fouldsy.com

Fairly happy with they eBay auctions that finished this afternoon. Made £280 across them, which isn’t bad considering I was optimistically hoping for £300 total, and would have accepted £250. The PS2 only managed £70, a lot less than I was hoping for, but about what I’d expected given the prices + number of PS2′s on eBay. The Sony amp didn’t fetch much, and the CD changer could have got a bit more, but the two head units sold for more than I was expecting and balanced it all out.

The next batch of auctions finish on Sunday/Monday, so hopefully they’ll bring a few more pennies in

I’ll get bored with eBay soon, or pissed off with the final prices! Doesn’t bring as much as it should selling on eBay, but figured the longer I have stuff sat around, the less I’ll probably end up getting. The car audio stuff is going well and those auctions are finishing within the next hour. I put up the Xplosion 375W RMS 12″ sub + box, along with a Fender 15W practice amp last night, and today I’ve ran through putting the water cooling equipment out of my old desktop up. I installed all this last summer, but only ran for about 6 months, as the AMD X2 3800+ dual-core I upgraded to is so effecient + quiet, I decided not to water cool the system.

So, here’s the latest round of offerings on eBay:

• DangerDen Maze4 – AMD Socket A inc. SHD fixings
• ThermoChill HE120.2 dual 120mm radiator inc. barbs
• DangerDen clear 5.25″ bay reservoir
• Hydor L20 1/2″ pump
• Xplosion 12″ sub – 375W RMS inc. carpeted sealed box
• Fender Frontman 15W practice amp

Again, if you’re interested, either check out the auctions and start yer bidding or point your friends in the right direction!

Considering it took the best part of two days when installing all the car audio equipment, it took about half an hour to pull it all out! With all the gear up for sale on eBay (go check the auctions out if you haven’t already!), figured I may as well remove it all with the auctions ending tomorrow and it being dry today for playing with cables + electrics. Once again, managed to avoid blowing either myself or the car up!

Looks a mess, but is all tidied up now (so space to sleep again tonight…). There’s also an old JVC head unit which I had way back in the Fiesta which ran for about a year up for grabs, at a paltry £10 at the moment. Sad to see it all go, as regardless of whatever some may say about the Sony X-plod gear, it does sound awesome for the price if it’s setup right. The Ford head unit just sounds so hollow now, even though the JBL components are still installed in the front – the Sony F7500 made such a difference with the extra power output, plus the amp + sub might have had something to do with it…

Mind, after re-installing the original Ford head unit I found the radio code was incorrect. Not too impressed at having to fork out 15 of my English pounds for the correct code, but, least it’s working now. No CD player though Not that I use the car much now though so can’t grumble too much – unless the eBay auctions don’t pick up much in the next 24 hours of course!

Decided to take out the frustration of conflicting info from Insure&Go and flog some more gear on eBay. First two people were having none of making a claim for cancellation of the Japan trip as technically I wasn’t declared unfit to travel or advised not to go by any of the medical practioners at either the hospital or my local surgery. Finally, someone saw sense (and after being quote their own terms + conditions which didn’t state a medical certficate declaring unsuitability to travel was not a requirement and thus they were, well, making shit up), and the claim forms have been sent out looks good for recouping the money.

But, another round of eBay auctions, mainly music stuff again, but this time car audio equipment (okay, and a PS2!):

• Sony CDX F7500 head unit, MP3 + CD changer out, remote
• Sony CDX 848X 10-disc CD changer
• Sony XM-280GTX 2/1 Channel Amplifier
• JVC KD-S731R CD head unit – 4x45W
• Sony PS2, 2 controllers, 8 games, memory card, network

Plenty of folk will testify as to how awesome all the Sony car audio equipment sounded! Some awesome bits of equipment in there, and going for next to nothing, so get yourself some bids in

So, the eBay auctions ended. Didn’t fetch quite as much as I was hoping for on the Ibanez bass guitar and the Marshall amp, but kinda balances out as the Yamaha Pacifica electric went a lot higher than expected, and the Shuttle media center PC just about did alright. Wasn’t expecting great things from eBay anyways. Will probably have more stuff going up when I get back from Japan though, including all the audio equipment out of my car

But, the fun started arranging collection with ParcelForce. Done it dozens of times before through work (all but a distant memory now…), but not as a home user for a few years. First up, you can’t be running anything other than Windows for the site to function. Bit of a bugger with a MacBook or Kubuntu desktop computer being all I have on offer (and quite happily, I must add!), so had to troop off and knick my dad’s computer. You plod through filling in all your details, pretty standard stuff, then it comes to payment.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of WorldPay for payment handling, as they just re-direct all over the place and you never really know what on Earth’s happening. Get annoyed by companies that don’t make at least some effort to integrate payment processing. Makes me nervours, especially on a computer I don’t mantain. Rant aside, I put in my payment details, and Internet Exploder does one of it’s little bottom burps, SP2 blocks pop-ups, so Verified by Visa fails. Click the button to allow pop-ups for this transaction and wheeeeeeeee!!!! back to the start we go asking you how many parcels you would like to send…

Not impressed.

All sorted (I hope), and pretty sure the right parcels will go to the correct buyer! On the plus side, I found 2Gb Crucial DDR RAM for the MacBook shipping for £130 and figured I’d treat myself. As much as the MacBook is impressive, it really doesn’t like multi-tasking with a few Firefox tabs open on only 512Mb RAM, and especially so if you’re running GarageBand or iPhoto (pretty much shut all other apps before processing audio in Garageband!). I’m hoping to play with (read steal) dad’s JVC Mini-DV camcorder whilst in Japan and use iMovieHD and iDVD to create my own movies when I get back, so guessed more RAM can’t help, and hopefully should make all the stuff with the Unsigned Rock Podcast much quicker + easier too

Yup, only a few more hours to get your bids in for a right awesome collection of music equipment. Still pained to part with it all, but the Marshall amp + Shuttle media center are running good prices.

• Ibanez GSR200 4-string bass, walnut finish + hard case
• Yamaha Pacifica 112 electric guitar, hard case + extras
• Marshall MG250DFX 100W guitar amplifier
• Shuttle SN45G media PC, AMD 2500, 512Mb, 160Gb SATA HDD, GeForce4 + TV-out, DigiTV card

Hope the electric + bass guitars pick up soon or I’ll be pretty sad

Trying to stay optimistic in believing that at some point (before Christmas…) my US visa will get sorted, and the fact that I’ve got bugger all money left after being out of work for 6 weeks and travelling quite a bit, most of my music equipment is now up for grabs on eBay. Local ad magazines hadn’t brought in buyers as everyone is looking to pay bottom dollar, so I’m forced to put them up on eBay (meaning I’ll get bugger all for ‘em, and you, the lucky buyers, get a right steal!).

Items for sale are:

• Ibanez GSR200 4-string bass, walnut finish + hard case
• Yamaha Pacifica 112 electric guitar, hard case + extras
• Marshall MG250DFX 100W guitar amplifier
• Shuttle SN45G media PC, AMD 2500, 512Mb, 160Gb SATA HDD, GeForce4 + TV-out, DigiTV card

You have no idea how much it pains me to see the Yamaha Pacifica + Marshall amp on eBay, especially at such ridiculous starting prices If you know anyone after new equipment, point them in the right way, eh?

And for the record, if the US immigration department mess things up anymore and the visa doesn’t go through, blood will be spilled if these get sold and I’m stuck here!

eBay is a naughty, naughty place. It draws you into buying stuff against your will. Well, not quite, but you get the idea.

The latest idea is playing around with some high-end network services under Linux. OpenLDAP servers maintaining an entire LDAP directory, with integrated Samba file + printer sharing on per user/group basis including virus scanning, e-mail solution containing virus + spam filtering tied into the LDAP structure, and of course Internet content filtering + Squid proxy cache complete with Intranet portalset all based off permissions from the directory. So, I needed some equipment.

Space being limited, and also wanting a decent challenge as opposed to running them off my usual testing machines based round PII 400Mhz’s with 128Mb-256Mb RAM, picked out some Sun Ultra 5′s instead. Since the Ultra 5′s are IDE interface based, they take standard hard drives and CD drives making them cheap to get parts for. These 4 cost £45 plus shipping – 3 x 270Mhz with 128Mb RAM + 6.3Gb hard drives, plus 1 x 330Mhz with 256Mb RAM and 6.3Gb hard drive.

What’s going to run on these? Gentoo Sparc64, of course. Support seems very good under Gentoo, with active forums, mailing lists and IRC. Although compiling will be slower compared to the other alternative, Debian, I’m interested to see how much Gentoo can harness the 64-bit processing, plus how well Gentoo actually stands up in a server environment. I’ve always ran Debian on servers due to ease of installation and updates, but since I’m not in the production environment, would try something else. Whilst this is purely for development and learning, the reasoning behind it is an integration of these technologies into our Windows network at work, or for future reference depending on employment status in a year or two.

Once the keyboard + mouse arrive, will make a start trying to install Gentoo in the first place! Hoping to simply create a base install, then image the remaining three drives, allowing me then give each machine it’s own roles without having to run through building each system from scratch.

Well, not quite, but I had right good clear out and about half my worldly possesions are on eBay if anyone wants to grab an authentic piece of fouldsy memorabilia! Haven’t quite gone so far as to put the electric guitar (would be worth something when I’m rock supa* for all those wanting to pencil an offer just in case) or the laptop (with your own version of fouldsy Linux 0.3 pre-installed for your pleasure and annoyance) up for auction, but stay tuned and you might catch a bargain!