Category: Geek

18-year-old Eagle Scout Richard Robbins has built a PC with 37 working operating systems!. The six hard drive box includes BeOS, OS/2 Warp IV and a million flavors of Linux, not to mention Windows 1.0. The mischevous little wirehead built the box after a cyberpundit claimed it couldn’t be done. After he proved otherwise, he drove from Southern Utah to the Maximum PC offices in Brisbane, CA to show it off.

These kids today! Why, when *I* was a kid, we didn’t even have a stinkin’ operating system, we used to have to poke little holes in paper…with our teeth! Now THAT was computing…

The Hardware Geeks are running a first annual Skinning Contest (for creating skins for such popular programs as WinAmp3, WinMeda8, Mozilla 1.2 and others). Prizes include a Leadtek Nforce2 motherboard. Check out the site for a full list of skinable interfaces and prizes.

A number of anti-spam initiatives are underway using Baye’s Theorem to analyze email contents to classify incoming email and recognize spam. I’ve been using POPFile, which is a cross-platform Perl script that you train. POPFile runs as a proxy on your desktop — useful if you don’t own/control your mail server. More Thoughts and Background

Just a reminder — the Leonid meteor shower has officially begun, and will be going strong all weekend until it peaks sometime on Tuesday. This year is supposed to be a spectacular show, especially on the East Coast which should have the best viewing for the peak. Go to Space.com for more information on where and when to best see the Leonids.

Jim Leftwich, a grossly underappreciated artist, big thinker and interface designer, gets a bit of his due today at Wired News. His WAY before its time CyberPort Desktop (painstakingly built, pixel by pixel, with Mac II-era SuperPaint) was one of the big inspirations for our Beyond Cyberpunk! HyperCard project. Jim got on board with BCP in a big way and continued to do bleeding edge art that blew our minds on a nearly daily basis. You can see a number of images of his CyberPort with the article.

Congrats, Jim! You deserve it (and LOTS more).

[Thanks to Jay Townsend!]

I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t tried it… here’s my experience using Intel’s Application Accelator to achieve WinBench disk improvements of 34% on a Win 2000 box, and 19% on an XP. Done by some form of disk pre-fetch, I believe.

Check it out, it really works, and it’s a free download from Intel.