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SlimNAS Is In Service

My rebuilt SlimNAS device is now operational. The little 2.5" HD is installed inside the T5700 case. I used the expansion chassis just to ensure that there's enough air flow now that there is a IDE ribbon cable blocking airflow…

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Magic Jack, End Points & Cheap Minutes

There has been a little rumble of late in the blogosphere about Magic Jack. Ike Elliot had an good overview of the service here. And a little more here.

I first heard of Magic Jack literally a couple of years ago when visiting Durham, NC. It was the topic of conversation on an ABC radio talk show. The host was raving about cheap long distance calls using his PC, and paying $40/year for unlimited calling.

Ho hum. Cheap minutes. I don’t generally get worked up about such things.

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SlimNAS, T5700 Thin Client & 2.5″ 250 GB Hard Drive

The new HD for my SlimNAS box arrived last Friday. So the time to rebuild my SlimServer system is fast approaching. Right now it’s running on a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, but since I’ve abandoned the idea of the Inguz on-the fly room correction in software it just doesn’t need all that CPU power. Nor does it need to be making all that heat & noise.

However, I don’t expect that the simplest solution will work. The T5700 has a 44 pin connector for the flash “disk-on-module” that it normally boots from. A reader in Denmark has indicated that he had some trouble getting the small HD to power-up when connected here.

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SlimServer on FreeNAS Soon To Be Revisited

I see that the newer Squeeze Center, which is actually Slim Server v7, is available as a FreeNAS module. This means that it might be a good time to upgrade my T5700 based music server.

I haven’t actually been using this server for a few months. A while back I decided to try a “room correction” plugin from Inguz for Slim Server. This does some DSP transformations on the music stream on-the-fly, basically effecting some equalization. This plugin required more CPU power than a lowly T5700 could provide, so I’ve been using and old P4-2.8 as my music server these past months.

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Astlinux Lives!

After a relatively long quiet period the Astlinux mailing list has been fairly active lately. This is thanks in part to some new users who have been extending the distro to meet their needs. Like any open source project, the…

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