Years of Poems and Spirits

God gives life and Charles C. gives us Kindle. We received it as a surprise gift and love it from then on.

I was just thinking the other day after struggling with a hardcover book, “Five thousand years of human civilization later, is this the best reading experience we can come up with?” Here is a list of my problems:

• You can’t use ball pen to mark on a book while lying on the bed
• A beautifully bond book is the hardest one to keep open (to read, to write on, etc.)
• You don’t want to dog-ear or write on borrowed or rented books
• Books tend to have to small a margin
• You can underline, write all you want in a book, it is still a pain in the ass to look up anything you remembered as “somewhere in the book”.
• Books are heavy

The most important thing Kindle offers is a much superior reading experience: the book is light, you can order content at any time from almost anywhere (anywhere has a Sprint-competible wireless network, that is). The printing technology (the device is much more like a miniture printer behind a wipeable slate than a LCD display) make it very easy on the eyes. Another feature we like the most is that it allows you to send your content (in Word, text or HTML format only) to your Kindle.

Of course, there are things I would like in future versions, e.g. so far, all the contents are of the same font. It cannot handle the pictures embedded in a block of text in the original print. The device is super light yet not the most ergonomic to hold for a long time. So far, Kindle only supports 240K titles and many of the academic ones are not yet available.

But for $395, which includes all the wireless bills incurred forever, this is an incredible piece of machine that will change many people’s lifes, particularly those poor graduate students (I felt like someone just died before they came up with Penicilline). I am saying so with some confidence too. Bezos revealed on Charlie Rose that in the 14 month Kindle has been on the market, Amazon has sold 1/10 of the books on it already. WOW!

Problem statement:
1. My 1/2-T network storage has only 90 gigabytes left
2. The Linux box hosting that storage was built 5 years ago and has Giga-Ethernet compatibility and USB support problem
3. My Win-Tel box runs on an old Dell “space-saver” box with a 3.25″ disk and zero expansion slot
4. The Win-Tel box has only an mid-level graphics card that is not going to support video-editing and raw image processing
5. My daily backup job routinely fails because the Redhat-USB external hard disk issue

Proposed solution:
1. Build a new mid-level Win-Tel box
2. Convert the Dell box to a barebone Linux server
3. Use FreeNAS to build a NAS server with 1-T capacity

Budget:
1. PC: case, motherboard, graphics card, CPU, memory, XP Professional. Should use EIDE board so to reuse existing HDD. About $500 ?
2. Linux: nothing. Not sure latest Fedora has all the drivers though. If not … very very bad.
3. NAS: 1 SATA card, 2x 1-T sata HDD. 1 Giga-Ethernet NIC. total $750.

Risks:
1. I have an old IDE-board. But the new HDD are SATA. If I put in a SATA PCI card, does FreeNAS recognize it?
One user posted on 7/18/07: this card and this one both work with the latest freeNAS version.

2. What Giga-Ethernet card does freeNAS support?
According to freeNAS support page, “Any NIC controllers supported by FreeBSD FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).are supported by FreeNAS ”
The FreeBSD site lists the following NIC: 3Com 3c996-T (10/100/1000baseTX), Netgear GA302T, Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter (82541PI),

Candidates:
HD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822145167&ATT=22-145-167&CMP=OTC-pr1c3watch&cm_mmc=OTC-pr1c3watch-_-Hard+Drives-_-Hitachi+Global+Storage+Technologies-_-22145167
SATA card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815124020

Barely two years into its life span my iPod Mini battery is dying. I didn’t even use it that much! Anyway, got the word that I can replace the battery myself and did so moments ago. I order a kit from TechForLess.com and finished the job in 30 min. I don’t like iPod’s proprietariness (?) but I am impressed with its workmanship. It is almost European in that regard. Beautiful piece of work. Too bad now it has two ugly screwdrivers marks on both ends.

Frontal view. All the buttons and circuits … oh yeah	Back view. The kit comes with a special screwdriver and a replacement battery for $16.