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 equip it with the ability to stay in a fixed place for months at a time. Also, put antennas on it. For what? Whatever you need…. cell phone coverage… a wireless internet transceiver of some sort? etc.
Category: Hardware
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Mythtv based hardware available from monolith
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…)
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Is the firmware current?
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”, the problem is the pc didn’t receive the dhcp address, so I had to manually set it. I didn’t know the correct gateway information (should it be the bridged device ip or the REAL gateway.) At one point I got dns lookups working, but routing to the internet was not working, then the access point got pulled off a shelf and EVERYTHING stopped working. Checking in on the bridge would show it was just cycling through the WPA handshake process over and over and over.
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Massive Dell Laptop Battery recall
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 18, 2006. There is a Dell site for this issue www.dellbatteryprogram.com. Realistically, the new lithium ion batteries are trying to pack a large power density into a small space and if something goes wrong, it can go BAD wrong….
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Lenovo to preload Suse linux on thinkpads
The Channelinsider is reporting that Lenovo will be the first tier one OEM to preinstall a linux distribution on generally available PC’s. For years, you either had to order large volume, or find a smaller name system builder to get linux preinstalled. Now, Lenovo will start offerning Novell’s Suse Linux on their Thinkpad T60p mobile workstation.
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List of Vendors for Linux preinstalled PC’s
The forums over at LXer.com have a good list underway of vendors that sell linux preinstalled on PC’s (desktops and laptops.) They also list those vendors that sell pcs without an operating system.
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Wiping cd-r/rw and dvdr/rw media
It looks like those shredders that take on optical media nor the physical scraping of the reflective surface is enough for some…. Plextor will be marketing a drive designed to wipe optical media (cd-r/rw dvd+-r/rw single or dual layer.) It essentially fries the colored dye on the disc and it seems that it would be very difficult to reconstruct anything from the results.
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Another attempt at different hardware problems
I mentioned some time ago a frustrating issue with the hardware on my desktop that I had finally solved. I got the new system Which was a 64-bit AMD Athlon on an Asus k8N4-E board and a pci-express nvidia based card (6200 TurboCache), 1 GB of memory… Things worked very nice for a while, rock solid stable and no issues. But the one day, I noticed…. “where did my tvcard go”. There were 2 pci slots, one I had used for a tvcard, the other for an addon sound card.
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Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405
Well, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD405 that I ordered from Amazon has arrived today (ordered the 5th of July, arrived the 11th with the “slow boat” free shipping option.) I’ve had it long enough to charge batteries, set time and do a few still pictures and a few short video clips. So, these will be my initial impressions, and I’ll likely follow up later with further thoughts/experience/etc. This was certainly not a small purchase for us and I spent quite a bit of time narrowing down choices. I really wanted a dvd based recorder. The idea of having it already in a format that we could archive was a real plus there. Yes, I might pull it onto the computer for editing, but life will be much simpler if I don’t HAVE to….
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Lexar Jumpdrive Firefly recall
USB thumb drives seem fairly simple, nothing hazardous…. but Lexar has recalled several models of the Firefly series as well as the JumpDrive Secure II, 1GB model. The affected Firefly sizes are… 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB. They apparently have a “risk of burns to consumers and property damage.” I would assume the risk is ONLY when they’re plugged in to a USB port. I wonder if it has to do with the circuit for the LED light. USB provides 5 volts power and LED’s can be quite particular about getting the exact voltage needed. In a LED circuit you usually have a resistor to bleed off the un-necessary voltage. Once I built a light with about 18 white LED’s and I ran into a “design failure” in my first attempt (didn’t take into account the wattage rating for the LED.) and so the first mockup had a smoking resistor.