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I’ll be replacing my current M0n0wall setup with this board.

The board has it’s own DC-DC converter and power supply so it’ll happily run of any AC Adapter from 7-18v DC with a center positive connector.

A nice touch is the USB ports, not just because they’re USB because because of the higher quality connector used here. These black USB connectors are very rare, the only other place I’ve seen them used is on the black Apple Macbooks.

In the rear, we have three Ethernet jacks, each with it’s own VIA chip on the board. The serial port is used for communication mostly during the inital setup, there’s no VGA on board.

Sandisk’s Extreme III 1GB CompactFlash card in the ALIX’s CF slot working as a solid state hard drive. It’s a bit overkill considering m0n0wall doesn’t need more than 8MB.

There’s also a 44-pin IDE header, should you want to use a 2.5” laptop hard drive instead. To the left is the parallel port header.

The AMD Geode LX800 500MHz processor, very low power, doesn’t need a heatsink with 256MB of soldered-on DDR memory.

ALIX2C3 Specifications:

500MHz AMD Geode LX800 processor, 256MB DDR RAM, CompactFlash and PATA, built-in power supply, Mini-PCI slot, triple Ethernet, Parallel port, Serial Port and USB.

PC Engine’s ALIX2C3, a compact and energy efficient router platform from Switzerland.

The web browser is a lot more usable than the one I tried out with the earlier 3.1x firmware on the original PSP. It makes for an excellent web comic reader.

Strangely enough, the PSP I bought is a Japanese import. I’m not sure how the shop owner in that part of the city, the part that’s not exactly the pride of our commercial enterprises, got a hold of it and sold it for less than what it would’ve cost me anywhere else on the planet.

And it was sealed in shrink wrap, factory loaded with 3.90 firmware.

So I’ve bought a PSP that I cannot think of a way to pay for at the moment, without a memory card or game disc for the same reasons above which effectively makes it an expensive, glossy, paperweight.

A 1909 map of Hyderabad, this is how things were until about 1948-1956.

Sony PSP 2000 (Slim & Light) First Impressions:

It’s slimmer. And lighter. It doesn’t feel like an expensive piece of electronics, like how the original PSP was. There’s no heft. There’s a lot of glossy everywhere. It’s a lot lighter. Feels like toy, a very well made toy, but toy, nonetheless. Whereas with the original PSP you’d be careful with handling it because it felt so expensive, this is more or less has the carefree feel of a Gameboy. I’m not sure if I like that. For some mindsets like my own, lighter is often associated with cheaper so in this respect the new PSP doesn’t impress out of the box like the original PSP did. The plastics look nice and are firmly attached to whatever’s inside. Sometimes you get the feeling that something might fall off or break if you stare at it too hard. This is probably because while everything feels solid enough, the plastics aren’t of the highest quality, which is to be expected, I guess, of a throwaway purchase like a handheld video game system. I suppose it’s a trend of sorts. Or a result of cost cutting. But even with all of these quibbles, it’s absolutely mesmerizing once you turn it on.

I’m going to go and do that now. Again.

Shiny new PSP 2000.

I went out to buy a cheap flash, I came home with a portable video gaming system.

The trip the Abit IX38 took to get here:

1. California, USA
2. Alaska, USA
3. Hong Kong
4. Philippines
5. Singapore
6. Mumbai, India
7. Hyderabad, India

Ants have taken shelter inside of my aluminium Apple keyboard and have eaten away whatever that’s inside that makes my TAB key work.

A final shot before I put them away until the power supply arrives.