Santa, in the form of my wife and daughter, really came through this year. Ry got me a Dell ST2010 HDMI monitor to use with my beagleboard. I think she saw the mammoth CRT TV I had hooked up to it and thought I deserved something more modern. I have it hooked up to the board now and have switched the default mode from tv-out to hdmi-out in the boot script. It will be really nice to be able to compare both digital and analog displays for beaglebox, once I manage to get X running on the board.
The other cool toy I got is a Lilliput USB monitor. It's a small USB connected display that I intend to use with the BeagleBoard but may also look at incorporating in some projects at work. At the moment, I don't have it running – just haven't gotten to it yet. I've seen some examples of it running, including on the BeagleBoard. But those all run under ubuntu. What fun is that? I'll get it working under my own distro and with fedora later. Currently its connected to my dev box at home running Fedora but I don't have the driver modules built for it yet.
For myself, I finally bought another USB drive for my mythtv server to replace a WD that died last year. This one is larger – 1.5TB – but is still a WD. I have lots of WD externals both at home and work so the one that died is mostly just an anomaly. Now I can get all my DVDs back online so I can have something to watch while I work. I think the power supply on my MythTV server is insufficient for these external drivers, however. I've already had one hiccup in transferring files to the new drive and the motherboard doesn't even boot if the 1TB+ drives are plugged in at hardware reset. A replacement system will run about $110, which is pretty cheap. A similar system with a nice case for the bedroom (my wife wants me to hook up the internet TV in there like I did in the living room) goes for about $150, both from Newegg. The latter also costs more for a slightly better on-board video.
So it was a good holiday and parts costs are going down so it may be a merry spring too. Now if I could just find an honest hardware recycler in the area – just don't know who to trust in that field. I'd hate to hand it off only to have it pollute some 3rd world fishing village.
Interesting. For recycling, have you considered http://www.bococo.org/ ?
Hadn’t heard of them. Looks interesting, but it seems mostly interested in refurbishing old stuff. My stuff may not even work. I know the miniITX board is dead. And I have some very old motherboards, maybe older than P3 (not even sure what they are I’ve had them so long). I’ve got a dead scanner, a possibly dead old Epson, some dead power supplies, dead CD/DVD drives, a possibly working cheapo Lexmark laser printer, and three old cases (2 HPs and a no-name case). I even have a dead motor from my heater fan. In other words, a bunch of junk I don’t want going into a landfill or being shipped overseas to go in their landfills. There must be someone who melts this stuff down and pulls out the useful molecules.
Anyway, I’ll check with them. Thanks Davide.