There is a new news site in town that has already become my de facto place to read tech news. Lobste.rs was founded by Joshua Stein as a response to getting banned from Hacker News. I never liked Hacker News very much but Lobste.rs is fantastic! It is invite only to avoid spam. If you need an invite, let me know.

This is also my first link log post. If you don’t know what that is, you probably haven’t read The Daring Fireball Linked List or Marco.org. You can differentiate link log posts by the arrow following the title. You can still link to the individual post here by clicking on the ∞ symbol that follows the date.

I came across a puzzling dilemma today as I was provisioning some Sun Fire V120 servers for some tests. Although somewhat old now, a 650MHz Sun Fire V120 with 3GB of memory does just fine for a lot of tasks like DNS, some basic mail processing, and static web content. One of the dilemmas I have faced in the past was running two disks in a RAID mirror. OpenBSD has had softraid(4) for quite a while but OpenBSD 5.1 adds support for the root filesystem on softraid(4) for amd64, i386, and sparc64 systems. There was only one problem.

I previously covered several different hardware builds for building your own Minecraft server. Martin, a good friend of mine, decided to go with the “Premium Mini-ITX Build” I had outlined. He is the person I had mentioned who introduced me to Minecraft to begin with. Martin and a few others have been working together on a very impressive Minecraft world. Especially for creative purposes, Minecraft becomes much more fun when you can all work together on amazing creations.

As I covered in the previous article about my first Ivy Bridge motherboard, the Asus Sabertooth Z77, the Ivy Bridge upgrade is more significant for the motherboard chipsets than for the processors themselves. Today, we are looking at the Asus Maximus V Gene, a Micro ATX board that is part of the Republic of Gamers series.

Although the form factor has its limitations, I continue to be fascinated with Mini-ITX systems. The newest Mini-ITX premium case is the SilverStone FT03-Mini. It has a similar but more compact form factor to the Micro ATX SilverStone FT03. I never ended up purchasing the FT03 but the FT03 Mini is on the top of my list. This morning, the FT03-Mini models showed up in stock at Newegg.

Yesterday, Apple released the latest update to OS X in the form of OS X 10.7.4. The OS X client delta update weighs in at just under 700MB and contains a variety of fixes. Along side both the OS X client and server updates, Apple also released two security updates for Snow Leopard, Safari 5.1.7, and Apple Remote Desktop 3.5.3 Client.

As of this past Sunday, Ivy Bridge processors are now officially available for sale. This article is intended as an initial guide to the available options and whether you should upgrade. Intel has only released some of the Ivy Bridge processors and the remaining models including all of the slower Ivy Bridge mobile processors will not be released until June. This article will only cover a selection of the available Ivy Bridge desktop processors.

A friend of mine introduced me to Minecraft about a year ago. It’s a very interesting and creative game. It’s a fun activity with our oldest son since you can build all sorts of amazing structures in the game. Most everyone I’ve played with likes the creative mode which is all about building and does not involve any monsters. In any case, if you are not familiar with the game, you can find out all about it at Minecraft.net.

In line with Intel’s tick tock roadmap of processor introductions, Ivy Bridge processors are officially available on April 29 as the tick. Earlier this month, the first motherboards featuring the new Z77, H77, and B75 chipsets started emerging. Although I don’t have an Ivy Bridge processor at this time, these new boards work perfectly with Sandy Bridge processors. This is a rundown of the some of the best boards so far.

As I have covered before, one of the major needs with the iPad if you want to use it for content creation, is an external keyboard. There are a few different options but one sticks out as my favorite.