RARGH week

Work = dreadful, and I'm doing more overtime tomorrow morning, which I really don't want to do. Oh well.

Decided the Latitude D400 has got a bit past it when it comes to running as my MP3 player as I wanted to try playing video from a machine attached to the 23" monitor I use instead of a TV. The D400 does have DVI via the dock but it just hasn't got the graphics poke to play any meaningful form of video.

So the cunning plan is replace it with a HP DV7-1103ea laptop bought with Ebay proceeds. It's a big fat thing with gobbets of tasteless chrome and white LEDs, a 17" screen, a dual-core Turion, 4gb RAM, 250gb hard drive and, most importantly, a Bluray drive. The idea is to get a HDMI to DVI adapter to hook it up to the screen and some sort of digital audio connection to the surround amp. The second part was to stick a spare second 250gb hard drive in it (dual bays rule) and set up a VirtualBox machine on it to replace the FreeNAS VM on the Atom server, which I can then get rid of. The Atom machine hasn't been used for much beyond that as the 7741g can do virtualisation much faster.

So far the HP is working OK. It's missing the battery, the case is a little battered and the screen is a bit dim, but none of those matter for what it will be used for. I've rebuilt it with a fresh install of Windows 7 and it plays Blurays quite happily. The VirtualBox and FreeNAS setup went fine with the only real issue being that file transfers to it are rather slower than to the ESXi VM, even though the HP is using gigabit. Not sure why, but perhaps VirtualBox only emulates a 100mb network card. Shouldn't matter too much though.

The HP is running a little hot, but I know Turions tend to anyway from my experiences with the Acer 5535, so it might be normal, and getting at the CPU to clean out and regunk the heatsink might be a pain from what I read. When I played a Bluray, it stayed quite cool as I think most of the work is done by the graphics chip.

Went to the gym twice, did a good walk, and played badminton all this week, so I'm feeling good about that, but less good about the fairly poor diet. But never mind. Tomorrow is bound to be bad, as it's Maz's birthday meal in the new Asia restaurant in Denbigh. I've had a takeaway from there and it was great, so I'm really looking forward to that. Also going to order new glasses, get a haircut (first time in ages) and go to the gym.

Still can't summon up the courage to run on a treadmill. I'm happy enough walking on one, but I'm scared of running on it. It's probably got something to do with when one cut out on me at full speed in Rhyl a few years ago.

Building cars using genetic algorithms, quite fun to watch:

http://megaswf.com/serve/102223/

After getting the latest Oomph! album Monster and liking it, I got the previous one, GlaubeLiebeTod, which is pretty good. Sort of industrial type stuff.