Update: It seems I totally forgot about taking pictures. The computer did come in last week and I managed to get it all put together and up and running. There were some complications but it all worked ou in the end. I’m extremely satisfied. But I guess I just became more involved than I anticipated, hence the slow update. I might still take some pictures of the final product later, but don’t hold me to it.
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So a couple days ago I finally placed an order for my computer. I ordered all of the parts individually from newegg. This will be my first time putting together a computer myself, and I’m freaking excited. A couple weeks ago, Windows XP on my 2.5-year-old laptop decided to stop working correctly, which was enough incentive to break down and get something new and much nicer. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for more than a year now and it’s finally happening. It’s going to have a huge (to me) 22″ LCD monitor, a GeForce 8800GT video card, 4gb RAM, a massive 640gb hard drive, and blue lights in the case. You might thing it’s excessive, but I wanted to push the limit and get something really nice that will last me a long time. Being my own creation, I wanted something I’d really enjoy, rather than a stock factory-build machine out of a box.

I will continue to use my laptop for school and on trips. Fortunately, all of my documents (music and pictures mainly) are there so I haven’t lost data. I can run a Linux distrobution and everything is peachy.

The monitor and a majority of the components should arrive tomorrow, shipped from a Memphis warehouse. The case and a couple other things should be in Thursday, as they’re being shipped from California. I plan on taking pictures of the building process, and if I do I will be sure to share them here.

Yeah, that was stupid. But it just came to me. Anyway!

I’ve discovered a handy little something called Rockbox, a firmware replacement for mp3 players. Yesterday I took a notion to reorganize the music on my iPod and encountered an impasse when I tried to put some of my .ogg files on it. By default, iPods are only compatible with .mp3 and .aac files (seriously… aac?). I blame Apple, but that’s another story. My Internet searching led me to an interesting solution: replace the default iPod firmware with Rockbox. Firmware is basically a piece of software that is “hard-wired” to a piece of hardware. Your computer’s BIOS menu (which you may or may not have ever seen) is an example of firmware as it is attached to your motherboard. In the case of mp3 players, the firmware is basically the operating system - it is the code that creates and displays the menu, determines how the player responds to button clicks, organizes data, etc. In a nutshell, it’s what you see on the screen. Well, Rockbox is its own firmware that you can load onto any one of a number of various mp3 players. This was the first time i’ve been glad that my iPod Nano is an old 1G (well, maybe the second.. I recall a sense of pride when I noticed how stupid the younger models look.) as when it comes to Nanos, RB only works with 1G (1st Generation). Continue Reading »