It's been a while, so I thought I'd post a catch-up entry. Not much has happened, really, other than I received a new keyboard and mouse yesterday from an eBay auction. It's a brand-new 'Type 6 Country Kit'. I mean sealed-box new. Mint. But the big bummer is that I had assumed that all Type 6's had PC-style keyboards (the Unix layout switches the location of the CapsLock and Control keys, among other things). Well, that's not the case. This beautiful new keyboard has the same damn layout as my old Type 5 keyboard. I'm not saying the layout is bad, mind you, it's just that I spend most of my time on PC-style keyboards. The Unix layout is just different enough to cause me major hassles moving between the two.
On another note, I'm searching for a brother for Sparky. He needs a big brother, really, because now that I've been using him for a while I've come to realize that Sparky just isn't a very good web-browsing platform. He's limited to 256-color graphics, and well, he's pretty damn slow at rendering web pages. I guess I shouldn't be surprised - at 100mhz (dual 50's) he's just not a powerful guy. Dual processors seemingly would help, in that browsers tend to be multi-threaded, and a multi-threaded program can take fine advantage of a MP machine. However, something leads me to believe that maybe the browser is only running on one CPU, which means you're trying to run on a 50mhz "machine". So, I'm shopping for Ultras on eBay. I was inches away from winning an Ultra 10 at $1250, but got outbid in the last 3 minutes of the auction. I thought I had it locked up. Anyway, the search continues. If I do end up getting another Sparc, I'll probably rename this blog to "This Old Sparc"
Oh, and last night I found a very well done (not perfect, but pretty darn good) Windows9x X server. It's not free, but the only limitation of the unregistered version is a 2-hour limit per session. It's called X-Win32, and is from StarNet. I set it up on MB's machine, and had it installed, running and connected to Sparky within 15 minutes. Pretty nice.
