Joe Wein’s blog

I’ll be moving to a new house next week, my first move in a decade. To make the switchover as smooth as possible I decided to set up and test the broadband connection and router at the new location ahead of the move, so I’d only have to bring along my PCs and everything should [...]

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Often when I post on my blog, I get a linkback from another blog that has repackaged my posting. While I like other bloggers quoting from my site, many backlink-sites I come across look completely automated. They contain nothing but machine-generated quotes taken from fresh human-generated blog postings that have just appeared on other sites. [...]

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The GuruPlug Server Plus that I ordered from GlobalScale Technologies in February finally arrived around the middle of May, about two weeks later than anticipated.
These ARM-based Linux computers draw a mere 5-6 Watt of power at idle according to my WattChecker Plus, yet provide as much port connectivity as a regular notebook or desktop [...]

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I had a scary experience today because one of my Windows PCs “blue screened”, i.e. it crashed. While the “Blue Screen of Death” was fairly common in Windows 95 and 98, it is unusual to see it on any healthy machine running Windows 2000, XP, 2003 or 2008 Server, Vista or Windows 7.
Since the [...]

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Over the years, Intel and its microprocessors have become a household name, recognized by millions of PC users. However, far more people own computers based on ARM processors without ever having heard of that CPU – it’s their mobile phones. More than a billion mobile phones are sold worldwide every year, each one more [...]

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Gizmodo reported about a Gadget shown at CES 2010 that supposedly harvests energy from a wireless hotspot. The “RCA Airnergy WiFi Hotspot Power Harvester” consists of a small battery, a USB connector and some circuitry that is supposed to convert wireless signals into DC power to top up the battery. The gadget can then be [...]

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I recently upgraded a secondary hard disk in a Windows machine from a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1 TB drive to a Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS 1.5 TB drive. Mirror imaging the data off the old drive to the new drive using the Linux dd utility from an Ubuntu live CD went very smoothly and [...]

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Last week I updated my Gateway M-6750 from Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 (“Karmic Koala”) and managed to get myself into a right mess, as I lost access to both my wired and wireless internet connections. I then burnt an Ubuntu 9.10 live CD from an ISO image dowloaded with uTorrent and reinstalled from [...]

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Recently two hard disks died in my household, both of which were Windows boot disks, just as if I needed a reminder how quickly one can lose important data. This and some troubles while upgrading my Gateway M-6750 notebook from Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 (“Karmic Koala”) prompted me to get some spare hard disks [...]

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The Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor P4460 by P3 International is a popular gadget in North America for measuring power usage by electronics and electrical appliances. You simply plug it into the wall socket and plug the appliance into the device and it will give you instant read-outs of power usage in Watt, [...]

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