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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

It’s been 15 months since I set up a Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 with open source Linux-based DD-WRT firmware as my main broadband router (see “DD-WRT on Buffalo WHR-HP-G54″, 2008-09-06). I’m happy to report that this US$70 router it is the most robust router I have ever used. It’s performance has been solid as a rock.
I’ve owned [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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, [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

I just came back from a fabulous 6 day trip to Utah, Arizona and Nevada with my family, retracing a tour there back in 1992 inspired by reading Edward Abbey’s “The Monkey Wrench Gang” which is set in the Four Corners area of the Southwestern USA. The Grand Canyon (North and South rim), Monument Valley, [...]

[Read more →]

Last weekend I got IPv6 working on my US$60 router, allowing all my machines here to talk IPv6 to the outside world. That includes an Ubuntu Linux server, 4 PCs and one Mac.
The biggest incentive for upgrading to IPv6 is the fact that at the current pace we’ll run out of (IPv4) IP addresses in [...]

[Read more →]

A recent survey amongst Japanese third year university students indicates that relatively few aim to join the well known companies producing the export products “made in Japan” that, economically speaking, put the country on the world map during the 20th century.
According to the list published in Nihon Keizai Shimbun (2009-02-23), five of the top [...]

[Read more →]

This week I bought myself a late Christmas present, a Sony PS-LX300USB turntable and there is a story behind that. I have a fairly large LP collection which I acquired mostly in the 1980s, mainly reggae and African music. Most of the about 450 LPs I found in record stores in the UK, others were [...]

[Read more →]