EasyLinuxGuide Blog

The best show on TV is returning on January 24th, 2007. It will be airing on two consecutive nights for the season premiere. tick tick tick tick counting the days.

I managed to grab the 6 Seasons of the show Oz. I have not seen any episodes at all, but I hear it is quite good. I have been warned that it is very graphic which won’t impact me at all since similar to anyone else over the age of 12, I have been desensitized thoroughly. I will start watching them fairly soon.

This kernel was released recently and I didn’t really have a lot of interest in trying it out at first. I read up on some people who had tried it and someone mentioned that it loading the ‘mounting local filesystems’ much faster. I have 950Gb worth of drive space to load on boot and found that it took approximately 15 to 20 seconds or so. When I compiled this new kernel and tried a boot, it load the filesystems almost instantaneously. This is a huge difference. Sure, really it only saves me about 20 seconds overall and I rarely every reboot this box as it is my server, however; it is definitely good to see that this process slowdown was fixed.

The other major change was the relocating of the sata and pata drivers. Serial ata will no longer be located under low level scsi drivers, but instead under its own section. This was an inevitability due to sata catching on and being used more frequently. It’s nice to see some good changes in this release. Excellent work kernel devs!

Wow! This TV is unbelievable. I just got it today and set it up. The set up was easy with an on-screen set up coming up as soon as you connect it to your cable which prompted me to allow it to scan for channels. The remote is easy to use and the picture is crystal clear – this is considering I have not replaced my rca cables for my Xbox (will get component cables tomorrow) and also using a standard cable box (will look at getting an HD box tomorrow). My previous TV was ok by older standards and had a nice picture and had proven itself very reliable, but it was time to move on. I can now see the scores for sports games in the top corners that had been previous cut off at times. The screen size is ultimate – 42″ may not be the largest overall, but it spans the enter top of my entertainment center and feels like I’m in a theatre (minus the vagrants chattering banalities and showing off their abhorring opinion of cleanliness and social considerations).

Granted, it is still the first day and I am likely to get used to the expectation of viewing all of my geeky shows and such on a large screen, but it is nothing short of spectacular right now.  Gaming is phenomenal on it as well. I can now more clearly see even small aspects of the game such as fog, shadows and footprints which were an afterthought before.  I would highly recommend moving to the LCD technology. I went with Acer because they really have become solid in LCD technology. I already own a 19″ widescreen monitor for my main system which I have been impressed with since I hooked it up. Cost wise – I found a better deal at Tigerdirect but ended up buying it from The Source due to convenience mostly. I also managed to talk to the salesperson into giving me a comparable deal even though the policy is no price matching. I generally find that The Source has very competitive pricing but this one was $100 more expensive. In the end, I got a good deal and a 3 year extended warranty. Buying it from The Source also means I get in home service if ever required.