Archive for: January 2009

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My friends at …

Sometimes, simple is good. And in the ScreenPlay TV Link from iomega, that’s exactly what you have. A simple device that you can hook up to …

Check Point Software, the company that is likely to employ me relatively soon, has announced their Q4 2008 earnings, and they were above analyst expectations. While you can read the press release for …

Yesterday, like many people around the world, I watched the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Unlike many of my friends, I watched it on a regular television. Sure, the CNN/Facebook integration was a cool idea, …

For those of you who don’t visit phoneboy.com directly, you may not have noticed that I changed the site’s tagline to read: Simplifying Network Security, Telecom, Gadgets, and More! Previously, it read VoIP, …

Since Ubuntu was giving me the finger on this old iBook, I decided to try a different distribution. I’ve heard about and been meaning to try OpenSUSE for a while now. Given it supports my vintage PowerPC, I figured it was worth a try.

The first issue I encountered with OpenSUSE 11.1 was that I needed a DVD to do the installation! Since my iBook only has a CD drive, I thought I might be out. However, they have a “mini CD” that downloads everything off the Internet.

The instructions for network installation weren’t very specific, but I was able to figure out what choices to make. The installation process, after the initial load of the installer, was graphical and fairly straightforward. A high-speed Internet connection is definitely recommended since pretty much everything is downloaded–2.5 gigabytes of data!

Or so I thought. I should tell you something at this point that I did something that complicated matters a bit.

A couple years ago, I tried installing Ubuntu on an old Apple iBook G3 I have with only moderate results, as shown in this YouTube video:

While I know that Adobe Flash and AIR won’t ever be supported on the PowerPC chips that run in a lot of the older Macs, the size of this iBook puts it real close to the “netbook” category. Since I don’t see myself spending $400-$500 on a new computer anytime soon, why not try and repurpose one I already have?

My expectations for this PowerPC G3 with 576mb of RAM and 10gb of disk aren’t high. I just want something with a reasonable keyboard that has WiFi and runs a web browser. It’s got all that and the current versions of Ubuntu (8.10 as I write this) will support the wireless (which it didn’t back in 6.06, which was when I took this video), at least in theory. Why not give it a try? Details after the jump.

I really, really like the guys at PhoneNews.com. They post a lot of hard-hitting stories about mobile phone industry. They are also trying to go …

Several years ago, I purchased a domain for our family. Upon doing the prerequisite search, we ultimately settled on a .net name. Not our first choice, but it was what was available.

On 1 January, I got an email from a …

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Today’s been a relative cornucopia of news …