Simon Rules!

I haven’t said anything yet and I’ve already violated two copyrights – oops. Last night I was in Circuit City buying a new TV. I needed a couple of HDMI cables, but declined to buy the “cheap” cables on offer – they were charging $74.95 for 6 feet! The expensive ones (Monster Cables) started at well over $100. What surprised me was that DVI cables (essentially the same thing) cost about $100 in 2004 when using them with TVs was relatively rare, so they have actually gone up in price.

I know better than to spend crazy money on digital cables when I can get certified HDMI cables for $7 online. I actually bought a $100 cable in 2004 and compared it against an equivalent el-cheapo one, and found there to be absolutely no difference. I promptly returned it. The guy in Circuit City claimed that the colours were washed out with the cheapo cables. I told him I was a graphics engineer, and that it is impossible for random bit errors to selectively wash out particular colours in images, but he didn’t believe me.

I’m wondering, do many people actually buy into the belief that if you spend $200 on a power filter, you will actually see the difference? Reducing the mains hum delivered to a good amplifier can be a good thing, but how many people can actually hear that hum to start with? It makes me laugh when I see that people have spent hundreds on these cables when they have those tiny 6 inch high cube speakers and are watching their DVDs in simulated surround because they didn’t know to operate their receiver. Oh well.

PS. Someone told me recently that the cookie monster is on some kind of a diet. Poor bugger.

Two weeks ago I had a realisation that the server I rely on for hosting websites, handling the home security system (future post on that to come) and secure file transfer was running off a 10 year old hard drive. This is what happens when you build Franken-Puter from a bunch of old parts. I opened it up, and sure enough, the assembly date on the hard drive was sometime in 1998. It’s a 10GB drive, which was pretty big (and expensive!) back then. Incidentally, my first computer had a 4MB hard drive. Yes, megabyte. I also disabled a line on the power supply that prevents it from turning on if the voltages are not high enough, which probably wasn’t the best idea. $100 later and I had two of the smallest hard drives I could find (80GB) and a new power supply costing a whopping $12.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the OS to boot from the new drives in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration. On Linux with software RAID, you set up an md (multiple disc) device and add the drives to that, then boot off the new md device instead of directly from one of the drives. The problem, that I found out after many hours, is that Ubuntu Desktop edition cannot boot from md devices due to the md device driver being loaded after the OS starts. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. I had to reformat with Ubuntu Server edition.

I’m happier now that I have a good backup (although it is on site) and that everything is running off a good (though cheap) power supply. Hopefully I’ll get another 10 years out of it!