It's another payday, and I had planned on buying more parts for the Shuttle. My big plan is to complete this thing on IN-come rather than IF-come, that means buying without resorting to anyone's easy payment plan. -Best laid plans and all that.

A little historical interlude. Up until this morning, I had DSL service to my home. It was low speed, expensive, and pretty much the only game in town. It also required me to have a copper line hardwire phone, whether I wanted or not, and whether I used it or not. I didn't want it, nor did I ever use it.

Finally, we have a viable choice.
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I've been reading about Linux Journal's Ultimate Linux Boxes (ULB) for years, and to get right down to it, there is no way I can budget the cost of their idea of an Ultimate Linux Box. Additionally, it's been about 9 years since I put together a computer for my home LAN. So, I think it's far past time for me to build my idea of my own ULB. I'll define that as a system which has more computing power than I expect to even come close to taxing over the next five to seven years. Oh, and it also has to be able to do 'wobbly windows', since that's a critical aspect of modern GUI design.

The way I plan to build this system is to buy a few parts each payday, and put it together over time. While I could buy everything at the same time and put it on a credit card, I'd rather buy it without resorting to the credit card.
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I recently picked up "Firefly, The Complete Series", and would like to enjoy viewing it on my newly recycled laptop. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 2650, with a copy of the KDE Live version of Fedora installed on the harddrive. I'm doing my best to add capabilities in a GUI manner, even though I personally much prefer a terminal window and a command prompt.

Placing a Firefly DVD in the drive, after a moment, the 'what do you want me to do with this?' window popped up. Fedora Live KDE version installs player Kaffeine, so I'm going to be working with Kaffeine. I pick play with Kaffeine, a short banner appears, and then Kaffeine dies, being unable to read the DVD. No shiny yet.
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This is a kind of part 2 to my Fedora and YouTube, Part 1, but in reality, it should work with most distributions. So now I can go to YouTube, and listen to jazz selections like this, but what if I want to hear them again? How about if I'm travelling, and I don't have easy access to the web? FireFox has a number of add-in modules to assist with capturing video to the hard drive, but really, it's already there. All it takes is knowing where it is, and what it looks like.
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On a fresh install, neither Konqueror, nor Firefox will play content from YouTube. Fedora and Redhat's take on patents and licensing issues seems to be rather than risk stepping on thin ice, they'll avoid going out on the lake at all. Me, I'll take a stroll on the lake and trust I'm aware enough not to fall through the ice.
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For my first ever wine review, I've chosen Sundown, a blush table wine by Mission Mountain Winery, located on Flathead Lake in Western Montana.

Sundown is a blend of grapes from Yakima, Washington and Montana. It's comparable to a White Zinfandel, though somewhat sweeter. I think the color is more of a peach, than a rose, and does remind me a bit of the sunset colors in Big Sky country.
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Live CDs allow you to test drive a distribution before actually installing it to your hard drive. Booting and running from the CD, or DVD lets you see what works, and what doesn't work when it's coupled with your specific hardware. Something may still not work until you've installed, and have the opportunity to modify a configuration, or install a driver, but a Live CD gives you a good quick look at how things are going to go.
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I was recently gifted a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop. The poor thing had been replaced, and was living in the back of a closet for the last year or so. I think that's unfortunate, since it was quite the machine when it was new in January of 2003. With the installation of Fedora 8, I think it can still be quite the machine.

As shipped, it has:
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• 1.7 GHz, 512K, Pentium 4
• 256 Megs of memory
• Read only DVD drive
• Floppy drive
• 20 GB Hard drive
• ethernet port, modem port, two USB1 ports