Following up on the decTOP mini-PC group buy:

My decTOP now sits tucked away in an otherwise-wasted corner of my desk, quietly working as a LAMP server on my LAN. It doesn’t actually serve up pages to the outside world, what with Comcast taking a dim view of people running servers from home. Instead, it lets me play around with Stupid Apache Tricks without the very real risk of me inadvertently wiping out my blog during a bout of temporary stupidity, and, as a consequence, having to beg the techs at my hosting company to clean up my mess for me.

And really, it’s PERFECT for the job.  It’s nearly silent (and once I set up hdparm to spin down the hard drive during idle times, it will be completely silent).  Since it draws only 8 watts, it doesn’t heat up my room like my dual-G5 system. That trivial power draw also means that, should the power go out, my UPS can keep it running for, oh, a decade or so. And by running it headless and doing everything over ssh, I don’t have to add any more peripherals to my already-horrendous clutter.

The only change I’ve made so far was dropping in a 512 MB RAM chip so it can run everything without swapping to disk. I’ll eventually change out the hard drive for something more capacious, but 10 gigs is more than enough space for now. I also went ahead and installed Xfce so I can use the decTOP as a desktop system if the need should arise.

Overall, it was $85 well spent. Recommended.

Wayne Kramer on YouTube. The World’s Largest Tire appears at around 2:45.

I know, I’m not much of a gunblogger these days. Here’s some edged goodness to make up for it.

The item at hand is the notorious Gerber Mark II fighting knife, made famous during the Vietnam War. This particular specimen is a minty example, one of the first of 11,190 knives made in 1981 (according to the production matrix here). I picked it up for something like $35 at a gun show a few years back; the seller didn’t know what he had.

Gerber sold the Mark II as a “Survival Knife” for most of its production life, though it’s completely ill-suited for that job. No, the Mark II is a pure fighting knife, and a remarkably handsome one. Personally, I think it looks even better than its conceptual ancestor, the Fairbairn-Sykes.

Gerber discontinued the Mark II in 2000 and surviving examples aren’t getting any cheaper; Vietnam-era knives, especially, command a serious premium. You can still find some new-old-stock examples occasionally, but be aware that knives made during the last three years of production have inferior, 440A stainless steel blades.

Lebanese med-school student arrested for running around in the park with an AK.

Not many details yet, but it sounds like the guy might have terrorism ties. I know a bunch of people at Wayne State med school; I’ll find out if any of them knew this nut.

Tam, Marko and Kevin all linked to this story about a rather extraordinary suicide in my hometown.

From the details in the story, the guy apparently offed himself here, where they’ve been building a big-box shopping center on the site of the old V.A. hospital.  That’s on the extreme northern edge of town, about three miles from my childhood home on the south side.

Well, Allen Park now has a second claim to fame, the first being the World’s Largest Tire. And having grown up there, I can see how death by guillotine would hold some appeal.

Via Rustmeister, confirmation that I live in the most dangerous metropolitan area in America. Go Team!

… when you blow off your Networking homework because you’re too busy setting up your own local DNS server.

But hey, ssh iggy is soooo much cooler than ssh 192.168.1.5, right?

I’ve been swamped the past two days with school stuff, side projects and veterinary issues (came home last night to find The Unforgiving Puppy hobbling around on feet the size of softballs), so blogging hasn’t been a priority. I’ve also been working on some things that will be published elsewhere under my own name instead of appearing here.

Anyways, here’s today’s comput0r tip:

What with just about every website incorporating Flash these days, it’s almost mandatory to have the Flash Player plugin installed in your web browser. I bet you didn’t realize, though, that the plugin can, as Wikipedia puts it, “silently compromise its users’ internet privacy, and do so without their knowledge.”

It gets even better, though. While you can change some settings to better protect yourself, you can’t do so without going to a special page on Adobe’s website. And Adobe doesn’t exactly go out of its way to let you know about that page.

So I’d urge you to take a minute to go here and review your Flash plugin settings. You might be a bit unhappy with what you see. Be sure to let Adobe know.

What can I say, I’m a procrastinator. It’s almost 10 on Sunday night and I’m just now doing the Weekend Hotness. Next up: homework for tomorrow!

Here’s Alicia Witt. I’ve been on a redhead kick lately.