autonomous_unit

What is the price of one of these video cards?

You should seriously consider the price of the cheapest motherboard w/ integrated graphics, low-end CPU, and reasonable amount of RAM to just make a simple diskless thin client PC per "head": one motherboard, one CPU, one stick of RAM, one cheap case, one keyboard, one mouse, one display.

Use the integrated NIC to put the 6 or 12 machines on a LAN, and run one server machine with disks to serve these thing clients for network-boot and network filesystems. This would be much easier to setup with Linux than trying to juggle all the separate X servers and keeping their input devices separate on one machine.

Six months ago, I could find a 2.4 GHz Athlon64 AND micro-ATX motherboard bundle, w/ integrated graphics, for $99 USD from mainstream web stores in the US. I imagine something similar must be available here, and that speed CPU certainly isn't necessary to meet or beat the performance you'll get from 1/6 or 1/12 of a CPU talking to a slow graphics card on an overloaded PCI bus.

The cables may even be over-sized because they were designed to take more current. However, the mechanical switch could be a concern, as with twice the voltage it may spark more in the moment before it is opened/closed.

I don't know whether the switch designs actually vary around the world for this type of product, but as the voltage goes up, so does the spark gap width... I'm not sure I'd want to take my chances on something like that, although I suppose we take our chances every day with some of the cheap local stuff.

By the way, I recently looked into the large-scale multi-disk solutions. Unfortunately there is not really a perfect value out there right now. In terms of performance it goes something like this (fastest to slowest, ignoring cost):

1. external SATA or SCSI chassis

2. firewire 800

3. Linux server with gigabit ethernet for network-attached storage

4. firewire 400

5. USB2 high-speed

note, the solutions can all vary in speed depending on whether one link is shared by multiple disks or whether each disk gets a separate connection to the host computer via a multi-port adapter (of the appropriate type). Note, most of the current "home office/small office" NAS solutions are not comparable to the item (3) above. Because of their wimpy embedded CPUs, the performance does not reach the limits of gigabit ethernet but rather is more comparable to USB2 or maybe firewire 400 at best.

If you have the skills, the most cost-effective thing right now for the small office would be to buy a reasonable PC to stuff the disks into and run Linux as a server to support one or more clients over the LAN! This is still cheaper even if you have to buy a gigabit ethernet switch and extra NIC for a couple of client PCs... of course, if you only have one client and you have large-storage needs, it is probably wisest to just buy a new machine and run the application directly on one with sufficient disks installed internally...

These external storage solutions are really kind of silly if the empty enclosure starts costing as much as a "barebones" PC with a 2+ GHz Athlon64 and 1 GB of RAM... find the current market price for the size of disks, subtract it from the bundled price, and that is your effective enclosure price if it is not offered empty. Is it worth it for you?

Can anybody recommend a good shop in Bangkok to get a good ham for the holidays, considering I have not ordered ahead or anything already? Or is it already a lost cause to get one for Christmas or New Year?

I already tried out a roasted turkey on my in-laws for US Thanksgiving, so now I'd like to try a ham... I'd prefer a smoked ham, but other types of cured ham might be OK too. I want a real ham on the bone, not some pressed thing in a can.

It depends on the model of the hard disk that you're using. I have a 2.5" external drive that runs off just the one USB port.

Did it come with one of those cables with the extra tap for power? There is a limit to the amount of power that "should" be drawn over USB according to the standards, but all software does not necessarily enforce this and some devices may be able to deliver more than the nominal amount of power. However, I personally would not want to risk that since the failure behavior of the drive with insufficient power could be silent data corruption.

As for speed, the bottleneck is probably the USB2 and not the disk drive. (Have you ever seen more than about 20MB/s over USB2, in practice?) However, the price per GB is of course higher. A nice advantage is that you can use the same size/make of drive as in your laptop and maintain a full bootable mirror image. In the case of a hardware failure, you can get out the screw-driver and swap drives to get back online quickly. I have a 7200 RPM, 60 GB drive that matches the one in my laptop...

What do you miss about your former life in USA?? Why did you resettle in Thailand?

What I miss, aside from family and friends, is the sum of many little things. I don't want to turn this into a Thai vs. western thread, but honestly there are many aspects to living in Thailand that some people find endearing but I dislike. I miss my culture and the social and geographical diversity of California. I have to admit, we had it good there.

We relocated here solely because my wife has a long-term obligation to work for a Thai organization that sponsored her education in the US. In fact with my personality I ought to have been voted "least likely to travel voluntarily" in the old school yearbook. We were just facing some immovable obstacles in our future, and we decided to give it our best shot rather than giving up on us. That is what we are still doing.

Also, I am not interested in throwing away our financial future, so I have had to work quite hard to try to make a reasonable living on a western scale and to maintain my marketable skills (which are really not marketable in Thailand unless I slouch a bunch). I want to make sure we could go where we want (whether back to the US or some other developed country), were her current obligation to be removed.

Yes, I used mozilla for years and now use seamonkey, but it would also work in firefox I imagine.

Rather than try to create all the tabs and bookmark them at once, I think I actually used the "manage bookmarks" screen to move stuff around where you can view the bookmarks hierarchically like a file manager. Same idea though... this way is easier to adjust things later on as well.

...

But, I've never thought of them as "giving up" compared to the wonderful complement I've found here. Not only the partner, but the wonderful new friendships of warm Thai people. It's like I've come home!

And the other "stuff" just seems to pale into distant memory (with the exception of family with which it's easy to stay in contact with the communications technology available).

I wish I could say that, but actually I think walking away from everything and moving to Thailand was the biggest sacrafice I've made. After nearly three years, I'm accepting that I will never feel at home here. I definitely miss the life we had together before in the US. However, the obligations that brought us here remain, so I keep trying to cope.

Note, I'd have to say the sacrafice is for us, not for her...

Does the harddisk make odd noises while this program is hanging? If it always seems related to certain large files, they may be on a part of the disk that is suffering disk read errors. The program may seem to "hang" while the disk keeps retrying the read.

I don't know Windows, but you might want to check the SMART data for the drive just as an easy check... if it is showing block-remapping events on a fairly new system, you need a new disk drive (and some backups)!

I mention this because you say the program is hanging but not the whole OS.

[oops, duplicate post deleted]

In the car or truck, my wife insists on turning off the aircon, radio and headlights before swtiching off the ignition

My dad (American) taught me the same thing, plus set the parking brake and take your foot off the brake pedal (to turn off the rear brake lights) before killing the engine, and NEVER EVER using the interior lights in the passenger cabin when the engine was not running. He would also obsessively "gravity start" the truck on hills instead of using the starter motor.

However, I have to admit that the truck we had at the time is the only vehicle I have ever used long term where the factory original battery lasted for 10 years... so reducing the electrical load on the battery during that brief period just might make a difference?

I still have a twinge of guilt when I drive a rental car and it insists on shining the headlights for a minute after I park.

edit: oops, I posted the same thing someone else just said...

Dave: Of course, it's a word. It's the second person plural, previously called you as opposed to the singular, thee. The possessive form is y'all's."

That's odd, I've been told unambiguously by Texans that "y'all" is singular and "all y'all" is the plural.

By the way, I completely agree with the previous long-winded post about "have you eaten." However, as a native Californian, I expect people to use it the way that is described as the British usage. I would only expect "did you eat" in a factual discussion, e.g. about someone's trip or experience, unrelated to finding out whether they are hungry now.

I heartily recommend Motorola phones for this purpose, as I have had no troubles using them for 24x7 GPRS access in the past with both AIS and DTAC. Getting one with a mini-USB port can be very nice so that the phone charges off the computer too.

I mention a brand because I have seen lots of people complain about problems with other brands but I have never seen real complaints about the stability of GPRS on Motorolas. (The phones may have other problems and user interface issues, but their GPRS hardware seems rock solid.)

The site GSM Arena has a nice overview of the features of different phones, but as you say, most have class 10 now. Since you are not looking for EDGE, the choices are wide-open... just look in the shop at prices and whether there is a mini-USB plug?

About 6 months ago, we spent 8000 THB on a Motorola V360 which does have EDGE. Ironically, we ended up living a bit too far from the nearest DTAC EDGE tower, so I only used it with regular GPRS. The non-EDGE phones must be much cheaper by now...

The most secure method for keeping out DSL freeloaders is to use MAC filtering .

By the way, that is just not true...

The most secure method is to disable wireless.

The second most secure is to use WPA.

The third is to turn on WEP, which is about as effective as MAC-filtering in that it only keeps out naive and lazy users.

It is even more trivial to change the MAC address than it is to run a WEP cracking utility. And if you can monitor the network, because of cracking WEP or because no WEP was used, you can just watch until you see what valid MACs have been used, and then set your own MAC to be one of those. Depending on when you do this, the victim may or may not notice problems with their network connection.

Other: I click my "thaivisa" bookmark which loads up a bunch of tabs, each showing the first topic page for a subforum I read. I glance at the top of the list to see new/active topics. Then I close the tab when I get bored and move on to the next.

When I was on GPRS, this made it possible to read by clicking an article in one tab, then switching to another tab, or two, or three, to keep reading while the first one slowly loaded. Lather, rinse, repeat. Now it still feels more convenient on ADSL...

Sorry, I misunderstood your previous post. The "intrusion" alerts you just showed are coming from the external public Internet and all it means is that your firewall is working correctly. I think 125.27.7.83 is the IP address you are getting from TOT, so all this shows is that some other addresses are sending packets to your TOT address. Almost any public IP address receives random probes these days, so you will never get rid of these!

I thought before you has said that an unknown client was getting access to your LAN while you were trying to block them. These random attacks are nothing to worry about as long as your PC is behind the NAT and firewall and not set as the "DMZ" host in your router.

I have had some Linux systems on public addresses in different parts of the world over the last 15 years, and they've been noticing random probes for at least the last 10. It's just a fact of life on the Internet. It is one of the reasons I do not have any Windows machines on the Internet.

Your processor may be a real power hog... the Pentium 4 line uses much more power than the "Core" line or an Athlon64... and all of these use more than a good laptop chip like Pentium-M, and all of these use way more than what is in one of those little embedded router or NAS devices.

I've heard it said that desktop harddrives may draw about 15W, per drive. A good low-power desktop processor is in the 30W range when clocked down and idle, and closer to 100W when running full tilt. (A small router might only draw 5-10W total.) I think some of the Pentium 4 line can draw significantly more than that!

If you cannot get your hands on a current meter to actually judge how much the whole system draws, you might try to judge how much heat it is kicking out... if you run it in a small room or closet, how fast does the space warm up? Maybe compare it to an incandescent lamp if you want to be really geeky about it...

With a really nasty key, which is another thing you can get generated for you at GRC.

Wow, I never realized people needed to use computers to access a remote server to generate a few random characters for them! Also, I don't recommend doing this over wireless to get a key meant to secure your wireless while you have evidence that someone is actively intruding into your wireless.

I agree you need to enable WPA, but the first thing you might want to do is connect via an ethernet cable, factory-reset the router, disable wireless, make sure your router password is really safe and secure (not some default "admin" password), then restart the router, configure WPA, and reenable wireless.

You didn't mention whether you were using WEP before or not... that would help us gauge the level of sophistication of your intruder. The fact that they got on again right after you blocked their MAC means they are not just an accidental tourist...

If they are clever enough to crack WEP and/or monitor the traffic on the wireless, they may already have the password to your router or they might have already reconfigured it to give them another way back in. A truly paranoid geek might want to make sure his router is running up to date firmware from the manufacturer...

There is a "foreign earned income exclusion" that is per year. It only applies to salary/wage or fees for services rendered... it does not apply to "passive income" like interest, investment income, rental income, etc.

There is talk about some people in Congress wanting to eliminate this exclusion, and I also think they've changed the way it works so that your exclusion cuts out the "lower" tax tiers but the remaining income is taxed at the same progressive tiers that it would be if you had been taxed on all income. (For example, a person excluding all but $10k of earned income would pay tax on the $10k at the rate of 28% instead of 10%, using 2005 rates.) I think somebody may have posted about this before...

Another thing that can be surprising is that you may have to file "self employment" tax schedules to figure out your equivalent of social security tax when you have a foreign employer (one who does not play with the IRS, issue a W2, etc.)

There is also a foreign tax credit that can offset the "taxes owed" amount but this has to be adjusted by the foreign earned income exclusion, e.g. if you were able to exclude 90% of your income then you cannot get credit for the corresponding foreign paid taxes on that excluded income. For many people who have much excluded foreign income, the standard deduction is better than trying to itemize the foreign tax credit, from what I understand.

Note, I am not a tax expert. All I know is what I learned while struggling with my own returns.

...Every time you open a door or window they will flock inside!

This is how they get in our house, I think. I particularly noticed that the bites increased depending on who from my wife's family was staying with us, and I eventually realized it was that those people acted as if the screens and doors were not important or rather were an obstacle to them rather than protection...

We've partially trained my mother-in-law now, but she's stubborn and a bit careless so she still has a tendancy to throw screen doors wide open, walk in and out about ten times, go check the pot boiling on the stove, and then finally come back and close the screen door.

We, on the other hand, treat entries like "air locks" and try to get in and out without ever actually opening the screen.

This is one of those cross-cultural things I have decided not to spend too much time trying to understand, just for my own sanity...

Not chimps, but the previous poster forgot to mention tarantala feet.

Yes there is a mirror: mirror.in.th/fedora/core/, but their trees for updates and extras does not seem to include FC6 yet (just up to FC5). When I checked, their mirror for FC5 updates seemed pretty slow to catch up to US sites, so I wouldn't recommend using it to get security patches anyway.

I suspect the theory on evolution is probably correct.

Me too. But, oh, how I'd have liked to have an intelligent designer involved in our house.

Mikeinminburi: I agree about high-end computer parts being a waste for casual home users. A much better value can be had on "last year's" or older stuff that was considered good enough then...

But a surprising number of the folks here use their computers for work as software, web, or content developers. The extra expenditures for faster parts or better user experience are easily worth it when you spend your whole work day in front of the computer, unless all you do is browse the web for work.