Archive for the 'Hardware' Category


Multihead PC

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006

More than once I’ve wished for a second (or third) set of keyboard/mouse/video for my main desktop. Linux is a true multiuser operating system which means that it’s capable of hosting multiple graphical logins at the same time. For MOST things, a single, modern CPU is more than adequate to deal with this [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

CDROM drives with yellow exclamation point in Windows XP

Friday, September 1st, 2006

I ran into something I hadn’t yet seen firsthand today. A PC (running Windows XP home) with 2 optical drives (CD-RW and DVD drive). However, neither cd drive showed up in My Computer and both of them had a yellow exclamation point in the device manager listing. Of course, two drives don’t [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tools of the trade - USB2.0 to IDE & SATA Cable

Friday, September 1st, 2006

Today is the first chance I”ve had to try out my new usb/ ide adapter “in the field”. I have previously used external ide enclosures for either laptop (2.5″) or desktop (3.5″) drives as well as larger (5.5″ cdrom’s) But, it was a bit of a nuisance to have to remove the drive [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Recovering lost files

Monday, August 28th, 2006

There’s an article at linux.com that gives a good overview of using testdisk and PhotoRec. Testdisk should be able to recover at the partition level and PhotoRec should be able to just pull the files out of a damaged partition. Truth is Hard drives fail in a number of different ways and some [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Skype and USB phones….

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

I’ve seen skype I just haven’t used it personally until very recently. In fact there was a place (dialpad?) that I had used once upon a time for a few free long distance calls online. It was neat, but had some limitations (delay). It quickly became non-free and frankly the microphone I [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Strange net problems with a Netgear FS608 switch

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

This was weird and now that the switch is replaced I haven’t been able to duplicate it, but let me explain. There was a netgear fs608 (8 port unmanaged) switch plugged into a linksys router (model number not noted.) The cable was straight (although the fs608 has support for link through straight or [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

The stratellite revisited

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

NO, I didn’t mean to type satellite. Stratellite. This is an idea that I’ve written on before and I think it has some interesting possibilities. The idea is to positition a large airship (helium balloon of sorts) in the stratosphere. Put it above the steering currents of the jet stream and [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Mythtv based hardware available from monolith

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

The title really says most all, it looks like you can get a preconfigured mythtv box starting at $695. Prebuilt, preconfigured no muss/no fuss. (No subscription fees like the tivo’s…)
Popularity: 1% [?]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Is the firmware current?

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

The other day I was struggling with something that should have worked “out of the box”. It was a little wireless bridge (Linksys WET54G Wireless-G Ethernet Bridge). The idea was to just connect it to the pc and it would just work. Well…. in a word NO. It “sort of worked”, [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Massive Dell Laptop Battery recall

Monday, August 14th, 2006

This is worth reading if you’ve got a Dell laptop. There have been numerous stories in recent months of Dell laptops exploding into flames and it looks as though now over 4 million batteries from their inspiron, Latitude and Precision laptops are being recalled. The manufacture dates range from April 2004 to July [...]

Popularity: 1% [?]

Google
 
Web www.averyjparker.com

Internet Storm Center Infocon Status