The TEFAF is long gone and still it’s been nearly a month since my last post. Anyway, I have made a decision: from this day forward I shall name the posts that are about new stuff I got “The new stuff chronicles #x” and today is #1.
The new stuff chronicles will be a new series of posts here on Pingwing.us purely and only for new stuff I receive as gifts or which I buy or otherwise aquire. Today I have some new things I got through second hand internet trading and something I got from a classmate a whole while ago, but I haven’t told the world about that yet and something I got for free from another classmate, also a whole while ago…
So what is the stuff that’s going to be shown is this post:
- 2x Nortel Networks Baystack 450 24T Ethernet Switch
- 1x DAP Audio DJ-Station
- 1x HP Laserjet 3150 multi functional printer
Let’s start with the switches
Baystack 450 24T
The Baystack 450 24T is a 24 port fast ethernet switch which is fully managable. Fast ethernet means that it supports up to 100mbit/s rather than only 10mbit/s like the Baystack 310 24T or the Cisco Catalyst 1924E which is displayed on this page.
Amoungst the things that this switch supports are VLAN, multi link trunking, spanning tree protocol and management through Telnet. There are ofcourse a lot more things supported by this switch, but those are probably the most notable.
Another interesting feature is the possibility to upgrade the switch with a cascade module in the back to enable 2.4gbit/s connections between up to 8 Baystack 450 switches. The cascade module connects the switches directly on their backplanes and more or less makes them function as one big switch and the best thing about that is that the cables required for this feature are standard SCSI cables which are relatively easy to find.
The only real downside of these switches is that they don’t have a built in uplink port. Allthough an uplink port of nothing more than a cross linked ethernet port, mostly the uplink port is faster and a 1000mbit/s uplink port would have been very nice. But an uplink port can be added with a fiber optic uplink module, but I have no use to fiber optics whatsoever.
And here is a picture of all my Cisco Systems routers and the switch and my three Baystack switches stacked on top of eachother:
DAP Audio DJ-Station
This is my mixer panel. Now you might ask what the use of a mixer panel is for home use, but I can tell you that the sound quality is much better with this thing connected between my computer and my speakers than with the speakers directly connected to the computer. And added to that I also experiment with audio (mainly vocals) on my computer and the recording quality of the microphone is also a lot better through the mixer than directly into the computer.
The DAP Audio DJ-Station has 8 stereo channels of which 4 can be used simultainiously. Which ones to use can be chosen with the little switches above each volume slider. It also has two seperate microphone input channels than are used independantly of the other channels. It has 3 stereo outputs on the back and an extra on on the front. The one on the front is the cue output, which is normally used to listen to a song by a DJ before actually playing it on the main output. It also has a main output which is a 2 channel stereo output, a booth output, which is pretty much the same but has it’s own volume knob and is meant speakers that the DJ himself listens too instead of the main speakers and it has a record output, which I connected back to my computer’s line-in.
Besides that it features some pretty useless but funny sounding soundeffects and echo and reverb for both the main/booth/cue output and for the microphone input.
HP Laserjet 3150
I got this cute little printer from a classmate who had upgraded his system with Windows Vista and this old bugger didn’t work with that anyway, so he got himself a new one and this one was standing in the way.
In Windows XP I still can’t use all of it’s features, but the main feature, printing, works just fine.
This thing is actually a fax machine as well as a printer, scanner and copier. To use it as a fax machine I would need to connect it to an analog telephone line, but I have no use for that feature and I haven’t tested the copier function as of yet and the scanner function doesn’t work on Windows XP. You’ll need Windows 9x/NT 4.0 for that feature. A shame really, but it just scans grayscale anyway, so it’s not that usefull.
