Not much to report

Not done much over the last couple of days. It's been quite quiet really. The Behemoth is still running well without any trouble so far. Vista is proving quite interesting and I have to admit the Aero looks are growing on me. Mac OS X will run on this machine though, so I might get a cheap SATA drive to try it out on (120gb for £30!).

I'm currently at 29% battery after running it for a couple of hours with the screen on full brightness and the wi-fi being absolutely hammered by a test iSCSI connection to the FreeNAS box. This pretends that a file on a remote machine is an actual physical SCSI hard drive. I only tried it out because Vista includes an iSCSI Initiator which I hadn't come across before. You can treat the connected file like a real hard drive, format it, defrag it, etc, which is interesting. It's a bit slow because the FreeNAS box is a crappy old Compaq iPaq desktop PC, with a 160gb hard drive bunged in it and the wi-fi doesn't help. iSCSI is meant for enterprise level systems with gigabit network cards. Still, it might come in useful for backups or something. Vista has a function to back up the entire system to an image, but it is quite picky about what you can back up to, so an iSCSI target might work.

A quick glance at Ebay showed there were plenty of spare parts for the 9400, screens, shells, motherboads, keyboard, etc and several complete machines in various states of repair. So at least I know parts are readily available. The service manual is also on Dell's website so I know how it comes apart now. There's also some XPS M170s on there, which was another model I considered as it's exactly the same as the 9400, but with black case parts, more powerful graphics cards and LEDs that emit coloured light of your choosing out of the speaker grills and air vents (yes, really).

Someone e-mailed me about the DS in work but didn't follow it up. I sold the PSP to my colleague yesterday, and he's happy with it. He has a PS3 so can do the Remote Play stuff, and there's also an RPG coming out on it he wants to play. He's now got one of every current console out there - 360, PS3, Wii, DS and PSP. Scary.

The Partsocaster now sounds infinitely better after I discovered that I'd wired the pickup totally and utterly wrong. It now sounds really good and actually sounds much fatter than I expected, probably down to the humbucking pickup. I might look into adding the second pickup at some point, if only to fill up the hole by the neck.