Adventures with Computers
Archive for May 2006
Yesterday I had a nice dinner at Mikkel’s new place, but unlike Rune I have no pictures to show of it…
Thomas handled the meat, Rune chopped the vegetables, and lille-Lars and I watched in exitement as the ingredients for our burgers were made ready. It was some top-notch burgers! Mikkel was busy unwrapping his new fancy-pancy square Chinese-style dishes.
I’m about to take off on my journey to Switzerland. I’ll drive down to Hamburg to catch the DB Autozug, and then drive the last bit from just north of Switzerland down to the Alps.
I’ll return in a about a week and Stéphanie will return with me! I’m looking forward to really moving in with her in our new appartment. More about that later, see you!
Stéphanie will move up here in less than two weeks time, so we’ve started looking for a new PC for her. It’s easier to buy a new than transporting the old one from Switzerland to Denmark.
Because we want to be cool and hip we’re looking for a SFF PC, a so-called small form factor PC. It’s those nice little boxes pioneered by Shuttle (they apparently call them XPC now). The system will not be used for games, but for office work, photo editing, etc. I’m thinking something like this:
SSF: Shuttle SD11G5 — 3,500 DKK ($600). This box includes a motherboard with integrated graphics card and a sound card.
CPU: Pentium M 730 1.6 GHz — 900 DKK ($155). Nice ultra-cool CPU that consumes a maximum of 27W under full load. It should be fairly fast too.
RAM: 2 GiB Dual DDR II SDRAM — 1,000 DKK ($170). I don’t care so much about the brand, but Stéphanie says that size matters :-)
HDD: Samsung SpinPoint P120 SP2514N 250 GB — 600 DKK ($100). I have two of these already and I’m quite satisfied with them. Silent PC Review recommends them too for their quiet operation.
DVD: Burner for ±RW — 300 DKK ($50). Again I don’t really care as long as it can read and write on all the silly plus and minus formats.
LCD: Samsung SyncMaster 204B — 4,000 DKK ($685). I hope this is a good 20 inch LCD monitor… I think it looks good and I’ve read positive comments about it, but I would very much like your input on this! So please leave a comment if you have any experience with this monitor or know about another good monitor in the same price range.
Please note how I managed to find three letter acronyms for all the components :-)
If you know of other good SFF systems then let me know! I like the Pentium M based system because it is low noise (when the computer has to be right there on the table it has to be quiet). But maybe this isn’t necessary? Tell us what you think.
I visited Svend today at my old dormitory, [Skejbygård][]. This was to retrieve a table plate I had stored there while I was in Switzerland. I was glad to see that it was still in good shape.
But that was not the most interesting thing I saw there — Svend showed me a video about Second Life which looked really facinating. I have never seen something like this! Second Life is a vast online world where anybody can join and live, well…, a second virtual life.
To make this interesting, everybody can develop their own stuff. What is different from other such places is that you own your creations, and so you can start selling them to others. You can build 3D objects and script their behaviour, so people have created anything from moon rockets (that launch up into the air with flames and all…) to guns to artificially intelligent clown fish (think Nemo…).
There are now more than 200,000 residents in Second Life, and they are trading those virtual items like mad — a certain anshe Chung currently holds virtual land for some 250,000 US dollars! They explain in the movie how a software developer in some poor country makes half of his income in Second Life…
This whole idea is crazy and fantastic at the same time! :-) It will be very interesting to see where this leads…