I’ve just built a new computer. Back in the old days (~3 years ago) things were much easier. Anyone could build a computer (more or less). Now it seems things aren’t quite so simple. There are lots of new things to go wrong. Technology mismatches can cause sub optimal performance (best case), pointless expense or even cause the system to go up in smoke (worst case). I decided to share my research/results with others who might want to build a modern, high power, yet not too expensive machine (~$650).

Price/performance ratio is a big issue here. As a general rule, 1.5 steps from cutting edge is about where i want to be. Paying extra to get the latest of anything is rarely worth the money. Paying extra for the next .5GHz step in CPU speed is never worth the money. (IMHO)

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I recently bought a new cell phone. A Motorolla v3m from Verizon. It’s about time. I’ve felt a little behind the times not having a cool cell phone i could hack. It has NOT at all been a smooth ride so far. Although this is (mostly) a very boring story, I would love to have read it yesterday before spending hours trying to figure this out. hehe.
The Verizon/Motorola software for using the USB connection does NOT work out of the box as advertised. I plugged the USB cable into the phone and got a message saying it could not find the driver software for the device.

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Just a note. I just converted the site from Greymatter to WordPress. Hopefully nothing has been lost. I’m really liking it so far. It’s much prettier and easier to use. I have plans to convert most of the site content. Its much easier to update and manage now.

I especially like the easy moderation of comment in WordPresss. I had to turn comments off in  greymatter because the ability to delete/moderate was way too cumbersome. Spambots would fill up the comments with junk and it took way too long to moderate. It made the comments feature unusable.