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"Too much data" now backed up

Picture of IDE cage, powered upThe IDE cage (or perhaps card) seems to be happy under lighter loads. It has space on the board for a FireWire socket, and the manual speaks of it being dual-mode, so I’m guessing that the difference between the $50 USB2 version and the $85 dual-mode version is one fifteen-cent socket and one extra hole in the back panel.

I’m amazed by how much trouble went into getting the blue power light to look trendy. The light is provided by blue LEDs in the ends of perspex rods, which appear to have deliberately induced optical flaws in them to produce a deliberately speckled lighting effect. Each of the three lit sides has a parabolic reflector behind it and a black grille. Disk activity is shown with a red LED on the right side of the front panel, which causes the panel to flash to purple during disk activity. In the photo above, the camera somehow caught the reflector at the back of that (clear-cased) LED, which is almost invisible to the human eye. I wish they’d put as much effort into the electronics as they had into the styling.

Now that we have a known-good copy (rsync checksums say so, anyway), the machine is on its way to becoming Mandriva 10.25 (ie, current Cooker, and thank you to Pacific Internet for an excellent WAIX-connected and rsync-able Mandrake/Mandriva mirror) and its owner is already delighted by the new features. Apparently The GIMP 2.2.7 can import Flash (.swf) files now,although I don’t see it in the ChangeLogs.

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