Scott Yang's Playground

Via AWS Blog, zBox is a PowerPC-based NAS box that automatically backs up itself to Amazon S3, so that you have the short latency advantage of LAN storage, and redundancy of online storage at the same time. They can even detect degrading disk drives and send you a new one preemptively. After several disk drive [...]

Bought an “almost new” HP iPAQ H5550 Windows Mobile 2003 device this week, via this Deals Direct offer. It got delivered on Tuesday, but I have only managed to charge it up and have a try today. It is my second Pocket PC device. Hence my issue. With this new iPAQ, I now have 2 [...]

The wireless access point that I bought almost 3 years ago is dying! It actually started a few weeks ago, probably around Christmas, that its signal strength just gradually dropping. AP sits inside the study room, and we used to get Good to Excellent connection from our bedroom. But now the signal strength is always [...]

Bought a webcam from eBay for $23 — yes one of those $0.01 win + $22.99 posted from China. Very average cam at this price point — 350k pixel CCD that does 640×480 at 15fps or 320×240 at 30fps. Powered by USB with a built in mic, it also sports 6 LED that emits weak [...]

New toy! While Sony has just released their new DRX-800UL double-layer external DVD burner, I have had a chance to grab a used retired model, DRX-700UL, off eBay for around one third of its retail price – delivered. It sports 8x maxiumum DVD±R write speed, 2.4x dual layer speed, USB2 and Firewire (iLINK in Sony’s [...]

Yeah. Which one? It is so hard to decide… Xbox 360 Or Playstation 3 Both of them running cell processor that is in the same architecture as PowerPC G5. Oh so yummy. I just feel that I can put all those teraflops into good use. But the likeliness of having any one of them sitting [...]

HowStuffWorks.com runs a series on how lightsabre works. That looks useful – only if a down ‘n’ out Jedi Master can sell his one to me for quick cash…