- Things are springing to life again around here, but it’s still too early to start on yard work. I’m thinking that the first week of April might be time for me to start raking and such outside. I do need to move the hop plant outside soon, though. It’s already got stalks that are about 2 feet long and it threatens to take over my kitchen. [press-patch]
- Here’s something claiming to be The Canonical List of Weird Band Names. Since I don’t see Ass Hammer on the list, I don’t think it’s canonical, but it’s still a pretty funny list. [boing boing]
- Says here TiVo Will Die. I think their deal with DirecTV is pretty good, but I agree that the expense of the HDTiVo is way too high. But I think that the HDTiVo will come down rapidly in price if you get a version bundled with DirecTV service. Besides, I’m a complete TiVo addict. [slashdot]
- John Gruber’s Markdown is a tool for writing plainish-text and having it auto-converted to XHTML. It’s got a lot of similarities to the text conversion I do around here, which is based on the stuff Dan hooked up over at Flutterby and Dean put in textile. I don’t have any real strong preferences, but I’m most comfortable with that I’m using now (not surprisingly). I just wish all these different variants would converge to a standard. [boing boing]
And that leads into some news on the hardware front. Yesterday afternoon I ran down to General Nanosystems and bought all the parts to make a new server out of a Shuttle SN41G2. It’s a sweet little box, and can even do TV-out. I plan on using it as a "tepid-swappable" server replacement. That is, it’ll be at home, on a separate network, but configured essesntially the same as the server that runs Dave’s Picks. Once I get all the software configured to my satisfaction, I’ll swap it into place for the existing server, and then upgrade that to newer software.
One of the things I find myself needing again is a cheap, small monitor to hook up to a computer like this while I’m doing OS installs. It doesn’t need to be much, since I just need 80×25 text-mode on a VGA-compatible monitor, and I used to have a 9" black-and-white monitor for that, but when I moved, I threw that away, rather than moving it. D’Oh! I could probably buy another for $25, but what I’d really like is a tiny (9″ or smaller) LCD monitor that I can use just long enough to install an OS from a CD that wouldn’t require much storage space for the other 11 months of the year when I don’t need it. Monochrome would be fine. The Datalux LMV10 looks like one possible solution, and they seem to be going for cheap enough on eBay, but if anyone out there has an idea of other solutions, I’d like to hear about ’em.
How is this related to Markdown? Well, I’m looking at installing some blogging software as part of the server-swap, and keep looking at various systems. I’ll probably try a few before actually making the new server live, but the current front-runners are textpattern and b2++. I need to determine how each works in a chrooted apache configuration before I decide for sure, but since I know that Movable Type can run chrooted, that gives me a fallback position.