Seagate Technology
Howdy Campers,
I’m a bit aghast at the behavior of my new highly touted 160 gig Seagate drive which failed yesterday.
This wouldn’t be so bad, except that I’m in the midst of
switching around drives and backing up stuff so I can upgrade the CPU on my g4. So I had a good bulk of Audio files, image backups, and various other stuff (ARCHIVES!) which is held hostage
until I can scrape up the do-re-mi to recover it.
Seagate has acquired Maxtor- So is this a good thing or bad thing?
I stopped buying Maxtor
a couple years ago and this is the first Seagate
failure I’ve experienced. What’s worse is that this drive is two months old.
I have that deep sinking
feeling that you can trust no one in the Hard-drive
business.

So I’m offering a solution to this problem which
bugs everyone in the business.
My solution is for these Hard drive companies
to tack a 5$ insurance plan to their drives to
cover replacement AND recovery costs.

Think of how this would effect the HDD business-
Users would have some protection of their data
over the warranty.
You could transfer the data to
the replacement drive.
Drive companies could tout
this policy as a best practices failsafe and give
customers what they want: integrity.

The computer hardware business is rediculous in the way it deals with hardware integrity.
Ram out of spec, bad firewire, out of box failure happens WAY TOO MUCH.
MS, Apple, Dell, Lacie- lately failures of these things are main part of my businesss- and that just
ain’t right.
Computers are all about data- so HDD companies need to stand behind Data Integrity -Not manufacturer error.
-By the way, I check my hard drives regularly,
I even have S.M.A.R.T. checkers on my OS which
is supposed to report upcoming failure. So Why
didn’t I get a warning?
-As I’m writing this I’m getting more pissed off,
so I’ll stop. But this really really sucks.
-owl

ganesh

Epson America, Inc. – Product Information – MovieMate 25

Epson has this great (from technical specs) box
for projecting a nice 80″ inch image from six and a half feet away. Would that Apple devine a similar box that would have (along with analog/digital i/o connections) Wireless and streaming from local
and WAN networked computers, a Docking station
for a video ipod, sort of a Mac Mini witha projector built in. Last year there were rumors about a thing called Asteroid….I would call this Asterisk!
If Apple enters the TV projection market with such a product I expect the stock to split (again) in two months from the release date.
Oh, I do love the rumor farms milking ideas before
Apple MacWorld keynotes. Someone check Steve
Jobs’ sleeves…

I am trying to figure out how to use [WordPress](http://wordpress.org) AND [MovableType](http://sixapart.com) at the same time. Now, I have [Plone](http:/plone .org)
running on Panther/G4 already here…uh, I haven’t used it much, but it’s been up since January 2003.
Stay tuned…writing thoughtfully to a website is a very different task than trying to get all the back-end stuff together.

[Make your Own 100$ laptop]( http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/12/make_your_own_100_laptop.html )

Here’s a piece on how to make your own
100$ laptop involving an Emate. Now I used an
eMate for a few years as my “portable” computer
during a time when I was contracted to various
companies and needed a way to check my personal email. This little green laptop was the best thing at the time (1997-2000) when I used it. I could check my email, surf the web (over phone lines or ethernet). I had the memory updates and a 16 mb pcmcia memory card which at the time was HUGE.
It had Newtontalk installed in it so when i would invoke the calendar program it would say:
“No Meetings Today, No Events Today”.
Plus, on the Bus to work I could play Golf or the
awesome Star Trek Game (both of which I never
mastered since I suck at computer games).
Alas, I sold the eMate (and bunch of other Newton
stuff – I had all the books, and couple of the 100
models) around the time the iPod came out-
I still have and use a 5 gig first gen iPod.
I think this project, however, is kind of rediculous.
I can appreciate the motivation but it will seriously NOT be less than 100$. I doubt the battery in
a used Newton will hold up very well, handcrank
charger or not. It’s a noble idea, but I think
it’s not quite the thing that you’d hand off to
a sub-Saharan (or even a sub-New Yorkian)
schoolkid.

Welcome to Owlgarden and the Owlgarden Blog.
Owlgarden is also found at owlgarden.blogger.com.
This may supplant it, but for now it will be the main
info point for Owlgarden.net.

Ok, now I am setting up my own Blog in WordPress and trying to settle on themes and a texture to be a central communication point for all things OwlGarden.
The point of this site is to deliver some podcasts, redevelop some video/music/art ideas that were lingering in the digital closet for a few years, and provide
a nice home for the exchange of ideas.