Good, bad, broken

30 Dec 2005

I thought I’d clinched a really good bargain. Being one of those people who see buying stuff as potentially being really good, that is, and not simply a loss of money. The guy at the computer shop–being the only one open within walking distance at this time of year, and myself not sufficiently motivated to travel to the city to buy things from people I hate–was particularly charming, in an Asian-computer-store-owner-with-whom-it-is-generally-difficult-to-communicate kind of way. He assumed I knew everything, which is a nice thing to get in computer stores (for me)… but thank God I wasn’t trying to buy anything more serious than a switch, or else I’d have been sorely regretting having stopped trying to keep up with processor/motherboard developments 18 months or so ago. As it stands, I am now regretting that… but we’ll come to that soon enough.

Anyway, I was adamant the switch I bought would be sufficiently devoid of extraneous power packs (external transformers, if we want to be like that), because of the awful mess that exists Where the Wild Things Are… err… I mean, that crevasse into which a wireless access point dangled some months ago. This created complications. Fortunately, the computer-store-owner-person deferred to the top of a microwave, upon which two moderately serious-looking (but vaguely dusty) pieces of networking equipment were perched. He brought one down to within sneezing range.

Glance: 3Com. Dusty.

First question: is it 10/100? It was an ostensibly intimidating device, vaguely reminiscent of my (10Mbps) Baystack enterprise-level gadget. We both assumed it was 16 ports at the time, though on later inspection (i.e. more than a cursory glance sufficient to fulfil the essential requirements of brand and ancillary textual information on the device’s front-plane, of which there was sparsely little) I discovered it was, in fact, a 12 port. As is the Baystack.

The speed, he assured me in enthusiastic tones, must be 10/100. “Are you kidding?” and then “Do you know how much these things cost?” I tried to tell him I’d bought a similar device (the 10Mbit Baystack) for $10 a few years ago, but he was in too much of a hurry. At any rate, I think the humour would have been wasted. His asking price was a mere $30. I could deal with that, for a rack-mount thing. What I really wanted was a smaller-than-rackmount switch with an internal PSU in a well-built metal casing, but for double the ports (so I thought, not realising there were only 12 — an 8 port switch was $30 also) and an internal PSU, it was sufficiently attractive. Bargain.

Having saved money on that (I was going to spend up to about $70 if there was a nice enough metal-enclosed switch), I was happy to spend a little more on the other thing I’d made the trip for, and ended up buying something nearly as good as the 16 port 10/100 switch that turned out to be a 12 port 10BaseT switch.

This second purchas is, largely, the fault of open-source software. aMSN had just released version 0.95, which incorporated MSN webcam support… on Linux. This was too cool to be true, and I had to see it in action! Logitech cameras seem to be the only ones with any kind of decent support on Linux (via V4L, if that means anything to anyone out there… do any regular-ish Linux users actually read this blog?), so it had to be one of them. They have a bottom-of-the-line version for about $40 or so, but I’d just saved money. So I spent $70 on the webcam instead.

Which subsequently blew up my computer.