After much fiddling, I seem to have been able to get my domain techfornonprofits.com to map directly to this blog, which is hosted with bloodspot.com. For a week or two it seemed it was lost in the ether, and I’m still not exactly sure what fix finally was. But, between Google/Blogger, and my domain host at Network Solutions, it looks as if the DNS records have finally got sorted out. Techfornonprofits, the blog was started when the Blogger program was relatively new, before it was purchased by Google. My first entry was in February of 2001 which seems like ancient history now.

I’m trying to sell a few DocBoxes. These are industrial-strength Mini-Itx machines originally sourced from Logic Supply. The have AOpen cases and motherboards, using Intel Celeron chips, with 1 meg of memory, a 60 or 80 Gig hard drive, and a CD or DVD-ROM. I originally had them loaded with Windows XP embedded, or Windows 7 embedded, but have reformatted them to use Xubuntu, which is Ubuntu configured to use the XCFE interface, a lightweight front end which seems to work well with the limited 1 meg of RAM on these machines. The best thing that I liked about this was a stock installation of Xubuntu automatically found the wireless network interface, and my wireless router and my printer. With XP and Windows 7 I had to go rooting around to find drivers for both of these things.

Nothing precludes running the boxes on Windows…I’ve tried it with a stock Windows 7 Professional installation as well as the embedded versions. In their original lives, they were running Windows XP Embedded. The units might have a number of applications:

• Granny or kiddie workstation 
• Thin client
• Industrial controller
• Process controller
• Mini file or media server 
• Lightweight web server  

The picture shows the docbox with a Logitech Orbit camera on top, which was the original configuration. I’m experimenting with how best to advertise and sell these, with a couple options, Craigslist, eBay via Global Garage, a third-party seller, and Do-It-Myself eBay.