My new favorite science blog is Darren Naish's. He easily beats PZMyers for sheer fascination density: apatosauruses cannot have had front toenails, because they had no front toes; those Texan monster pterosaurs must have fished like storks. For funny, let me direct you to Harry Hutton: "Having testicles is like being chained to the village idiot. Sad, but there it is." My favorite book at the moment is Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail. I've been waiting to read it for more than a year, and it turns out to be easily worth the wait: You know those Norsemen who starved to death in Greenland? Not a single fish scale has ever turned up in any Norse trash midden.
My total take from Google's program to encourage downloading Firefox to replace IE (as implemented by Explorer Destroyer) is up to US$24.20, for 45 conversions.
My brother-in-law contributed an "old" 2.4GHz Shuttle box to replace my mother-in-law's 400MHz VALinux box, which worked OK, but whose disk drive was too noisy, and whose software was ancient Red Hat. I installed Ubuntu pre-6.06. It was a real chore; it froze up quite a few times during installation, I suppose because of CD-ROM read errors, and then failed, absolutely repeatably, to install Grub at the end. Maybe it didn't like installing on an IDE "slave" with no "master" in sight. I had to install and configure Grub by hand.
Then, running, it was notably slower than the old box. An old Matrox G450 in place of the bus-stealing SiS chipset on the motherboard (refreshing 1600x1200 may have been too much for the SiS), and all was well. Actually, not quite: it would freeze when trying to run a GL program overnight (e.g. screen saver!). Replacing the Matrox with a US$50 ATI Radeon 7000 fixed that.
Her printer is an old parallel-port HP-LJ5P, but the Shuttle has no parallel connector on the back. (It has one on the motherboard, but the pin spacing is non-standard.) Curiously, PCI and USB parallel adapters I tried failed in almost the same way: each works fine the first day, but never again despite power cyclings and configuration erasures. To get each print job to come out, she has to hit the reset button on the printer after queuing the job. On the old box that was never necessary, but sometimes it would just quit printing halfway through a page, and then start again at the beginning after power-cycling the printer. That hasn't happened lately. Who knew parallel ports were so mysterious?
Just for curiosity, I tried building and installing the Mach64 DRM kernel module. It made glxgears slightly faster, but made rendering of background images in ppracer intolerably buggy, and, strangely, added from a half to several seconds' delay to X interactions. Now I'm running 2.6.17 without DRI, but with the TI acx-111 driver from Andrew Morton's -mm tree. I wondered why no new version of that driver had showed up at the driver website since the (very buggy) Feb 15 version, until Linux Weekly News spilled the beans.
My Corinex Ethernet-Phoneline Bridges that I got back on warranty replacement (after lightning destroyed them; now they are connected through arrestors, that might even work!) have been failing due to overheating lately. I extracted the PC board from the case of one, and moved it down from near the ceiling; let's see if that helps.
wingo: Congratulations on your cameo in Pixars' new movie Cars.