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2006-01-18 Gateway all-in-one

OK, picked up a Gateway Profile 400Mhz with 128M RAM, like this one. Booted fine into Windows 98, seems to work. Booted knoppix DVD on it and it seems to have trouble, optical drive trouble. Tried different knoppix CD, no improvement.

Parts are standard laptop stuff so I grabbed a DVDrom from a toshiba laptop, stripped off the toshiba mounts and IDE connection shim, and put the gateway stuff on it. Plonked it in and knoppix booted OK. Upon showing my achievement to a colleague, he grabbed the corner of the still dismantled machine and it went dead. Hmmm. No light, no bios, nothing. At this point I personally declared success because I had fixed what was initially wrong with the thing, but I suspected a warped motherboard had now killed the machine. For some reason he dismantled further. Getting close to fundamentals he tried a last test boot and it worked, hence we remantled piece by piece test booting as we went. Eventually was fully working and all together, change knoppix CD yet again to avoid a big piece of bitrot we dicovered and it works great.

Phew. Now, on the HD was a pile of word docs (homework assigment type stuff) , some porn movies, some music, Napster, Kazaa etc etc. Usual stuff, here are the top 20 domains previous owner got cookies from:

    138 sextracker
     88 go
     83 hitbox
     51 yahoo
     28 aol
     27 advertising
     26 sportsline
     25 co
     24 msn
     22 nj
     22 att
     18 weather
     18 porncity
     17 cnn
     15 gator
     14 porntrack
     13 villanova
     13 lycos
     12 mediaplex
     12 fastclick

Nicely representative I would think. This machine will become some kind of installed art at the hands of the Z dudes or something as it is quite a handy form factor for that.

2006-01-14 Some memory

Some crappo PC100 memory. Big whooppee.

2006-01-14 Loads of Calphalon

A nice batch of the basic Calphalon commercial stuff. These are the style with the plated, slightly crude cast handles. Specifically:

2x 2.5 Qt pots with one lid for such.
1x 1.5 Qt pot, no lid
1x lid for 5 Qt stock pot
1x lid for 8 Qt stock pot
1x 10.5 inch omelet skillet
1x 7.5 inch omelet skillet

Here are two of the pots pretending to be a happy set. These two will be sent off on Tuesday to be warrantied (loss of anodized finish inside...).

And the rest of it in a junkpile-like ensemble. These will be dealt with in due course. The lids we keep as Calphalon send you new lids when ever you return stuff. Finally we now have enough lids!

2006-01-14 Fancy bike

A super fancy Softride Windshear bike. It has loads of gears, fancy wheels, fancy bouncy saddle mount thing, and elbow bars. Missing one quick release skewer but otherwise in pretty fine shape. We may ride this for a while and then sell it or part it out. The mileage computer on the handlebars has 4000+ miles on the clock. No idea why it was discarded, though I talked to the discarder. I did not want to ask him why as he then might have reconsidered tossing it.

2006-01-11 Update - 12inch Omelet skillet

One of two things happened to the 12inch omelet skillet from 2005-10-29, either I got it renewed with the Calphalon lifetime warranty, or I stripped off the remaining nonstick, you judge by the pic what happened:

2006-01-10 Mac Keyboard

After having given away our last Mac full keyboard last week we conveniently found an identical one. Some kind of cosmic conservation of junk law seems to be in operatyion here, must investigate further. It had some form of coffee stain in one corner (compare, the one we just gave away originally had coca cola spilt on it) but when tested it all works fine. Quick clean and it is good as new, see the pic: