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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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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While researching some information, I came across a Google hit that looked like what I was looking for, but when I opened the page, none of the text in the preview paragraph was there. Somebody must have fed bogus contents to GoogleBot to attract searches.
Instead of the expected information I found myself on a scareware [...]

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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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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. Its 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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