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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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 [...]

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If you install Ubuntu on a machine that came with Windows pre-installed you have the choice of preserving Windows and chose each time you boot which operating system to run. By default, the boot menu will list the current Linux kernel, followed by any older Linux kernel versions, followed by a memory test and finally [...]

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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 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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I recently upgraded a Windows XP machine from Internet Explorer 6 to IE 8. Since then I’ve been getting warnings whenever I wanted to run any .EXE file that doesn’t use code signing off a network drive.
My main browser on that machine is FireFox, but that doesn’t matter. The warning that comes up is the [...]

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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, [...]

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