[E3-hacking] Running an IRC bot on the E3 ~ OT

[Matt Evans]

Dear Ralph,


Hello!  Hope you are well, it's been a while since we last emailed and  
I hope everything's tootling along nicely for you.  I saw your message  
on the E3 list,

On 9 Aug 2008, at 14:05, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

> BTW,
> does anyone have an opinion on the TI OMAP-based BeagleBoard for  
> USD149?

... and I thought I'd mention that I've just picked one up this week  
-- I had originally ordered it from Digi-Key to the USA (with the view  
to picking it up there at some point) but they noticed I had a UK  
billing address, phoned up and declared they'd changed their minds and  
they DO ship to the UK now.  (It was originally marked as export  
restricted!)  So, they sent it via UPS courier to me for a total of  
£82+VAT (which works out about £10 more than the dollar price  
including $5 shipping to 'somewhere in the US').  Not too bad, I  
thought.

Anyway - the board is very cute and clearly hugely powerful.  I note  
that TI have actually released some free compilers for their C64+ DSP  
core in it, too, but even ignoring that the ARM Cortex-A8 is a super  
chip.  I have literally just received the board and consequently have  
only had an evening to play with it (almost got it booting from my  
dodgy CF card, the demo rootfs then trashes my ext2 partition -- but I  
figure as long as there's a working kernel I'm alright).

Of course it was an impulse buy and I don't actually have a use for it  
yet, but I figure something will occur... :D  (MythTV/DVB MPEG2 player  
for upstairs over WiFi, or playstation emulator or something?) :)




All the best,



Matt