Some time ago, over a year ago I think, Abit ran into financial difficulty. I didn’t pay close attention to the details but there seemed to be financial impropriety, market manipulation and so on, or at least allegations of it. There was much fear at the time that Abit was in danger of going under. Recently they took steps to address their financial situation, announced in this press release. The wording is curious – first they describe it as a partnership, but in the small print it’s a merger, and when small companies like Abit merge with big companies, the outcome is often not that good, especially for companies like Abit that produce low volume boutique products. I’m bummed by this. I’ve been using Abit motherboards for at least 6-7 years and have almost completely positive experiences with them. My main gaming rig is using an Abit board right now, in fact, as have all my gaming rigs for years and years. I hope Abit manages to thrive as an independent entity within their new larger corporate parent and continues to produce the high quality performance and features focused products I’ve been buying, and doesn’t get forced into becoming a volume/commodity motherboard producer. There are already plenty of those.

In theory the Gigabyte I-ram is a pretty cool device – mount 4 sticks of ram on a PCI card and attach a sata cable, and viola, you’ve got a solid state hard disk. If you’re careful you could install windows and the swap partition to the thing and see enhanced performance, and at current ram prices you could build a 4GB one for under $400 if you shop carefully. I used to use a similar approach on macintoshs back in the system 7 days and it definitely did increase performance back then. Techreport.com runs the device through a battery of tests and basically conclude that it works though not to the level of performance one would hope for. It’s too bad the thing doesn’t support Sata II and larger ram sizes, but even with its current limitations and $149 price it’s a tempting toy. Who knows, maybe I could use it to speed up the glacial map loading times in Battlefield 2, from the test results at techreport it looks like this thing would help a lot with that.

This has been linked to all over the place, but I’ll mention it today since it just got an update – performancing is a firefox extension that adds a featureful blog authoring tool to the browser. I have been using Ecto for a couple of years but its sorry windows version coupled with the fact that I use so many different computers makes performancing a pretty viable replacement for it, giving me a consistent authoring environment no matter what machine I’m sitting in front of. This is also potentially a useful tool in a campus environment. As usual, free, open source etc etc.

Check out these instructions on Bigblueball.com on how to get google talk configured to be a universal messaging client which will provide access to friends on all the primary messaging networks (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ). I’m hoping Adium on the mac can ultimately avail itself of the same configuration, but until it can I’m sorely tempted to switch over to google talk on the pc so that I get access to their excellent VOIP setup.

If you’ve clicked on my webcam links to the right and you like the popup effect I’m using, you can now install it as a wordpress plugin rather than hacking it into your templates. Check out www.m3nt0r.de‘s site for instructions and the download.

And yes, I’m aware of the stale picture on the office webcam. There was a kernel update for my linux box which broke the webcam drivers. I’m already tired of having to recompile them every time there’s a kernel update – can anyone recommend me a webcam that will work out of the box with ubuntu such that I don’t have to do this every time?

Ever run into trouble getting your router configured? Downloaded some cool application only to discover it doesn’t work because your router is blocking access? Read a ReadMe file for a new application, seen it mention NAT or port forwarding and run screaming from the room? Check out portforward.com, a tremendously helpful site that contains extensive guides on how to configure your router to work with dozens of applications. Guides typically contain tons of screenshots specific to your router model and javascripts that help you figure out what value to put in each field in your router’s configuration forms. If you’ve ever been frustrated by this process in the past, it’s very likely this site will resolve your issues.

If you have a mac and can deal with computer generated speech synthesis, check out books2burn, a utility for OSX that takes text files and turns them into AIFF files you can listen to or transcode to mp3 to tuck on your ipod. Then head over to project gutenberg and grab yourself a classic or two.

So you’ve connected to a linux box, or you’re poking around on OSX, and wondering what the heck /usr, /bin, /etc, /lib and so on are all about. Take a look at the File System Hierarchy site and enlighten yourself. After you’re done you still may find yourself wishing the directory names were more descriptive, but at least you’ll have a better sense of how they’re intended to work, where to find things, and where to install things to.