This weekend was pretty good. It wasn’t hot, so Michael and I got a lot of stuff done. The roof is almost completely patched now, only need a bit more super heat resistant roof caulking stuff to patch up the remaining hole around the chimney.
I’m finally getting a new network card for my silly old laptop. I looked at corded cards, one identical to my old one I can get on ebay for about $30 shipped, and for that price we decided that going wireless would be the best option. So I looked through a big list of cards, some USB, lots of pcmcia and cardbus. To my disappointment many of the pcmcia cards (no cardbus on my laptop) were either expensive or just not carried by major sellers anymore. I found a few that were good and being sold by NewEgg:
Netgear MA 111 USB Device, $36.99 (and $10 mail in rebate). – I seriously considered this, but I read a bunch of reviews of crappy windows support. Why is that so bad? Because if I were to get a USB wireless card, I’d want to use it on my workstation too, probably for lan parties, and at lan parties I’m in windows. If it works crappy in windows that wouldn’t be so good. Wasn’t sure we wanted to deal with USB lan in linux either *shrugs*
Belkin F5D6020 PCMCIA card $38 – This is good for a pcmcia card, and I found a few how-tos online, even for different chipsets it might have.
Microsoft MN-520 PCMCIA card $37.99 – Shockingly, this card has great reviews for it’s linux compatibility, and it’s pretty cheap.
In the end I decided to go with Belkin, on principle. I don’t want to give Microsoft more money than I have to. So yesterday Michael ordered the card from newegg. Yay!
A local friend of ours has a linksys router he wants to get rid of, so we’re planning on meeting him on friday night. We’ve never actually met, he dropped in #13thHour one day a few months back, so we’ve communicated via IRC and email for a while. Should be fun, I think we’ll go to a brewery or something. Yay for meeting new people!