4. Hardware

4.1. Buses

4.1.1. IEEE_1394 aka Firewire

Firewire and USB-2.0 are fast enough to easily attach disguised cheap IDE disks externally.

4.1.2. PCMCIA and CardBus

Table 1.1. what card type is how thick?

type I

3.3 mm

type II

5.0 mm

type III

10.5 mm


4.1.3. SCSI

4.1.4. USB

Firewire and USB-2.0 are fast enough to easily attach disguised cheap IDE disks externally.

4.2. Components

4.2.1. Cases

4.3. Peripherals

4.3.1. Audio

4.3.1.1. Portable_Players
4.3.1.1.1. Apple_iPod
  • dmoz

  • www.extremeiPod.com

  • GNUpod -- a collection of perl scripts to use your iPod under ..., i.e. allows you the administration of the music library etc.

4.3.1.1.1.1. MUSICMATCH -- the overloaded multi-purpose utility

It serves (at least in theory) different and quite separate purposes:

  • converting your CD music into an MP3 library, adding nice meta information into the MP3 headers

  • uploading, downloading, synchronization, ...

  • ...

4.3.1.1.1.1.1. exploring the contents of the music library on the iPod etc

MM only shows your the play lists, it even gives you the impression, you can only transfer play lists of music back and forth. It does not show you pieces, that are (for whatever reason) not elements of play lists.

4.3.1.1.1.2. XPlay

...

4.3.1.1.1.2.1. exploring the contents of the music library on the iPod etc

XPlay shows you exactly the contents of your iPod music library, it does this via something, that plugs into your file system view of the iPod Firewire disk. And this view is not read-only.

4.3.1.1.2. Panasonic SL-MP35

There is no redundancy in MP3 audio files, so when MP3 CD-s get older and get more scratches, you will start suffering a lot, as the player skips as much as it needs to find the next playable location, and that results in pretty un-nice gaps and that will keep you waiting many, many seconds for the continuation.

The player expects the MP3 files beneath a directory level, one directory for each album.

For sorting purposes each such directory and each such file within a directory starts with a three-digit number.

I MP3-ed almost my entire CD collection into an MP3 library following these requirements, with the artist name above the albums of the artist.

For using this MP3 library with my iPod I have to establish a mapping from this deep structure to a rather flat structure. For this purpose I run a perl/shell script to map/symlink artist-album-file to a name formed exactly like artist---album---file:

cd ARTIST--symlinks-for-iPod;
		find "$( echo $PWD | sed -e 's/^.*\//..\/..\/music\//' )" -type f -name '*.mp3' |
                perl -F'/' -a -ne 'chomp; chomp $F[$#F]; splice(@F,0,3); symlink($_,join("---",@F)) || warn "{$_}: $!"'

File names on the iPod are shortened to 27+4 (4 for .mp3), 3 characters like ~27 are used for making the short names unique.

4.4. Standards

4.4.1. IEEE

4.4.1.1. 802.11a

A WLAN standard.

4.4.1.2. 802.11b

A WLAN standard.

4.4.1.3. 802.11g

A WLAN standard.

4.5. Storage

4.5.1. Hard_Drives

Nowadays computers (I mean PC-s here) have reached quite a speed and equipped with enough RAM, they are able to do us very good servics for quite a couple of years. The very special one kind of thing, that's likly to die far too early is hard disks. So why not make use of disks in external cases to be attached via Firewire or USB-2.0, like the ones of Coolergiant (with quite some regional presences)? They have cases for static use and also portables.

4.5.2. Optical

4.5.2.1. Devices

4.5.3. Subsystems

4.5.3.1. RAID -- Redundant Array of Independent Disks
4.5.3.1.1. basics
RAID 0

striping

RAID 1

mirroring

RAID 4

RAID 0 + parity checking using a single partition

RAID 5

parity striping

4.5.3.1.2. URL-s
Software RAID for Linux

www.heise.de's c't 1998/22: Linux: Festplattenzugriff beschleunigen

4.6. Systems

4.6.1. Dell

4.6.1.1. Our Inspiron 7500 notebook
  • just one USB-1.1 plug

  • two PCMCIA slots of type I or II, or a single one of type III

  • ...

4.6.1.2. Our Dimension towers

Both Dimension towers were ordered without too much and too deep reasoning. They are really not bad at all, but they seriously lack extensibility: not enough extra PCI slots, not enough IDE drive slots, i.e. no space for the possible 4 drives. I am going to compensate that by adding a Firewire + USB-2.0 PCI card and by occasionally adding external Firewire'ed disks.

4.6.1.2.1. Our Dimension ... tower running WinXP
  • ...

4.6.1.2.2. Our Dimension ... tower running SuSE Linux
  • ...

4.6.2. Sony

4.6.2.1. Our PCG-FX902P notebook
  • just USB-1.1 -- I felt a little betrayed, when I found out, that they sell a non-USB-2.0 notebook in 2003, but I didn't ask, so I shouldn't really complain

  • ...

4.6.3. Laptops

4.6.3.1. Vendors


[1] I would love to install a travla in my 911, but I still haven't found good and reasonable applications for it ... -- questions regard: display, car LAN, WAN access via ..., ...