Joe Wein’s blog

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 simple 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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The new Acer AspireRevo R3600 (Acer AspireRevo R3610-U9012) that combines a dual core Atom 330 processor with the Nvidia Ion platform was introduced at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin in September. It is just one of several interesting new nettops coming out now that will offer significantly more processing power, especially for video [...]

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Last month my Gateway GT4014j suddenly died and I replaced it with an Acer Aspire M5201, which came with 2 GB of memory installed. That was less than the 3 GB I had in the Gateway and it affected some very memory hungry apps I use. So three weeks later I did a memory upgrade [...]

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Since last week I have a new computer, after my old Gateway GT4014j died after three years of constant use. It had greeted me with a Blue Screen of Death on a sad Monday morning. If I rebooted, the machine would always lock up again within minutes: Bad news!
I hooked up the main drive (a [...]

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If you find yourself needing to read and write hard disks from other computers and do not always want to transplant them into a computer or an empty USB drive chassis, the NewerTech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter is a great solution. It handles just about any format:

3.5″ SATA (1.5 or 3.0 GBps, Molex [...]

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