Chiriquí Chatter

I will get around to relating to you “How I spent my summer vacation”, but I am currently involved in organizing my technology purchases and putting them to use.

All of the eBay purchases I had made before leaving Panama, had found their way to my daughter’s house and were safely awaiting my arrival on top of her refrigerator. After being in her house, for close to two weeks, I realized that the top of the refrigerator, was one of the few places that was safe from this small blond tornado that continually sweep through the house. While you may be aware that Texas is in tornado alley, this new tornado beats all that I have ever seen.

The eBay technology was the Olympus SP550UZ camera and the Apple Mac Mini. I have just scratched the surface in learning the capabilities of the camera, but I believe that with more time, I will like it better than the Canon S2 that died.

The Apple Mac Mini is my current project. I purchased two gig of memory to install and need to go buy the standard Apple tool that is required to put it in (a regular putty knife). Hopefully, I will do that today and also hopefully it will be done without breaking the case.

I picked up a new keyboard (Logitech S539 Lazer) and that was yesterday’s challenge. It seems that during the boot process of UBUNTU linux, the keyboard isn’t seen and the system hangs. So currently, I have an old PS2 keyboard plugged in to bypass that problem. It isn’t the cleanest solution, but it will work until I figure out the correct solution.

I also purchased a 160 gig external hard drive (Maxtor DirecTouch III) that I found at Frye’s for a mere $49.95. That became one of those “It is just too good a price to pass up” situations and it easily found its way in my shopping cart along with the keyboard, 2 gig of Apple memory, and one gig of memory for the linux PC.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get it accessible to both the Apple and linux PCs once I get the memory added to the Apple Mini. Currently it is just sitting there because it is formatted in NTFS, which linux doesn’t support. I must admit, that it looks nice sitting there however.

Well it is time for some coffee and then I will head out to pay a couple bills and pick up my Apple tool (Putty knife). Wish me luck on the memory upgrade.

Tags: Cameras, Linux