Vennëa 

This is my personal computer, the one I do all development on. Vennëa runs on an AMD Duron at various speeds between 800 and 950 MHz (900 MHz at the time of writing). She has 512 Mb of RAM and 21 Gb of HDD. The operating system of choice is Debian GNU/Linux, with Windows 98 thrown in as a bit of an afterthought (I like the occasional game). Vennëa also has a SCSI bus with a NEC DVD drive (and a Ricoh CD rewriter. It uses a Sun (Sony, really) GDM-20D10 20-inch monitor, one of the prettiest large screens I've ever encountered. Before you ask, yes, the monitor took some kludging before it agreed to work on a bog-standard Voodoo3 3000, but the results were worth it (though my thoughts on the matter were very different while I was rewiring a KVM switchbox with heavily shielded cable and experimenting with composite sync, all the while fearing the video board would die in agony at every test). Watching DVDs on this one is a pleasure, especially with the added benefit of a Hi-Fi amplifier connected to the audio. When the machine had a K6 CPU, the DXr3 DVD decoder was pretty handy, but it posterised colours ― now the machine can play DVDs without an extra RISC CPU, and the colours are better (and can play DVDs under Linux, too). The nice Primax Colorado scanner that was previously attached to Vennëa's parallel port will no longer reach, so I'm using it as an in-tray. I hope to think of some ingenious way to make the cable reach again without resorting to moving too much hardware around the room.

Vennëa is the Zuchroshtan moon goddess. She's a typical fertility goddess, associated with most of the things that go with female moon-related fertility goddesses, and then some: love, war, destruction as a first step to creation, writing, medicine, and is a symbol of leadership. Zuchroshtan society is a matriarchy and some theorise this last aspect of Vennëa was added artificially to keep the (exclusively female) priesthood in power.

Change Log

2002-06-13

A Radeon 7500 dual-head, three-output card has replaced the Voodoo. The DxR3 decoder was removed from the system. It wasn't used at all, anyway.

2002-06-30

128 Mbytes of SDRAM just went kasplut. Ouch. On the other hand, Vennëa now has a brand spanking new ATI Radeon 7500 with twin framebuffers and really good 2D (and 3D) acceleration. And it talks composite sync, so my Sun monitor is catered for.

2002-07-02

The dead memory was replaced. And more. The machine now has a whopping 512 Mbytes of RAM. Not so long ago, I had less disk space. Wa-hey.