The other toy I alluded to last post was an Athlon64 x2 based system. I bought a chip, motherboard, some RAM and a couple of SATA disks.

It was a lot easier to put together than the last machine I built - I remember faffing with a heatsink for an original Athlon 500Mhz chip and almost breaking the board with the amount of force required to get everything to fit. This one all just clipped together and the new case has things which just unclip rather than fifty billion screws.

The graphics card was the hardest to fit but that was because Dabs shipped me the wrong one - an AGP card for a PCI-E slot. They still haven't quite sorted this out for me yet and they don't do phone support any more and seem quite slow at processing their webnote things. Ho hum. Noodles suggested I might have an old PCI graphics card lying around so it's currently using my Matrox Millenium card just fine.

Like the phone, there's a pile of things that need configuring up on it but I have at least managed a Debian amd64 install and given the mirror move have put it on unstable for now. Hopefully soon I'll have it setup to build xfce for me - should be a lot faster than bounce anyway.

Anyway, not much playing for me this weekend; I'm at the beer festival and then partying on Sunday.

Woo! One of my new toys arrived this weekend and I now have a Nokia 9300i. It's a phone-cum-PDA but it's not too big and the idea is I'll eventually replace my 6300i with it and maybe change providers.

It does indeed work and the interface is a little odd but I think that's just me getting used to Symbian. I got it working with my AP after I realised which field was SSID and which one was merely a nickname for the network (after all using SSID would confuse people wouldn't it?). So then I grabbed putty to it (zipped) and realised it didn't come with any unzip program. I think there's a lot I need to configure up before I'm entirely happy but I'm getting there.

The big issue I have at the moment is getting at its address book. It supports SyncML but the only Free syncml tools are multisync which connected but then didn't work (I've yet to tcpdump) and some 76meg Java based monstrosity called sync4j which just scares me. All I want is some text and numbers from the phone after all. Gnokii has its own applet that installs on the phone that I've yet to try; this might end up being the most sane approach after all.

Once I have the addressbook swapped over I think I can use it as my main phone and then the other configuration bits will just fall out as I work things out.

My other toy also arrived today ;)