The ebb and flow

Lots of changes are afoot in this tiny corner of the planet, which accounts in part for the silence over the past few days.

First of all, one of the computers I was expecting to inherit has arrived on my doorstep. I can properly introduce the NEC VersaPro VY22X/RX-M, or just vy22x, as I like to call it.

This is the 2.2Ghz Celeron I mentioned oh-so-many times over the past year or two. It’s not at all a bad computer — ATI graphics, 512Mb and more is possible, 1024×768 in a nice big size. …

It’s of very similar dimensions and specifications as the Toshiba, although it is obviously a completely different computer.

The hard drive is another ancient creaking wheel though — 20Gb 4200rpm, the omnipresent Hitachi MK2023GAS I keep finding — and will be the first thing to go.

The chassis needs a cleaning, and the previous owner liked to slather stickers on everything in the house. So I’ll need to scrape away some glue and goo.

Otherwise it’s in pretty good shape, and should be fun to experiment with.

But where there is an ebb, there must be a flow … so the 120Mhz and 133Mhz Fujitsu laptops are out of the house now, having moved on to a new owner.

It felt a little sad to see them go — particularly the slower of the two, given as many adventures as I had with it.

I was tempted to convert one or the other into some sort of photo frame or wall clock, but their value was in their completeness and good condition, not their Frankenstein factor.

I did not, however, include the CF cards. Those I intend to use in future machines.

I should also mention, though it’s a lesser point, that I’ve moved everything back to Arch Linux on the fastest machine.

That noisy romp through the Ubuntu betas was instructive, but not particularly productive. It was nice to see how some of those distros do things, but it reinforced where my preferences lie.

So all of this means there needs to be a few updates around this site. A couple of machines are new, a couple more are gone … life goes on. 🙂