Recently in Hardware Category

aha! This is just what I was looking for!

Dell BIOS firmware updates on Debian | MDLog:/sysadmin

I've had the OGIO Metroid since July, 2006 it recently had a broken zipper on the audio compartment on top, I decided to replace it with a Nyquist in white:
Ogio Nyquist Daypack

The Nyquist has 2350 cubic inches of storage, compared to the Metroid's 2250.

It is a race to the bottom, in form factors, the laptop / handheld market is being encroached by commodity mainboards for the desktop and developer community. I am working on a Mini-ITX project right now. It could be so much smaller!

VIA Technologies, Inc.

The Pico-ITX form factor leverages VIA's focus on enhancing power efficiency, thermal management and feature integration at both the silicon and platform levels, and has been designed specifically to be powered by VIA's energy efficient processor platforms, such as the VIA C7 or fanless VIA Eden processor, and based around one of the new breed of VIA's system media processors, all-in-one digital media IGP chipsets such as the VX700, which combines core logic, multimedia, connectivity and storage technologies within a highly integrated single-chip package..

I popped the hatch off the bottom and found an empty DIMM slot to add another 1GB of DDR2 memory to my laptop. To max it out to 2GB I will need to remove the keyboard first... Hmmmmmm Looks like some very good documentation on the Dell site on this process.
Kingston ValueRAM memory - 1 GB - SO DIMM 200-pin - DDR II ( KVR533D2S4/1G )

Dell™ Latitude™ D410 Service Manual

Each memory slot can hold DDR2 PC2-5300, DDR2 PC2-4200 with a maximum of 1GB per slot.*

I just ordered a new drive for my dell laptop. I have a 5400 RPM in there now, but this looks like it has the room I need, and the spindle speed to give me a noticable bump!

Hitachi GST Travelstar 7K100 hard disk drive 0A25015
100GB, 7200 RPM, Parallel ATA, 8MB Buffer - Hard Disk Drive



I used
fdisk -l
to determine relevant drives from a USB live distro I used (Debian).

I'm running on it now.


There is a setting in the on screen menu's to set this for Eco Mode which reduces the Noise to 36db and sets the bulb to 136 watts.

Doing so will extend your bulb life, we just had a bulb die after three weeks of minimal use!

ugh.

This site points out that sysstat is useful. I'm testing the data collection comoponent, since I need justification to upgrade my server...

How do I find out Linux CPU utilization? | nixCraft

Whenever a Linux system CPU is occupied by a process, it is unavailable for processing other requests. Rest of pending requests must wait till CPU is free. This becomes a bottleneck in the system. Following command will help you to identify CPU utilization, so that you can troubleshoot CPU related performance problems.

Finding CPU utilization is one of the important tasks. Linux comes with various utilities to report CPU utilization. With these commands, you will be able to find out:

This research site explains a concept personal firewall for RFID devices that would be carried on ones person. There is a growing concern that RFID tags as deployed are going to be interrogated remotely by neutral and hostile parties during normal day to day activities. Examples would be a RFID tag for a supermarket that was scanned by a roadside billboard and alerted you to a sale, maybe at a competitors store.

Other more sobering remote uses are more dangerous and would use the newly RFID enabled US passport to cherry pick victims for political retribution.

Any work done with RFID tags must be aware of these potentials.

Faculty of Science : Vrije Universiteit

The RFID Guardian is meant for personal use; it manages the RFID tags within physical proximity of a person (as opposed to managing RFID tags owned by the person, that are left at home). The RFID Guardian is portable. It should be PDA-sized, or better yet, could be integrated into a handheld computer or cellphone. The RFID Guardian is also battery powered. The RFID Guardian also performs 2-way RFID communications. It acts like an RFID reader, querying tags and decoding the tag responses, and it can also emulate an RFID tag, allowing it to perform direct in-band communications with other RFID readers.

When I spilled soda on my Dell Latitude D410, I freaked out, it was a race to turn it over, remove the battery and pull the hard drive. After three hours work I had with the assistance of the Dell website managed to remove enough parts to verify that the motherboard had not gotten wet. I then washed the keyboard and let it dry out for two days. What a relief to find documentation online for my laptop. This website has info on other manufacturers laptops. Have fun...

Repair4Laptop: Laptop and Notebook Repairing, Upgrading and Modding Survey: by Manufacturers

Laptop and Notebook Repairing, Upgrading and Modding Survey: by Manufacturers

Are you looking for do-it-yourself instructions about laptop or notebook repair? Here are disassembly manuals, pictures and videos ordered by manufacturer.

Ok after looking at the NSLU2 again I realized it was in my sweet spot for purchase, so I'm acquiring this, and an external drive and ethernet adapter. This is a TOP SECRET Project, but more details to follow...
The wonderful thing about amazon is I can have all these for Wednesday with my Amazon Prime shipping.

The NSLU2 unit:

300GB Of USB 2.0 Storage!

A high speed usb 2..0 ethernet adapter!

DebianSlug

There is cool, but this is beyond cool. Portability, combined with applicability means that this concept has feet, or wheels if you would. The icing on the cake is the last paragraph!

PBS | I, Cringely . October 20, 2006 - A Tradition of Empty Boxes

The beauty of a shipping container data center isn't just that it operates stand-alone and can be plunked down in the parking lot of your existing data center or dropped by helicopter on the roof of your headquarters building. A great proportion of its beauty lies in the shipping container's efficiency not as a server but as a network. It's the largest sneakernet ever built. Moving a petabyte of data across the country using even the biggest optical fiber connection could take weeks, but the Blackbox can be installed in at most a few days.
[...]
But one mistake I think Google and Sun have made is in the form factor, itself. A smart competitor to Sun (my guess is Google) would get to work on a Blackbox equivalent that doesn't fit in a shipping container, but rather in an airfreight container or Unit Load Device. The second largest of these puppies, the LD8, holds 243 cubic feet, which is about one quarter the volume of Sun's Blackbox. Still, you could stuff an LD8 easily with a thousand Opterons and half a petabyte of storage and instead of delivering it by sea at 10 mph or by truck at 60 mph, you could deliver it by air at 600 mph.

Ok I need a new external drive. I'm still hooked on Firewire interfaces, so this is my pick because it supports both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400. Take a look, you might like the price!

Seagate ST3300601CB-RK 300 GB External Hard Drive with FireWire and USB 2.0 Interface: Electronics