I really enjoyed “The Anubis Gates” a while back and when I was purchasing my $50 worth of free ebooks for my Sony Reader I made sure to pick a book by Tim Powers. I was disappointed.

Set around the time of WWII, “Declare” follows Andrew Hale who signs up with a British secret service agency inside the secret service. Running through Europe, the Middle-East, and Turkey, Hale tries to find out what the Russians are searching for, what’s the secret of their power, and what’s living on top of Mount Ararat.

I loved this book, Powers had me hooked on the first page. He bounces around in time and location but I was always able to follow the story. He did a great job weaving an alternate history around actual events and actual spies. I was sorry when the book was done. Luckily he’s written a half dozen or so that I haven’t read yet.

This was also the first book I read on my Reader. After the first few pages I didn’t even notice it was a real book. It was a bit annoying when I wanted to skip back a few pages to review something, but otherwise it was a great experience.

Two major updates, one by choice and one by necessity.

Laptop

Although I was able to revive my laptop from the previous hiccup, this time true-death came upon it when the extern brick stopped charging the battery. I found a new one for $75 but decided I didn’t want to put any more money into a seven year old laptop.

I played around with the idea of getting a MacBook, and came close, but I’m cheap and decided I really didn’t need to spend $1500, so instead I did some digging to find a good Linux compatible model and settled on a Lenovo 3000 N100 which buy.com had one sale; $704 with shipping. It arrived on Tuesday after ordering it on a Thursday, before the shipping e-mail was sent.

I backed up the Vista installation kit and put Ubuntu Feisty on it. I was impressed, the only tweak it needs was a manual build of alsa which was clearly documented on the Unbuntu wiki site. So far I’m really happy with it, it even sleeps, hibernates, and shows my battery life!

Server

Given my string of good luck with the laptop I decided it was time for a long overdue upgrade of my server. I was still running a much hacked four year old instance of Debian Woody that had been through two servers and many hard drive upgrades.

I bought three 320GB PATA drives from Fry’s ($70 a piece!) and a 320GB external Seagate drive to backup my current server onto. Unfortunately, I only had three IDE compatible power cables in my Dell SC420 box and rather than wait I decided to stick with two 320GB drives in a RAID1 array rather than the RAID5 configuration I had originally intended.

I found an article on upgrading a RAID1 array to RAID5, so if and when I run out of space I may give that a try. I installed Debian etch and so far everything is running great. USB is even working on my server which it never did with the 2.4 Linux kernel. I have a few more settings to tweak and I’ll be done.