While listening to episode 14 of the TuxRadar podcast, they had a not-quite-open ballot question on whether it matters to use free web services versus Free web services. The classic example is the difference between identi.ca and twitter.com

I've had my opinions about Twitter and it's role on the internet for a while as I've listened to folks like Tim O'Reilly tweet about why he uses twitter. Some analysts say because of it's "realtime" features, that it is part of the future of the internet. Most of these analysts though are listed on ...

So I've spent a couple of painful days booted in to 10.4 to rebuild the flac, ogg, vorbis, theora, neon, shout2, gstreamer, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-bad, and gst-plugins-ugly and hoped they would produce a 10.4 safe backend. I must have been a good boy, because they do work on my version of Tiger. While the rest of the world is bravely moving forward with Snow Leopard *evil eye for the Transmission project*, I'm letting y'all squeeze a few more days from these PPC boxes of ours.

There is one huge bug that I haven't gotten ...

Hong Kong has different types of exhibitions focused either on the vendor or the consumer. The big consumer show is the Hong Kong Computer and Communications Expo, which was held 21-24 August 2009 at the HKCEC. Being open to the general public, it tends to be CROWDED. I went on the last day and thankfully didn't wait until the last minute. The last few hours were becoming a mad house as people were out searching for bargains on computer products.

As elsewhere the big push was on items like LCD monitors/TVs, digital TV settop boxes, and netbooks. After ...

So I've done an upgrade to the latest FreeBSD 7.2 amd64 code on the server. In addition I've cleaned out a lot of dust clogging a fan or two and swapped out a 10/100 Intel network card for a 10/100/1000 Buffalo network card (Realtek based). Overpaid on the Buffalo card as I found it cheaper down in Quarry Bay than at the Wan Chai Computer Center.

I found a cheapish TP-Link 5 port desktop gigabit switch at the Hong Kong Computer Expo, so I'm finally taking advantage of the Gigabit port on this ...