Well, our Mac Mini server 2010 has a mere 4GB of memory and we wanted more of course. However PC8500 ram is very expensive, so we got the much cheaper ($180 for 2x8GB PC8500 vs $120 for 2x8GB PC12800). But the problem is putting in both doesn’t work. It appears that the Mac Mini needs […]

We’ve had the MSR Pocket Rocket for years and it is durable and very light. and has stood the test of time, but it isn’t very stable for sure, but technology has moved ahead: JetBoil Flash. $100. They started the revolution. The main advantage is that it is smaller than the MSR Whisperlite and is […]

Wow, Amazon has been expanding its membership programs. Here’s a list: Amazon Student. This is a great program. Half price Amazon Prime ($40 a year). It’s free for six months, you get free two day shipping, but you don’t get to stream movies nor borrow free kindle books until you pay the $40 a month. […]

Nothing like visiting REI and getting gear lust all over again by Outdoor Gear Lab: Mountain Hardwear Ultralamina 15 is the best synthetic speeding bag tjat is great for colder temperatures and soaking wet conditions. We just got this bag and it is heavy, but obviously warm. Feathered Friend Hummingbird 20. If you don’t live […]

While this is a nice printer and seems decently reliable, it sure is expensive to keep the cartridges. Two quick tips, get the: Canon 0621B016 CLI-8 3 Pack C/M/Y Value Pack. Just $32 from Amazon Canon PGI-5 BK 0628B009 2-Pack Pigment Black Ink Tanks. $25 from Amazon gives you two tanks of black

I have literally no idea what this means and the disk looks good. Have run disk utility and the disk structure looks good. Also gettting strange lock ups on this iMac (late 2009) running Mac OS X 10.9.4. Strange. But serveral a second read: kernel: cksum: out of data by 20 Looking at the manual […]

We’ve had two outages in the last two days. I’m getting a partition down message and it lasts for several hours. A chat with the bluehost live chat folks isn’t encouraging. They don’t know why the file system check is running nor do they have log file indicating what is going on. So I guess […]

OK, what kind of gear do you need for a 4 day trip, here are some notes from outdoorgearlab, backpacker.com and outdoor.com: Backpacks. They really like the Arcteryx Altra 64 is the best by a long margin with the main issue being its cost (but on the other hand, a backpack lasts a lifetime). Backpacker […]

It is hard to find reviews of these and most seem like junk. Monoprice does a budget set for $83, but Sound and Vision just did a review set and for not very much, you can get a nice sounding set of outdoor speakers: Niles OS5.5 Black (Pr) 5 Inch 2-Way High Performance Indoor Outdoor […]

Well time once again to figure out how small and low power you can make something. Let’s look at form factor, chip set, processor, memory, disk, in that order for a basic Haswell system. Here are the recommendations for a Linux running Haswell simple single board computer (and following some models like iafeche) for $584 […]