I once was on my merry way to becoming a real Apple fanboy, but for several reasons I’ve turned into an Apple skeptic instead: I don’t like the closed Apple App Store ecosystem where you are at their mercy at all times, Apple’s quest to sue anyone and everything, the annoying fact that my iPhone got slower and slower with every update (with my Android phone it’s the other way around, for some reason) and how Apple reseller Humac handled my laptop battery issues. But the thing that grinds my gears the most when it comes to Apple are the Apple users themselves. A lot of you them develop an amazing tunnel vision: Apple products have no flaws whatsoever, and all other competing products are crap. Period. I’m even seeing this a lot amongst my industry peers, people who you’d expect would be open to the idea that Apple is not the only way to go. And it’s not. I’ve been on the other side of the fence, in many ways the grass is actually greener there.

That said, Apple do make some great hardware – when workers at the Foxconn factories are not busy throwing themselves off the factory roof. And the piece of hardware they’ve really hit a home run with is the keyboard. I’ve burned through quite a lot of keyboards in my time and the Apple keyboard is without doubt the best I’ve ever used. It’s responsive, the button layout is well thought through and it doesn’t make a lot of noise – I’m a heavy hitter when it comes to typing, much to the annoyance of people around me.

I think it’s important to break out of the tunnel vision. It’s not all about Apple or Android or Intel or Google or any other big brand for that matter. Take a look around, be a bit open minded. Maybe you’ll discover that there are some pretty great stuff outside of your technological comfort zone.

Anyway.

After I installed the new ASUS AT5IONT-I the average load on the VBOX almost doubled for some mysterious reason. Mysterious because the new CPU packs an extra 200MHz, and the average load should, if anything, decrease.

To handle this I’ve installed WP Super Cache for WordPress. With the plugin enabled, the site will serve static files instead of using the PHP engine to generate the page on every request. The pages load a lot quicker now and the average load should drop quite a lot. The one-liners on the top of every page won’t update on every request and the views count won’t display correctly, but with the speed increase it’s worth it.

Now all I need to do is to write an entry that hits the Reddit or Digg front page and I’ll really get to test the cache configuration. Good luck with that, eh?

I found a really nice 50mm fan from Fractal Design. At 19 dBA I didn’t think it would be too noisy, but when it’s running at full speed it does sound a little like a plane is taking off in the living room. So there I was, with a heat problem once again. The original ZOTAC ION ITX F was supposed to be working without a fan, but got too hot. Now the new motherboard had the same problem and the fan that was supposed to be quiet wasn’t.

That’s when I found this – the Zalman Fan Mate 2, an excellent three pin fan controller. Price? 4 US dollars. Now the fan is running at 1600 RPM, just fast enough to keep the CPU cool-ish, and just slow enough to stay quiet. I have no idea why I didn’t think of looking for a fan controller before – instead of throwing 340 dollars out the window for the new motherboard, I could have spent 4 dollars on the fan controller.

Well, that was pretty damn stupid. But now I have a spare motherboard, if nothing else.

There is, however, a slight problem: The CPU is ridiculously hot without the chassis fan connected. Right now the temperature is 82 degrees centigrade and the load on the server (requests per second to Apache and MySQL) is about average. The maximum temperature for the CPU is 100 degrees, so there is still some slack before things turn from hot to meltdown. What will happen when the CPU really has to do some work? I did a few tests, and that’s when it started to get interesting.

Hallvard, Terje and myself have been using vbox-host as a Counter-Strike: Source server lately, adding a few bots and playing the odd half-hour game. The Source server is not multithreaded and hogs only one of the four CPU cores, and with 10 to 12 bots, the core is running at full speed. Interestingly enough, the CPU temperature only increased by about 2 degrees with all the bot slots full and the core completely occupied with moving them around. I honestly thought the CPU would get close to the critical temperature with the core under full load.

This means that, in theory – and maybe even in practice – the server should be able to tag along happily without any fans cooling the CPU. Running too hot will decrease the life time of the CPU, but after reading the D500 series data sheet from Intel, it looks like 82 degrees centigrade is well within the acceptable limits. As long as the temperature does not exceed 100 degrees, Intel says that there will be no damage to the CPU. If it goes beyond that, however, there is no telling what might happen, and at 125 degrees, the CPU will automatically shut down.

So, there you have it – I’ll let the chassis fan stay disconnected for a while and reconnect it if strange things begin to happen.

Since the server is in the living room, I really wanted to keep the it as quiet as possible. Ideally not making any noise at all. That’s why I got SSD disks and a ZOTAC ION ITX F series motherboard when I built it. Unfortunately, the heat sink on the motherboard was not good enough and I had to add a chassis fan to prevent the CPU from melting. Sure, the fan doesn’t make much sound, but the goal was to get the server completely silent.

Now a new option has surfaced: The ASUS AT5IONT-I. It’s got a huge heat sink and adds an extra 200MHz of horse power compared to the ZOTAC. I ordered the board and memory chips on Monday, and everything arrived yesterday. Gotta love Dustin. But of course there are some problems now as well…

The memory chips I ordered are not compatible with the ASUS motherboard – it’s very picky when it comes to RAM it allows you to install. Let me put it this way: The motherboard has 2 DIMM slots and supports a maximum of 4GB of RAM – 2GB in each slot. Now, the issue is that the first version of the BIOS only officially supports one single model of 2GB memory chips. Naturally, I had not bought that exact brand.

But there is light in the horizon. The latest version of the BIOS supports the chips I bought. The problem? The motherboard doesn’t boot with the chips I have now and I need to boot it to upgrade the BIOS. Neither does it boot without any chips installed. A classic chicken and egg problem right there. The bottom line? I’ve now got to buy a 1GB chip that’s officially supported just to be able to upgrade the BIOS.

Thank you, ASUS! What the hell were you thinking? One single supported 2GB chip!?

The 1000HE is a 10″ netbook with the latest Intel Atom N280 processor, 1GB (can be replaced with 2GB if necessary) of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and all the other bells and whistles you’d expect from a computer these days.

The netbook comes with Windows XP Home Edition installed and that works well. The N280 isn’t a power horse, though, and it will start to struggle a little when you open Flash-intensive sites, like online newspapers tend to be. I didn’t test video, but some reviews I’ve read say that most video formats should work OK, except for 1080p HD video where it’s likely that you will experience some frame dropping.

A major selling point for the 1000HE is the advertised battery life of 9.5 hours. I’m not really sure if 9.5 is realistic, mainly because I’ve not had the computer turned on for that long yet. But since I started using it on Saturday, I’ve only plugged in the charger once. The 9.5 hours of battery life are also dependent on how good the power saving features of the operating system is and I’ve installed Ubuntu in favor of XP. According to what I’ve read on the all-knowing interweb, battery usage with Ubuntu tends to be higher than when using XP. But if I’m able to use the 1000HE for at least 8 hours straight at normal use without the need for an external power source, that’s more than enough for me.

Some people have problems with netbooks because they tend to have rather small keyboards. So far I’ve not had any issues with the 1000HE’s keyboard, but I’ve got small girly hands, so that might be the reason why it didn’t take long adjust my writing style to it. Noise, or rather the lack of, is important to many people. As for fan noise, the 1000HE is very quiet under normal use, the fan is almost impossible to hear. I’ve not tried to run CPU intensive operations to really get it going, though.

At 1.45Kg (3.20lbs) and with the dimensions of 266mm (W) x 191.2mm (D) x 28.5mm~ 38mm (H), the netbook should be quite portable. Exactly how portable I don’t know, because I haven’t brought it with me outside of the apartment yet. But it’s portable enough to be used when laying on the couch and sitting by the dinner table. Like most laptops are, too, I guess.

Of course there are a couple of things that could have been better, but I suspect that they are related to me using Linux and not XP. Flash, for instance is a nightmare, at least Flash video streaming. Even though the CPU load is not too high, there is a constant audio/video sync problem and that makes Flash video more or less useless. The built in web camera also struggles in Linux, with a crappy frame rate. In XP it worked much better. The final thing that is not working very well on Linux is the audio level. Even at maximum volume, the audio from the speakers is hard to hear in a semi-noisy environment, like when the TV is on. It was a little better when using headphones.

But all in all, the Asus Eee PC 1000HE is a great choice if you’re looking for an ultra-portable computer for basic everyday nerd tasks.

Then why am I’m referring to the sun? The reason why I’m rambling on about the sun is that yesterday we saw the first real hot summer day here in Oslo – at least the first one I’ve noticed. Despite being a nerd, I like the sun – since it’s one of the main reason we’re able to stay alive and stuff – so I took the opportunity to take a walk downtown to buy something we all need from time to time: New socks. Exciting!

But I also spent a little money on a little something I’ve been meaning to get for a long, long time. Over the three last years, I’ve been slowly buying speakers for my 5.1 surround system. First two great Dali Blue 5005 front speakers, then two budget Proson rear speakers, a Dali Concept Center and now my surround system is finally complete with a marvelous Dali Concept Sub. It’s really a great piece of Danish engineering – you can’t really tell it’s there until you turn it off and a lot of the dynamics in the sound suddenly disappears. It’s present in the audio without dominating it, but it’s still able to deliver that extra “omph” when necessary.

No, I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I like to pretend I do.

This is what you’ll get:

• Xbox 360 console with 20GB harddrive, wireless controller, headset with microphone and all the cables you need to hook the console up to your TV and stereo.
• Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel with force feedback. Supports both the Xbox and the PC platform.
• Xbox 360 Memory Unit (64 MB)
• Xbox 360 Quick Charge Kit with one rechargeable battery that’ll fit in both the racing wheel and the wireless controller.

You’ll also get these 14 high quality games:

• Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock (with guitar – this game is bought at Platekompaniet and still sealed, so you can go to the store and exchange it for something else if you want to).
• Battlefield 2 Modern Combat
• Need for Speed ProStreet
• Need for Speed Carbon
• Kane & Lynch Dead Men
• NASCAR 08
• Test Drive Unlimited
• Project Gotham Racing 3
• Project Gotham Racing 4
• Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars
• Saints Row
• Forza 2 Motorsport
• Colin McRae Dirt
• The Orange Box

All this is yours for a mere 6995 NOK! That’s over 500 NOK off the price I’m advertising elsewhere on the interweb. Why? Special price for you, my friend.

Because of the size of the bundle it’s preferable that you can come pick up everything in the Oslo area, but I can of course ship worldwide at the buyer’s expense.

Grab it now before it’s too late!

There is one challenge left, though: Because of the fuse box right next to the router, quite a lot of network capacity is lost because of interference. In the living room the download speed ranges from 3 to 5 megabits per second – it doesn’t matter if I connect to the wireless repeater in the living room or the router in the hallway – right next to the router in the hallway the download speed is between 10 and 13 megabits per second.

Right now I consider it a small annoyance because what matters is that I have a wireless repeater bridge that works. It might be possible to move the router so that the fuse box is not interfering that much with the signal and it might even be some tweaks I can activate in the dd-wrt firmware that will help.

Since I struggled for so long to get it to work, the remainder of this post will contain a guide of sorts on how you can set up a wireless repeater bridge yourself. Yes, it’s going to be technical.

What is a wireless repeater bridge anyway? It’s a setup that will enable you to expand a wireless network, allowing wireless clients to connect to all access points you use to expand the network and at the same time allowing ethernet clients to connect to the ethernet ports of the access points if any.

Consider the following network “diagram” that shows what a wireless repeater bridge can do for you:

internet <---> router <-------------> repeater <---> Xbox
              (hallway)             (living room)
                /|\                     /|\
                 |                       |
          wireless client           wireless client

Personally I had two devices in the living room without a wireless network card and setting one of them up with a wireless network card with WPA encryption would be a lot of work. The devices is the VBOX, a Debian Mini-ITX box with no PCI slot and I can only imagine how much work it would be to get a USB dongle wireless network device to work properly with WPA encryption. I’ve tried in Ubuntu and it was a total nightmare I never really recovered from.

I had two devices I wanted to use for the new network setup, a Linksys WRT54GL and a Linksys WAP54G. Linksys will tell you that you can set up a wireless repeater bridge with these two devices, but don’t get fooled: You will not be able to set up a wireless repeater bridge with any encryption that matters. WPA personal will not work, for instance, so in terms of network security, they’re useless.

But with dd-wrt installed, they are just what you want. From this point on, I will assume that you have two devices with dd-wrt version 2.4 RC3. I will not tell you how to install dd-wrt because there is plenty of detailed information on the dd-wrt site that tells you how to do that. If you are using another version than 2.4 RC3 on your devices, you might also be able to use the below configuration, but you’re on your own. I also assume that you are able to connect to and log in to both of them.

If you see a setting that is not listed, leave it at its default value. Sometimes the value listed below might be the default value. Whenever you are done with the settings on a page, click “Apply Settings”. This will save the settings and apply them. Some of the changes might cause the device to reboot.

On the wireless router, in my case the Linksys WRT54GL, use the following configuration.

Setup -> Basic Setup:

Local IP Adress: 192.168.1.1

DHCP Server: Enable

Wireless -> Basic Settings

Wireless mode: AP

Wireless Network Name (SSID): A name identifying your network, for instance “wireless1″ (without the quotes of course).

Wireless -> Wireless Security

Security Mode: WPA Personal

WPA Algorithms: TKIP+AES

WPA Shared Key: The long password you can think of and remember

The wireless security settings are really something you should decide on yourself, the above are only recommendations. But make sure you secure your network with something safer than WEP.

On the wireless repeater side, in my case a Linksys WAP54G, use the following configuration:

Setup -> Basic Setup

Local IP Address: 192.168.1.2

Wireless -> Basic Settings

Wireless Mode: Repeater Bridge

Wireless Network Name: The same one as you used on the router, in our case “wireless1″ (once again without the quotes).

Wireless -> Wireless Security

Use exactly the same wireless security settings as you used on the router.

Now, here’s the trick that I missed out on that kept me having problems for a long time. To get the router and the repeater to communicate, you have to do the following on the repeater:

Security -> Firewall

SPI Firewall: Disable

And that should be it, your wireless repeater bridge should now be up and running. You should be able to connect to the wireless network using the SSID and the network encryption you used in the above configuration.

Good luck! I suspect you’ll need it.

Because of that, I have not been able to run at all since Tuesday, meaning that I have to run four days in a row now to make up for lost time. It’s probably not very efficient exercise since it won’t allow any days off for restitution, but I still feel I have to do it to keep my promise to myself to run every other day.

This weekend I have to get the Linksys mess in order or both VBOX and the Xbox 360 goes offline. Good luck to me. If i fail again, perhaps I’ll just have to put the money on the counter for a D-Link setup instead. I certainly hope not, because the Linksys equipment set me back enough.