November 12, 2007 by Omega.

I’ve been trying to keep relatively up-to-date with the progress of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project for a while now, and they have recently announced an incentive to donate. To help production get started they are offering participants their own XO laptop to give to a child in their own lives when they buy an XO laptop for a child in a developing country. Prices are expected to drop as production ramps up, but this offer is only available until the 26th of November. Check it out!

Give One Get One
Main OLPC Site

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October 9, 2007 by Omega.

As I was researching the possibility of replacing my Antec NSK1300’s power supply I came across one of the most interesting power supplies I have seen yet.

Pico Power Supply

It’s an itty-bitty power supply that is built directly onto the motherboard connector. It’s fanless and 96% efficient, but it does have a couple of downsides. One issue is that it runs on 12v, which is fine for car operation but it means that in the house you’ll need to use a little adapter outside of the computer. The larger downside, though, is that it is only 120 watts, which is insufficient for anything but very small, low power machines. The same website sells small 200 watt power supplies which would probably be able to support a microATX computer assuming the builder pays plenty of attention to using low power parts.

So, unfortunately, I don’t think any of those tiny power supplies would be a good replacement for my 300 watt Antec supply right now, but hopefully in the future they will offer a higher power version. Even a PSU that is 1/3 to 1/2 the size of a normal uATX would be a great savings in space. In the meantime if you’re looking to build a mini-ITX or other very small PC I’m sure it would be a very good supply to look into. If you do build such a machine let us know how it goes, or write a review on the wiki!

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September 10, 2007 by Omega.

I’ve been incredibly busy lately, so I haven’t had much time to work on the wiki. I spent about half an hour just cleaning up spam pages on the wiki due to some company in Malaysia that cheats in WOW for you. It’s unfortunate that people have tried to take advantage of the openness of the wiki, but I have not added any restrictions except to block the IP addresses that the company used.

As soon as I have more time available I will resume adding to the site. I’ve been trying to delay buying a new computer to wait for a price drop. When I do get started I’ll certainly be posting my progress.

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July 26, 2007 by Omega.

I received my micro-ATX case (Antec NSK 1300) yesterday and assembled it. I took a bunch of pictures of the process and will have a review up soon.

oh, and Electron Frog… wtf?

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July 18, 2007 by Omega.

I just ordered a new computer case to put my aging micro-ATX computer into. I ordered an Antec 1300 cube case to cut down on size and noise, we’ll see how it does. It was about $85 from zipzoomfly.com. When I get the case in I’ll be sure to document the experience and report what I discover about the case and the retailer.

This case is the beginning of my gradual computer upgrade. The next step will probably be to buy a 500 gig SATAII HDD and throw it onto my current computer. The last step is sort of an all-or-nothing thing; I’ll have to buy a motherboard, CPU, RAM, and video card all at once because none of them will be very useful on their own. (I could get by with the onboard video on the new mobo for a bit if I think video card prices are going to go down shortly, but it’ll get tiresome pretty fast.) I might decide to buy another 2gb of RAM later on, but I think the computer will run just fine with the first 2gb until RAM prices drop more. (DDR3 RAM is starting to come out, as it gets to be more reasonably priced high-end DDR2 RAM will come down in price too. Plus, the mobo I plan to buy has support for DDR3 RAM.)

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July 14, 2007 by Omega.

After quite a bit of work the team has been able to finish up upgrading the wiki to the most recent version of MediaWiki. The domain links directly to the new wiki now, but you may have to refresh the page to get it to show up the first time.

The wiki looks best in Firefox or IE7, there are some known issues with previous versions of IE. Let us know if you have any other problems.

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July 10, 2007 by Omega.

Both domains now link directly to the wiki’s main page. A good amount of information for beginning computer builders has already been written and is available. Also, we have gotten the site ready for ads and can now start trying to make up our hosting costs.

There are still a number of important pages we need written, any green link is a page we plan to have that hasn’t been created yet. Access for creating and editing pages is still almost unrestricted, you don’t even have to sign up to work on articles.

We now have a Wikipedia page! Hopefully this will help get our site increased search engine hits and draw people to the site.

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June 29, 2007 by Omega.

The site is coming along nicely. The wiki is up, currently at www.electronfrog.com/wiki. We plan to replace the page at electronfrog.com with the main wiki page soon.

There are a few articles up on the wiki already and the system is ready for editing by the public, so feel free to help us out! The orange links are to pages that haven’t been created yet, if you click them you will get the opportunity to make them.

Alpha has ordered and received shipment of parts for a new computer and he has begun to assemble it. He will be documenting the experience and benchmarking and reviewing the components soon. If you have a review or benchmarks you’ve taken please write an article on the wiki!

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June 27, 2007 by Omega.

The Frog funds the site somehow, but he certainly has a frog-sized attention span.

Just ignore him.

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