I am attempting to not have to replace my computer motherboard. My best diagnosis for the recent computer freezes: both SATA drives hooked up to it both go offline at the same time. So, a SATA controller problem seems likely. (If the whole southbridge has gone wonky, then I'm just out of luck ( Read more... )

Bruce Schneier asks Why not improve security by "[taking] those critical electrical grid computers off the public Internet?", and the discussion that follows is reasonably good ( Read more... )

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has released a kit for a 8-LED module that implements Conway's Life. You can plug larger numbers of modules together to create a large display. I've thought on and off about building a similar design (and even did some prototyping) based on LED matrix displays, so I think this is a very cool project ( Read more... )

I'm looking at the following ( Read more... )

I went to an interesting talk by Joe Jeddeloh of Micron. He showed off an example of the 1M-IOPS PCI Flash storage device they are developing, and talked about some of the design tradeoffs. The major win for them seemed to be doing a pure HW design rather than using an embedded processor, which let them get a much greater degree of parallelism ( Read more... )

Long, long ago I installed Mandrake 10.0 on my Linux box at home. I set it up with a RAID 1 configuration because I was sick of reinstalling whenever a hard drive went bad. (Previously I had just backed up home directories to a separate disk ( Read more... )

1. My motherboard SATA controller does not work with newer SATA drives. (150Mbps SATA vs. 300Mbps SATA, evidently ( Read more... )

Game computer is still dead. The new power supply checked out fine; after I installed it I got fans and LEDs and everything else expected, but didn't hook it up to the TV to make sure it booted ( Read more... )

I gave up on instant gratification and ordered this Adesso split keyboard (with touchpad) as a replacement for my dying Logitech.

I also got just as good a price at NewEgg for my replacement hard drives as I saw at Fry's. ($55 for 500GB 3.5" SATA.)

My gaming computer bricked: no lights, no fans. Naturally that led me to be suspicious of the power supply ( Read more... )