Biggie size your music! This baby comes with a 120GB disk, it’s underportable, and requires AC to power it at all times. Big music without the big price tag. Build yours today!

Okay – so it’s nothing like the original. How ever much I want an iPod, the price of one verses other geek toys always seems too high. Today I bought a DeLorme USB GPS w/Software, a USB-Firewire External Drive Enclosure, a USB powered hub, and a data cable for my cellphone. Even if you include the 120GB drive I bought for $90 you still don’t own a 40GB iPod.

This is a CompUSA 3.5″ Aluminum External Enclosure with a 120GB hard disk popped inside. The sticker was made with bumper sticker sheets printed on my ink-jet printer. Here’s a link to the big image if you want to make one too!

I was up in Maine setting up the server and dropping off some stuff. My brothers and I were laughing about one of the latest shorts from homestarrunner.com. They are planning the release of a new game called Peasant’s Quest. It looks hilarious! Towards the end of the trailer they include the original “tune” from the Trogdor game. “I want that as a ringtone!” One of us said. Korey challenged me to program our Motorola v120’s to play the Trogdor theme music.

After futzing with the interface, Korey told me to press the up or down buttons while in the “Create” mode. It steps you through a scale of notes. A few revisions and a few changes with the note length – here’s what I got!

For my Motorola v120
*3C4 *3C4 *3C3 *3#F2
*3C4 *3C4 *3C3 *3#D2
*3C4 *3C4 *3C3 *3#F3
*3C3 *3#D3 *3C3 *3#C3 *3#D3
“Trogdor the ringtone by Kristopher Marciniak”.

It should only take you a few moments to pump this into your phone. Then you’ll have the coolest ringtone ev4r. At least for a month or two…

Update: Click here to see the planetkris.com unofficial Peasant’s Quest guide!

“Maruchan Ramen”
– A Poem –

Oh, that brick
One long string
Cheap and good
Boil
Heat
Wait
Splash that pan
Great big bite
Tasty sip

Flavor
Fake
False
Faux
Like powder
Chicken
A cheat
Tricks you
Tastes the same

Box of ten
Food for one
Fork
Spoon
Water
All you need
Time is money
Money got scared
Left with Ramen

I think it was back in 1998 or 97 that I put my faith in the MP3 data format. Some of the guys that I worked with at PictureTel were compiling every Rush CD they had and encoding it to a server. This was big stuff back then! The drives were slow, the encoders were slow, the files were big. I mean 65MB for a whole CD worth of music was pretty cool, but you have to remember that we had 4GIG drives in servers, and 1GIG drives in desktops. This is how I was able to obtain everything that Rush ever recorded from the beginning to 1998. It fit on two 650MB CD’s!

It was around this time that I decided to rip everything I had to MP3. The Great MP3 Project was born. After about 20 CD’s I was pooped. (Mind you this took hours – because on a P133 and a 12X CD-ROM it took close to 35 minutes to rip a CD…) I figured if this was ever going to get done – and done right, I would have to make some changes as to how I listened to, and ripped CD’s.
Continue reading The Great MP3 Project →

Hey – How is this? I know, I know. Well me too! It’s not every day you figure this stuff out . Matter of fact it was a breeze. Maybe not THAT easy. Any could do it. Is that what I’m saying? Yikes! The directions were pretty clear. I had to rebuild a few templates. Are YOU laughing at me? Take that!

heh –

I was thinking about GUI’s the other night while doodling on my OhioArt PDA.

The megacorp that owns the desktop is like any other. They start out small, lie, cheat, steal, become the only option, and move right to the top. Then after a while complacent thinking takes over. “Well, we’re your ONLY option, so – DEAL…” Then down the road, they get kicked – hard. Remember when big blue was your ONLY hardware option?

Well, Micro$oft has taken this path. “Borrowed” some stuff from IBM, “evaluated” some Xerox hardware, flat out stole some file compression software, bundled all of that together in order to push out some Internet browsers. You write code for their OS, while praying that you don’t get stepped on, and dreaming that one day they will buy your little software company.

It’s clear that complacent thinking has taken over in Redmond. With the recent code leak they are scrambling the FBI on contractors, while downplaying the vulnerability. The time is right for an open source kick.

RedHat is a fine example of a company that can make money giving away it’s products and letting everyone look at their code. You can load RedHat, or called by it’s free-ware name Fedora, on just about anything, including the KitchenAid blender. (Okay you may need FreeBSD for the blender.) The point is – you can get any personal computer to run a UNIX based OS. Darwin is Apple’s open source UNIX based OS. The Darwin X86 project is running Darwin on Intel PC’s right now.

So, Apple – here’s what you do: Compile your GUI for Darwin x86. Now every PC on the planet can run MacOSX. Setup a support structure for paying customers and let go of being able to dictate hardware requirements. You will still have the fastest PC’s on the planet and we can now do a true side by side compare of Intel vs. Motorola. Who cares who’s faster – in the long run they will be running your operating system. You will at this point go into competition with RedHat, but I think they’ll survive. Give them free iPods or something.