Dell’s Studio Hybrid

I spotted these on Dell’s site earlier today. I think they look great: they’re just the right size to snuggle on one corner of your desk, are aesthetically pleasing (except for the bamboo one), and apparently don’t use a great deal of energy.

I bet they’d make a nice Hackintosh alternative to the Mac Mini, or a decent home server. I’d like to suggest they’d make a good Media Center machine too, but I’ve had trouble getting the integrated Intel 3100 graphics to play nicely before (largely overscan related, tbh, so YMMV).

So, anyone at Dell want to send me one to review? No? Curses.

Anyway, link!

Dell Studio Hybrid Desktop Details.

Building PCs and Ritual Bloodletting

It seems that all I’ve done over the last few days is build computers.

I upgraded my Dad’s, which is always fun. By fun I mean a journey into the depths of despair and beyond, because inevitably it won’t work. Although it seems that we always manage to figure it out in the end. For example, the XFX Nvidia 650i Ultra board we used for the upgrade came with its CMOS jumper set to clear. That threw me for most of the evening; I haven’t seen a board with CMOS jumpers in ages.

I left the house in a cheerful mood, because everything seemed to be well and good. Until today, this is, because the machine died this morning. So, a new motherboard has been ordered, and I’ll fit that tomorrow.

Then at work I built my new workstation machine, because that’s significantly quicker than waiting for Dell to get their finger out and ship a similar spec. Fitting the Abit P35 Pro motherboard into the Arctic Cooling Silentium T1 Pro case was a bit of a nightmare, and I had to forego their clever velcro hard drive fastening mechanism in favour of the old fashioned drive-bay approach, because the motherboard’s power connector was in the way.

Still, it’s a lovely bit of kit, and seems to be suitably speedy. And my Asus MW221U screen is lurvely.

Then I come home, and I have to swap out my dead Fatal1ty F-I90HD board for the Asus I liberated from my Dad’s machine pre-upgrade. I should probably have seen it coming with a name like Fatal1ty, but the VGA port died, and then the whole thing decided not to boot. So, back to Ebuyer it goes, and I’m happy with the well tested Asus board.

During the extraction of the Fatal1ty, I gouged a large chunk out of my finger. Not on the case, incidentally, but on the blanking plate for the motherboard (you know, the one with all the holes on). And it struck me that, maybe, you have to have a good bleed into a case before the thing will actually run correctly. A little ritual bloodletting during construction hopefully means your PC will lead a stable and happy existence.

Maybe I’ll bleed into Dad’s machine when I have another go at it tomorrow.

Zooomr Update

Things are starting to look better for Kris Tate and Thomas Hawk, the unfortunate souls behind Zooomr.

As I’ve written before, things went a bit pear shaped for them earlier this week, and after a fifteen minute launch, their server died. Which might not seem like such a big deal, until you realise that it meant that all Zooomr hosted images went offline. Prior to the database crash, even though Zooomr was offline, the static images were still being served.

Happily, the images are now back online. Which is reason enough for me to repost the hideous picture of me in the cooler bag.

According to reports from the Zooomr.tv chatroom, Dell flew some parts out to fix the ailing database server. In addition to that, Sun have loaned the guys a monster machine to support the increased demand that’s sure to come their way when the site does launch. And Zoho have given them some rack space in which to keep the server.

However, it sounds like the new monster actually consumes roughly the same amount of power as a small third-world country, and the Zoho hosting facility wasn’t geared up for that. This could be nonsense, of course, but it’s the impression I’m getting from the chat. It looks like the final hurdle, for now, will be to get power to the new uber-server, and relaunch Zooomr Mark 3.

Kudos to Kris for continuing to broadcast the Zooomr.tv feed, even while the guys from Sun were installing the new server. His composure and attitude in the face of everything that’s going on is quite inspirational. You can say what you like about their business plan, the downtime, and the future; but you can’t fault the manner in which the two of them are conducting themselves throughout all of this.

Oh, and apparently their blog has died, which would explain the lack of updates in the last couple of days. The priority at the moment is fixing Zooomr, not the blog, which is fair enough really. That said, if either of the guys read this, Twitter is your friend. If the blog’s down, create a Zooomr Twitter account, and throw some javascript onto the holding page at beta.zooomr.com to display the most recent Twitter: instant mini-blog.

Zooomr should be back really soon; as I said, things are looking up.