Oct 22 2008
Foxconn technical support finally came through, and sent me Beta BIOS S02 for the troubled A79A-S. This finally allows memory to run at 1066MHz, albeit with greatly increased timings, well above the speed that the memory is capable of.
Oct 14 2008
The Jetway J7F5M MiniTIX motherboard is yet another entry in the 17x17cm small HTPC/low-powered server market. This particular model runs at 2GHz and features Jetway’s proprietary expansion connector for adding additional network, video, or serial ports. I have a 2xRS232 expansion card on mine, to allow me to fix otherwise broken servers via a serial link – it’s the way of the future 🙂
What impressed me is that options for the expansion board appeared in the BIOS, and without any obvious option-ROM loading sequence as is often seen delaying the boot sequence nowadays (JMicron, I’m looking at you) – I can configure the additional ports along with the rest of the system.
What is unfortunate, then, is that Jetway have broken ACPI DSDT tables, built with Microsoft’s non standards-compliant ASL compiler, installed with their BIOS.
This causes a number of issues, including premature shutdown and standby/resume failures – but luckily these are all fixable!
Oct 12 2008
I don’t have to most successfully history of predicting what Apple might do next – but then, who does?
There’s an interesting discussion on MacRumors about newly-leaked photos (allegedly) showing more details of the machines which will be announced this Tuesday.
Oct 4 2008
Further to the situation documented here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869249, it appears that Foxconn are still shipping motherboards with BIOS which are either intentionally or inadvertently broken under any non-Windows OS.
Oct 3 2008
Having last built a new desktop computer (I do have an ever expanding collection of MiniITX servers, but these don’t count 😉 ) in about 2003, I decided that it was high time to upgrade my 256Mb Athlon 1800+ desktop to something more recent: I was finding that I wasn’t updating my Gentoo Linux installation on the basis that I’d probably be replacing it in the near future, and I really wanted to play a few more interesting recent games such as Bioshock.
Aug 21 2008
Sometimes, you’ve got to love the oft-maligned BBC, such as in today’s news story “Swearing removed from kids’ book” where they somewhat delicately state:
In future editions, the offending word will be altered by one letter and replaced with “twit”.
Verily, I doff my cap to the writer who devised that most excellent turn of phrase.
Many thanks to Richard for laughing heartily when he read the original article
Aug 6 2008
I have a somewhat complex home network setup consisting of seperate 802.11n and 802.11b/g wireless routers, HomePlug AV (which is supposed to present a maximum throughput of 200Mb/s to 100Mb ethernet jacks), and a mixture of gigabit ethernet and fast ethernet devices – but I’ve never actually checked to see how these connection methods differ.
Jul 22 2008
WordPress 1.0 for the iPhone has been released, and I’m using it to write this post. It’s been a little time coming, but it looks pretty fully-featured.
Oct 23 2008
Awesome :)
The 10 year-old in me is hugely impressed 😀
By Stuart • Toys, Video 0