it extensively. I decided to check it out myself today, primarily because it works on the Jabber protocol, and I already have a Jabber account at jabber.org. In my research I found out that while Google Talk does use the Jabber protocol, the talk.google.com servers don't communicate with other Jabber servers. I was hoping I could use my preexisting @jabber.org account to chat with my @gmail.com friends, but have had no such luck. Google claims that they are working on it, and will update the service to support 3rd party servers, but they are still working out the kinks (like IM spam). So I will give this Google Talk thing a go, sans the voice functions. The nice thing is that if you already have a gmail account, then you already have a google talk account and you just add the account to your favourite jabber client.

I would still prefer that people add me under my "tiosc@jabber.org" account, but if you do use Google Talk, then you can add me under "dunnadam@gmail.com". It would be nice to use Jabber at least once to talk with someone! You can read more about Google Talk here, and you can find out how to add your account to the best instant messaging client here.

Google's Presentation, Room Panorama

On Tuesday (I know, I'm a little behind on these posts) Google gave a presentation here at UBC titled "Organizing The World's Information". Three Google engineers came up from Mountain View, along with one intern from UBC (the kid in white in the photos) to give the presentation. The presentation basically had the objective of recruiting, although no effort was made to hide this fact. It started with Dave Marwood, a UBC alumni himself, talking about the challenges that Google faces, like distributed processing, search algorithms, easy user interfaces, etc. He then talked about the lifestyle at Google, which morphed into how one could apply to work at Google. After the slideshow was finished, there were questions and answers, most having to do with recruitment, some about secret Google projects (to which they claimed ignorance). Pizza and pop were given out before the event started, and pens and long sleeve shirts were distributed afterwards. A raffle was also held for other Google clothing items. The talk was quite interesting, and they tried to show all the different areas that Google does research in, not just search. I didn't take any pictures of the slides, out of respect and copyright concerns, but I did get one of the opening slide, showing the presenters names. The lighting wasn't the greatest, and I kept my flash off, so some of the pics are also blurry. I picked up one of the orange pens, and the two shots of the shirt are the large that I picked up, front then back. I really don't feel like downscaling the pictures, so all of them are presented in the full 5.1 surround pixels.
Google raffle prizes on table
Slide 0
A fair turnout
Dave Marwood in background with intern in front
The recruitment part of the presentation
Dave Marwood and Wenxin Li
Intern and Kelly Poon
Savages fighting it out for Google shirts
Empty pizza boxes
Different angle of pizza boxes
Crowds starting to die off
People mingling
Google pens!
Front of Google shirt
Back of Google shirt

Speaking of surround pixels, last night I finished the compile (some eight hours) of a panorama tool called hugin. For the first test, I took five pictures of my room (in its messy-state) and stitched them together in hugin. Some Gimping had to be done to crop and scale, as I haven't figured out all the settings yet, and you will notice that the right-most picture was blurry. On Thanksgiving I will get an old tripod from my house and do more of this panorama stuff so that people on the other side of the world can better experience UBC life ;) Until then, all you get is my room.

Seeing Old Friends

Yes, it's always nice to get together with old friends to see how each other is doing. Sometimes when you meet people you haven't seen in a long time you have a different attitude towards them. When you previously had to spend many hours a day with these people you wanted nothing more than to eviscerate their intestines with a fork, but now that you meet them many months afterwards, you can both look back and laugh at times and events long ago. It's always nice to see old friends.

This past Saturday (Sept 24) I went out with a bunch of guys that I used to live with here on Nootka 4th. Many couldn't make it, due to being out of the country, out of the province, or otherwise out of reach. The eight of us that could get together met up at the UBC bus loop and went out for dinner at Shabusen. Shabusen is a nice little place in downtown Vancouver (Google it, there are only two locations in the world, the other in South Vancouver), where they serve Japanese sushi and Korean BBQ, with the availability of all-you-can-eat. All I can say is, "Oishii!" I've had sushi before, but only stuff like California rolls, and not really the "proper" sushi. This time raw salmon and tuna was had by all, along with a plethora of other vegetables, dumplings, wasabi, and other things for which I don't know the names. My personal favourite was the Korean BBQ, which was raw pork, beef, or chicken, marinated in special sauces, which you then cook yourself over a BBQ that is built into the table. My descriptions can do no justice, as I don't know what half the stuff was that I was eating, but it was very good. If you want to stuff yourself on Asian food sometime, try Shabusen. It is a bit pricey, at $23, and you will have to make reservations before going, but for a special occasion such as this, it was great.

To see some pictures of the outing, and check out the array of food, go to the pictures page. It might take a bit to load, as there are 29 jpeg photos. Clicking a photo will get you the Ultra-Extreme-Platinum-Super-Huge Edition (a full 5.1 megapixels).

Jogging Again, Windows Vista News

Well, I'm trying to get back into some form of exercise, and jogging would be it for now. I must admit that inspiration comes from Mikee, although I'm not following the Sun Run routine thing. I also haven't determined things like route and time just yet. I have found that I'm really out of shape, and just can't run like I used to. On the positive side, I can feel myself improving from one day to the next, because I'm so out of shape. Due to this, I don't have a set route to run, because after a couple weeks the current one will likely be too short. I'm also trying out the early morning run thing, getting up around 5 (more like 5:30) to do the jogging before my day starts. I don't have any good graphing software, so there won't be any statistics gathering (like I did for my meal plan points and my biking times). Should be interesting, to say the least.

There is a lot of stuff happening around Windows Vista this week. It seems that MS has decided to use the Professional Developers Conference (right now in Los Angeles) to announce things and show things off and lift NDAs on people like Robert Scoble. Two places to watch: Slashdot and Channel 9.

Settled In University

Well, I know it's been a long stretch since I last blogged, but anybody who has this on a feedreader will probably get it within a day. Those who were visiting the site manually will have dropped off by now and won't know anything about it.

I'd say I'm now pretty much settled into university. I'm back at UBC, taking second year computer science, and I'm living in Nootka 464. I'm right back on the same floor that I was on last year! The kids here are fine, they seem to be more the partying type than last year, but they also manage to find their parties elsewhere, which is fine by me.

One of my plans in coming here was to have my main box (Babbage, PIII 500MHz) as my work machine and then set up another box (Cerf, PI 90Mhz) as a server machine, hosting things like http, ftp, svn, and maybe even some bugzilla. Unfortunately, the bios seems to be going on it (can't boot from cdrom like it used to), so I think I will just junk it. If anyone needs a 2GB hard drive, a 1GB hard drive, or some old old RAM, they can talk to me. I don't think I'll get too many inquiries. Perhaps in a while I will get Apache set up proper like, with some ftp and subversion, just like I planned. That won't be for a while though.

UBC is also really messing with me. Someone put the wrong co-requisites on the registration website for one of my courses. Long story made short, I'm not allowed to take a course this semester that I wanted to, and I'm being forced to take it next semester (it's a requirement for my degree). This means that I will be taking 4 courses this semester and 6 courses next semester. My plan is actually to attend the classes for the course this semester so that when I have to take it next semester, I will already know most of the material (except the labs).

On the previous two notes, when I do get my Apache up and running, then I will add my timetable to my server. I have already copied it from the UBC webpage (dynamically generated just for me) and stripped the html down to bare minimum. You'll just have to wait.

On a non-personal, non-educational note, I've had this problem with XMMS (Linux's answer to Winamp) not reading the file length of some MP3's properly. It either reads them to be too long, or can't get the length at all and treats it as a stream. In the latter case, any seeking results in a "failed to seek" error. I tracked the problem down today to being a bug in the MAD decoder plugin incorrectly reading tags when XING tag reading is enabled. Perhaps over Christmas break I will make it my job to hunt this one down and fix it (or sooner if I can). One quick fix is to disable MAD and use MPG123 or to disable the XING tags in the MAD options.

Encoding DVDs Not A Fun Experience

Took my Windows XP machine (the faster of the two) up to Oliver BC to edit some wedding video for some family friends. Edited a total 92 minutes of video, including some image touch-up (the lighting was terrible in the dance hall), and some sound touch up (their camcorder has a very bad microphone that was at the back of the hall). Everything was going fine until I wanted to export the video and burn it to DVD.

Adobe has a built-in DVD burner that does everything for you, as long as you're not looking for menus and titles and stuff, which I'm not. I still didn't want to use the built-in burner because I wanted to burn multiple copies from one masterfile on my hard drive, and as far as I can tell, Adobe's built-in burner script doesn't keep temporary files around for long. I figured that Nero would be able to handle it all for me, so I exported the video using the MPEG2-DVD option in the Premiere exporter. According to my readings, NTSC DVDs can only handle PCM and Dolby AC3 for the audio, while PAL DVDs can do PCM, AC3, and MP2. Premiere comes with a trial copy of some AC3 encoder, and only having 3 trial encodes left, I opted for the PCM. Adobe ended up exporting an .m2v file and a .wav file (I was expecting it to put both video and audio into one container, but this wasn't a huge problem). I opened up Nero, only to find that it will only handle .vob, .ifo, and .bup's. In order to burn anything else to a DVD Video requires NeroVision DVD. Not feeling like hitting up eMule or any of that nonsense (considering I'm not on my own internet), I tried hunting around for freeware to do conversions and/or burning for me. One project I found was DVDAuthorGUI, which seemed like it would work, by taking the exported files and putting them in .vob files for Nero. When I got that program fired up, it turned out that it couldn't handle PCM wave audio, and needed either .mp2 or .ac3. At that point I had to go hunting for another program to convert my wave file to ac3. BatchffmpegGUI XP helped me along there, so that I had an ac3 audio that could go into a vob along with the mp2, which Nero could then burn. To top all this off, I was constantly short on hard drive space, shuffling files around from partition to partition trying to make this stuff work.

For the people who think that video games cause violence, I can assure them that video games cause far less frustration and pent up anger than having to deal with formats that are patented by large corporations. Why can't the process of exporting a DVD be easier? Why is it that a consumer has to spend hundreds of dollars buying software and licenses, or download software that can't be distributed in compiled form in the United States. The media conglomerates are so interested in their own investments that they make it purposefully difficult and expensive for a consumer to work with his own personal video recording. What a pain in the butt.

Crankworx Video

In relation to my Whistler trip post, I have another post, this time related to the biking aspect. My brother has finished editing a video, that I compressed into XviD/Vorbis/Matroska. You can either dink around with filters for the ultimately crappy Windows Media Player, or you can get VideoLan Client, which will play the video out of the box. You can grab the video off my ftp server here. I would have posted it on something like OurMedia.org, but my brother used a copyrighted song for the background. All the video was taken using my Nikon Coolpix 5900 digital still camera.

The Full/Empty Recycle Bin

I'm trying to clear up some space for the purpose of video editing on my Windows XP Pro machine. The E: drive is my chosen partition for this job, as it has nothing on it except for the raw capture. One problem I was running into was a slight problem of missing 2.4 GB. On a partition that is 24.5 GB, 2.4 GB is a lot of missing real estate. So I made sure that everything was cleared off (except for the raw video), and I mean everything. All the other files were moved to different partitions, the recycle bin was emptied and the system restore points were cleared. Still I'm missing some space. So I ran scandisk and defrag, hoping that would clear up 2.4 GB (a miraculous feat) on this FAT32 partition (I chose FAT32 when installing XP for Linux compatibility reasons). This did not clear up the space, so I converted it to NTFS. I then went directory diving in cmd.exe, deleted a small file from the recycle bin that wasn't showing up in explorer, but that still doesn't get me back my 2.4 GB. Check out the following photo:

Windows Stupidity. Please excuse any Flickr problems, you will need to view the larger size to read the text.

In this photo, on the top left, you can see that the recycle bin is empty, according to the cmd.exe shell command dir. In the bottom left is explorer.exe showing that the recycle bin is empty. On the bottom right we see my explorer settings to show that I am viewing all hidden and system files (I leave my settings like this all the time). Finally, in the top right, we see that the recycle bin is taking up 2.4 GB out of spite for its master. A comparison of the raw video folder with the total partition usage will confirm the 2.4 GB deficit. I know many people wonder why I use Linux, and maybe it's things like this that caused me to switch; Linux just doesn't screw with my head in such evil ways.

Does anybody know any other ways I can get back my hard drive space? I don't want to have to format (raw video is on there, and not enough space on other partitions), but perhaps there are other sneaky things that Windows is doing I don't know about?

Advertising On Adam's Blog?

Yes, it seems that everyone is getting on the Google AdSense bandwagon, and now I am no exception. I'm not actually a fan of advertising, as I usually find it to be intrusive and distracting, with Flash popups and popunders, huge animations, or full page ads that take precious seconds to redirect you to the actual content. But what's wrong with wanting a little money? So I now have an advertisement at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. Statistically, according to Google, this is the worst place to put an advertisement, but that's okay, because I'm not paying for blogspot.com anyways, and I highly doubt this will be a big source of revenue for me. So let me test this out: I've picked the smallest ad size that would fit, and stuck with text-only ads. This should keep the advertisers nice and quiet while you read Adam's blog.

Update: I would also like to point out that most of my readers get this through syndication and aggregators (you should, it saves me a lot of time), which does not have the advertisements, thus the majority of my readers are unaffected. That, and I fixed a spelling mistake.

Canadian Indie Music, Wi-Fi Speed Spray

Not too long ago, a Korean MSN correspondent of mine asked me what Canadian music was like. My favourite band is by far The Beatles, with classical music, soundtrack music, and other forms of 60's and 70's rock holding up the rest of my playlist. I sent the Korean some Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive, but that isn't very representative of current Canadian artists. This is when I realized that I'm not very Canadian in my music listening choices. I don't listen to the radio much (kind of hard considering the esoteric stuff that I listen to), and it seems like most of the big bands I have heard of are from the States or from the UK. The only "current" stuff that I could think to send was Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews Band, and Nickelback, and even those weren't yet sitting on my hard drive at the time. Keeping a Canadian identity is very important for our society, especially with the proximity of the heavy-weight American media, and I decided that I needed to change that. I did some research on Canadian Music over at Wikipedia to get some ideas, and am trying out some of the suggestions from there. Today I found out about the CBC Radio 3 Podcast, and am currently listening to show #2. As a point of interest, Grant Lawrence, the DJ for the podcast, claims that the CBC Radio 3 podcast is the first ever public radio podcast with "pod safe" music, which means that the artists approved their music to be played over the podcast (first show, 30 seconds into it). I'm not going to fact check if it is the first legal music podcast in the world, but it wouldn't surprise me. So go check out the podcast, add it to your syndicator programs and be prepared to get blown away by the Canadian underground!

On another note, I've gone ahead and ordered three boxes of Wi-Fi Speed Spray (in case I should buy a Wi-Fi system in the future), and I would urge all of you to do the same. I mean, how can you go wrong with those equations?!

Back From Whistler

My brother and two of his friends volunteered for the Crankworx Mountain Bike Festival up at Whistler over the past weekend, and I volunteered to drive them up and stay with them (as no other parent was available). We drove up Thursday morning at 5, arriving shortly after 8, and were there until 4 in the evening on Sunday. A good time was had by all, the kids meeting all their heros and me walking around on the hiking trails. I set up a flickr account to post a small set of pictures here. The Lost Lake picture is out of order, making it seem as if the lake is at the top of the mountain, when it is actually at the base. I also didn't post any of the biking pictures, as I'm not into that stuff.

Windows Vista Losing Monad

It looks like yet another feature is being pulled from Windows Vista. This time, the Microsoft Shell (MSH, codename Monad) is the feature being pulled from MS's next operating system. Monad was going to be one of those cool features for geeks, as Microsoft was looking to the unix shells as a model on how to do great things with the command line prompt. Personally, I hated the command line, until I started to use Linux, and then I realized how a real command line is supposed to work. Monad has many great features, and looks like it will be a killer system, in conjunction with the Windows File System (also chopped from Vista). I know that Byron was looking forward to Monad, but it looks like his favourite OS company has let him down yet again ;)

MS is planning on releasing Monad with the server version of Longhorn, due to be released sometime in 2007.

Don't Buy Mitsumi DVD-R Media

In relation to this blog, I would like to suggest that one should never buy Mitsumi DVD-R 4.7GB 4x media. I went back to Futureshop and bought a five pack of Memorex DVD-R 8x, and so far 2 burns out of 2 burns have come out fine. I know that my sample size isn't very large, but 10/10 fails with Mitsumi media and 2/2 passes with Memorex media may be the start of a statistical trend. For both media I burned at half the speed they were rated for.

As for the FFII incident, an update that I got through a Debian blog (who in turn got it from ffii.de, but the link doesn't work for me) was that a DNS hosting company chickened out and removed the ffii.org site after receiving a letter from a Nutzwerk lawyer.

Shaw Assigning Different Subnets

Here's an annoying problem for you: two computers in a house, connected through a hub to Shaw Cable Internet. Now try ftping. I've come across this problem earlier this month, and it's back to haunt me today. As it turns out, Shaw's DHCP servers aren't smart enough to assign the same IP subnet to all computers registering through the same cable modem (I am entitled to two public IP addresses). When I try to transfer files over ftp all communications have to go through Shaw's router because they are on different subnets. This means that all transfers are limited to 50KBps, and the transfers will count against me in my monthly upload/downloads. One way I have found around this is to set IP aliases on both machines, creating my own private network (10.x.x.x). Of course, Windows needs to be rebooted every time you fart, so I have to wait for Kevin to save his game of Rollercoaster Tycoon so that I can restart the machine and get my own private network running in parallel. Oh, and this method seems to break the simple domain names that Shaw uses (like "shawmail" for my pop3/smtp server). Do I fiddle around with my DNS and gateway settings (breaking any hope of proper DHCP), or do I reboot Windows twice every time I want to transfer files? I've emailed Shaw technical, and the guy basically said that IP address allocation is handled by the DHCP server so they have no manual control over it.

FFII.org Shut Down By Nutzwerk

Has the FFII website been shutdown by Nutzwerk GmbH? FFII, the foundation that fights to get rid of software patents, among other legal battles, has apparently been driven into the ground by libel lawsuits filed by Nutzwerk GmbH over the past couple months. Apparently, FFII had posted some documents on their website about a legal win over Nutzwerk, and some of the text was seen as libelous to Nutzwerk (the FFII was badmouthing Nutzwerk). Since April, Nutzwerk has filed 5 court lawsuits, and word has it that ffii.org has been taken down due to financial strain. ffii.org.uk is still up, but has no related information. ffii.de is still up, and has links to two news articles, but these articles are both hosted on wiki.ffii.org, and are thus not available. Google has a cache of the earlier article, but has nothing for the more recent article. You can view a German press release on the Nutzwerk website here. Has Nutzwerk managed to take the ffii.org website off the net? Is the FFII merely trying to get the attention of the community? Has anybody heard anything more?

Babbage Coming Back Up, DVD Burner Problems

My school machine, the 500MHz is coming back into a state of usefulness. I try to do an average of one new program per day, letting it compile over night. Two days ago I got gaim installed, and yesterday was liferea. Today I will be looking around at different word processing programs (OO.org or Abiword or something else?) and I also have to get something for calendaring and todo-listing. Doing 1280x1024 on a 15" screen is also quite different and sometimes hard to see the smaller fonts.

Approximately a month ago I bought a DVD burner. There are so many files on my hard drive that are over 700MB that I would like to burn off, and I also want to convert the two dozen 8mm tapes in our house to DVD video. The burner I ended up buying was the Samsung DVD+-RW 16x DL burner (TSSTcorp TS-H552U) through NCIX for $60+tax. For my first media I bought ten Mitsumi DVD-R 4.7GB 4x discs at Futureshop. As of this morning I have burned all ten discs, and every single one of them has data errors. They aren't complete coasters, but in my mind, they are. I have used Nero 6.6.0.13, Adobe Premiere's built-in burner, DeepBurner, and Cheetah DVD Burner. I think it's safe to say that it isn't the fault of the burning program. I will have to go out to the stores and buy some more media (different brand this time) and try those. If they don't work, I will plunk this drive into the 500MHz Gentoo machine, and see what it can do.

I do hope that I can somehow get this thing to work.

Installing Gentoo

I'm currently installing Gentoo Linux 2005.0 onto the 500MHz that recently crashed. So far I have been through Red Hat 7.3, 8.0, Mandrake 10.0-10.2, and Ubuntu 5.04. I figured it was time to give Gentoo a try. Unlike most other distros, which prepare downloads in pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo does everything from source. For a stage 1 install of the operating system, you first run a live cd, then use the compiler on the live cd to compile the gcc compiler. Quite literally everything on the computer has been compiled by the end user (for a stage 1 install). It is not terribly difficult, as scripts do most of the work for you, and there is a step-by-step handbook available online. I read the first couple pages in the book yesterday, and started the install process this morning. It took me from 8:30 to 11:00 to step through the initial set up phase (that includes about an hour of downloading stages and portage info). I basically read the manual off my Pentium 4 while doing the install on my Pentium 3. At around 11:30 I started my stage 1 compilation, and when they say it takes a long time, they mean it. On my Pentium 3 500MHz with 256MB of RAM, it wasn't until 2:00 that I got a compilation error. Turned out that there was a "bootstrap comparison failure" with the file gcse.o from the gcc package. Googling didn't turn up much, and most of the solutions out there were to do a make clean and then try again. So I changed my compilation options from the very aggressive -O3 optimization scheme to the relatively aggressive -O2, and set it back to work. It is now 5 hours later, and I'm still waiting for it to finish. I've always wondered what it would be like to have an entire operating system compiled specifically for my architecture. No longer will I be using i386 binaries, but instead will have -march=pentium3 -msse -mmmx -mfpmath=sse specifically for my Katmai CPU. It will be exciting. I think I will also try out Fluxbox as my window manager, though I'm whimping out and keeping the GTK and QT libraries around. I hope I can get past stage 2 before I have to go to bed, as stage 3 will probably take a day or two to compile through. Windows XP doesn't seem like such a long install process in comparison!

Babbage Failing

The machine that I had in residence is getting closer and closer to retirement. Today I rebooted it (after 22 days uptime) to switch over to a new kernel I installed a couple days ago. Upon attempting to start, the kernel panicked with the following:
"kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)"
According to Google, this is commonly caused by hard disk drivers not being loaded into the kernel (eg. raid, serial ata, and reiser). Seeing as how I am using ext3 on parallel ATA on a pretty standard motherboard, I think it is highly unlikely that Ubuntu doesn't have my drivers compiled into the kernel. I have been known to have hard drive problems in the past. Put in Ubuntu Live, backed up some stuff, then started playing around to see if I could fix it. I decided to try running Memtest just to see what it would have to say. I've never seen Memtest return an error on my hardware before, but this time I'm looking at around 60 bad memory blocks around the 86MB area of my ram. Judging by NCIX, the going rate for PC133 ram is about 4x that of everything else. It would cost me around $100 to replace the ram in Babbage, while a new computer can be had for around $350. With the unreliability of the whole machine, I'm thinking I should just get something new for September. I will use Babbage until August, and buy a computer then, hoping that new computers come down by a couple price points. My next machine will also be fully researched for Linux compatibility in the hardware.

Sorry for any spelling mistakes, I'm typing on qwerty again.