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Tech Blog
s1axter posted on Mon. September 18th 2006 at 01:17 PM PST
Well, GI has been kinda dead for a few days, that has been because right now I am in the midst of moving from Iowa to San Diego. I start my new job this coming Monday the 25th. Right now I am in Salt Lake City, Utah leaching wireless off a coffee shop AP and figured it would be a good time for a post.
Before I left Iowa I found a number of cool old (circa 1980) computer commercials on YouTube.com and wanted to post some of them here while on my little cross country trip. Rather than embed 5 videos at once I'm just going to provide the youtube.com links.
Not the most innovative post but fun for wasting some time, Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgTCE6PTXsE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUEI7mm8M7Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVHaHFp62ww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EntiJhQ9z_U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eXkkf8m8k0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5gelel83u4
s1axter posted on Thu. September 14th 2006 at 06:38 PM PST
I’ve wanted to put a PC in my car for a while. The closest I ever got was putting a 333Mhz laptop under the passengers seat. The computer ran Windows 98 without the GUI (MSDOS 7) and a MP3 player built for DOS connected to the AUX in on the stereo head unit. The MP3 program controlled an alphanumeric LCD mounted on the dash using a PS/2 keyboard next to the driver. The LCD part can be viewed in the PPORTLCD project here on GI.
While I thought my little setup was cool, this guy has taken it to the next level and done what I have dreamed of doing for years. A full multimedia PC with LCD built into the center console, and unlike other car PCs I’ve seen, this one looks sweet!
https://www.timekiller.org/carpc/index.php
The system is called Mazda PC and has 512Mb RAM, 80Gig drive, Bluetooth, Wifi, (no specs on the proc), runs Gentoo, and is all based on MythTV. This is one sick setup! I might get the cash to buy and LCD like this and make my own some day….boy doesn’t that sound familiar.
Gentoo Linux: http://www.gentoo.org/
MythTV Software: http://www.mythtv.org/
s1axter posted on Wed. September 13th 2006 at 09:28 PM PST
Have a CD? Have an empty cereal box? Why not make a spectrometer?
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~zhuxj/astro/html/spectrometer.html
Jerry Xiaojin Zhu did just that with his hacked together CD spectrometer . A spectrometer is a tool used to measure properties of light. Some interesting information can be obtained just by looking at the spectrum given off by different light sources such as a high pressure sodium lamp, CRT display or neon signs. The material that gives off or reflects the light can be determined by dark lines in the spectrum and gaps in the colors. While this is a little over my head and not really computer or hardware related, some geek out there loves this stuff, plus it’s made from a cereal box, that right there makes it cool.
Build one yourself and try it out, the person who emails me the craziest light source gets a cookie
Here’s the wikipedia page on spectrometers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrometer
s1axter posted on Tue. September 12th 2006 at 08:09 PM PST
How ubergeek are you? If you search the net looking for CPU schematics so you can make backgrounds you are cool in my book but most would label you "strange".
Well for those cool people out there I have stumbled across Stanford's VLSI Microprocessor Historical Data page. Complete with microprocessor stats including clock speed, die size, cache size and even images of microproc layouts. Next plan, backgrounds!
Here's the link:
http://www-vlsi.stanford.edu/group/chips_micropro.html
You might want to check out the main VLSI folder, there are some cool pages there too.
http://www-vlsi.stanford.edu/
UPDATE: As promised backgrounds (not tooo bad I think)
Intel 4004 - Intel4004(1280).jpg - Intel4004(1024).jpg - Intel4004(800).jpg
Zilog Z80 - z80(1280).jpg - z80(1024).jpg - z80(800).jpg
s1axter posted on Tue. September 12th 2006 at 05:09 PM PST
"Never say that nothing good comes out of computer games..." This is the opening line from an article posted on embedded.com yesterday about a combo Cell & AMD computer expected to come out around end of 2007 or beginning of 2008.
The main goal for the new supercomputer (Roadrunner) is to combine the power of the IBM cell processor, designed for the Playstation 3, and AMD Opteron CPUs to break the Petaflop barrier. FLOPS is a unit of computer performance measure and is an abbreviation for Floating Point Operations Per Second. A petaflop is 10^15 FLOPS. If it took a person one second to calculate a single FLOP (e.g. 3.14159 * 2.0) what this computer could do in one second would take a human 31,709,791.984 years...wow! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petaflop )
According to the article, "IBM's Blue Gene/L is currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, peaking at more than[only] 280 teraflops." Quite a large step from where we are now.
As always, here are wikipedia links:
IBM Blue Gene computers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
IBM Cell CPU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor
AMD Opteron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron
Original article: http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192700705
Enjoy
s1axter posted on Mon. September 11th 2006 at 03:33 PM PST
HackADay ( http://hackaday.com ) is always on top of the latest news. This project was just finished up a few days ago.
Any modder and some game enthusiast will know Ben Heckendorn ( hhtp://www.benheck.com ) as the king of console modifications. Achievements of his include a portable NES, SNES, and Atari Laptop. Well for the past three months Ben has been working hard on cramming a full XBox 360 into a laptop form, complete with hi-def LCD, keyboard, DVD drive and all connectors. This is truly a feat.
Here is the original HackADay article.
I'm posting this a little early because it's gonna be popular. Ben Heckendorn has been up to his tricks again. This time he built a 14 pound, water cooled 17 inch XBox 360 aluminum cased laptop. It's got all the outputs you could ever need. This one is very good. He was kind enough to write up the build and do a nice photo shoot. Oh, this is very, very nice.
Links:
http://benheck.com/Games/Xbox360/x360_page_1.htm (Description)
http://benheck.com/Games/Xbox360/x360_page_5.htm (Photos)
http://skytroniks.com/benhell/mirror/x360_page_1.htm
(Mirror since benheck.com goes down when something like this breaks)
s1axter posted on Sun. September 10th 2006 at 10:16 AM PST
If you run Linux, chances are you already know you can add some really cool program extensions to the main X session and whatever window manager you choose. Here is a project that aims to provide a new way to interact with the windows on your desktop.
The project is called Luminocity ( http://live.gnome.org/Luminocity ) and a nice blog from one of the developers can be seen here http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots . There is not clear description on either pages that describes exactly what luminocity is but all is clarified within two seconds of watching one of the videos. Think of a window as a piece of paper tacked on a wall (the wall being the desktop). When you move the paper the physics of the universe move the paper and it wobbles. That wobble effect is kinda what luminocity is aiming for. Take a look at the videos, who knows this might be the de-facto standard for window movement in the future... "Keyboard[static window movement], how quaint"
doomerz posted on Tue. January 30th 2007 at 12:36 PM PST
"The GNOME Project has just released version 2.16 of their popular desktop environment. I will be checking this out when I get home from work. From the screen shots and some chat I've seen it's full of new eye candy, but not alot of new development features. Check it out yourself: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.16/
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Old Computer Commercials
S1axter's Tech Log of Crazy Stuff
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