All about laptops and netbook!
Solar cells from donuts and tea – energy crisis solved?
Yes I know – this has not got anything to do with mobile computing (sorry), and No, its not an april hoax at all – but I simply had to write about it.. as you can see on the youTube video below, this guy actually makes a small (and inefficient but still amazing) solar panel at home – from donuts, “starbucks passion” red hibiscus flower tea, water, vodka and some microscopy object slides…
Go here to read the rest:
Solar cells from donuts and tea – energy crisis solved?
Tags: actually-makes, all posts, april-hoax, from-donuts, hacks, mobile, panel-at-home, red, red-hibiscus, simply-had, some-microscopy
No comments yet.
No trackbacks yet.
HowTo: Measuring hard disk performance with linux and ‘hdparm’
about 3 months ago - No comments
Measuring sequential disk performance with linux is easy – most distros (like ubuntu) come with a tool called hdparm , that is mainly used for tuning and optimizing hard disk parameters, but luckily it also includes simple benchmark functionality – for example the following command sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda gives me the following output: /dev/hda: Timing buffered disk reads: 176 MB in 3.01 seconds = 58.55 MB/sec Of course you need to substitute /dev/sda with the name of your raw disk device (for example, it might be /dev/hda for non-SATA disks) . Its impossible to get higher transfer rates that that from your disk. Hdparm reads at the very start of the disk for these tests (which is the fastest area of the whole harddisk) and using optimal access pattern
Foldable USB keyboard simplifies typing with your UMPC
about 3 months ago - No comments
Most of the UMPC and MIDs available today share the same disadvantage: most of the time the keyboard just doesn’t work well at those tiny key sizes, especially if you have large hands. What to do? One possible solution could be using one of these ultra-portable external keyboards with your UMPC! The device shown on the right for example, bearing the rather technical description “Targus PA875U01X”, weighs just 180 grams at a size of 280 x 108 x 9 mm (unfolded), with 68 full-sized keys in QWERTY layout – enabling easy and smooth ten-finger typing for the mobile email enthusiast
HowTo: Add 3G/HSDPA functionality to your eeePC 1000H
about 3 months ago - No comments
During the last few months, Asus has started selling the “eeePC 1000H GO” with internal 3G/HSDPA card for easy everywhere connectivity. So far so good, but what about all those thousands of customers that already bought an eeePC 1000H before? Are they doomed to use one of those ugly external USB 3G modems – a threat to your eeePCs health if you drop it accidentally and the USB stick destroys the USB port it was sticking in (if not even more)…
HowTo: formatting SD cards using linux
about 3 months ago - No comments
Its nice to see that during the past year, the number of linux distributions custom tailored to fit the needs of netbooks has increased dramatically. While this is a great advancement, it cannot be denied that this is mainly the merit of one linux distribution – ubuntu linux, on which most of nowadays “netbook linux” are based (ubuntu in turn is debian-based, btw). While these custom netbook linux flavors usually come equipped with all the device drivers you’ll need for your netbook, there’s one thing that is missing (at least in Ubuntu 8.04 or “Ubuntu eee”): an easy possibility of formatting SD memory cards with the usual FAT16 (or the faster FAT32) file system with the card reader that is built into all eeePC models – but sometimes you just need an empty and freshly formatted SD card, for example to “burn” the newest ubuntu ISO image onto and install right from the SD card (which is quite handy if you don’t have a DVD/CD drive).
Asus selling iMac clone with netbook core
about 3 months ago - No comments
I’m sure everyone knows those design-award-winning Apple iMac computers that look like just a flat panel LCD and keyboard standing on your desk, but contain a whole macintosh… Now Asus has realized the advantages of such a design and is selling a computer-inside-an-LCD too. The “Asus eeeTop ET1602″ has about the same specs as the average eeePC 1000H netbook (making guesses about the interior of this device very easy), namely intel Atom N270 clocked to 1.6GHz, 533MHz Frontside Bus, 1GB DDR2 RAM, the rather weak Intel 945G graphics chipset, 160GB SATA-II harddisk (spinning at only 5400rpm), connectivity is provided by 802.11 b/g/n wifi, bluetooth and 1000MBit LAN, the thing has a 1.3MP webcam and built-in stereo microphone – and so far, I could just as well have read the description from the package of my eee1000H instead, without any difference…
HowTo: "Qualcomm 3G ICON 210" and Ubuntu
about 3 months ago - No comments
Although generally speaking I’m all pro linux and use it whereever possible – and consider it the best OS for networking encountered by me so far – I was not able to make my internal 3G modem work properly with Ubuntu yet. Of course I managed to have it load the right device drivers and I’m able to establish connections and to surf the internet – but unlike windows, ubuntu refuses to crank up the speed to HSDPA, and despite my patching (and recompiling) of the “usbserial.ko” and “sierra.ko” driver modules I was only able to get a downlink speed of 800KBit/sec at most. The same modem with WindowsXP though achieved between 2.2 and 2.8 MBit/s at the same daytime, causing me quite some frustration (I had bought the modem card because it was claimed as being fully compatible with linux, even with linux drivers supplied by manufacturer, mind you) and I started using WinXP more frequently again due to this issue.
what have fireflies got to do with BASIC?
about 3 months ago - No comments
During the last days I’ve been quite excited about a certain idea I want to report about here, and which I think is quite an entertaining project. During one of my web journeys I recently happened to stumble upon this link over at instructables.com and was fascinated: I was looking at a 5×5 LED matrix that initially blinked its LEDs randomly, but somehow “magically” (with the support of 25 light-dependent resistors) synchronized them very slowly, to finally reach a state of absolute synchronicity – and all this with 25 totally independent control circuits, all based on 25 single atTiny13 microprocessors!! The whole thing should be considered as being a model of large swarms of thousands of male fireflies in sout-eastern asia, which are capable of synchronizing their blinking to attract more female fireflies over a greater distance. For more detailed explanations about the background (and how to set up a physical logic model using AtTiny13 chips and C coding) I want to forward you to the instructables link above as well as to this scientific paper explaining the underlying mathematical theory behind this..
dBird-notifier checks for twitter, ICQ, email
about 3 months ago - No comments
I refined the software part of my last project a bit. Now the thing consists of one main python script calling various subprocedures as separate threads, it has a nice colorful “parrot” tray icon (for closing the “application”), it listens on the dBus interface for alerts from various other software and shows three different types of incoming messages with a) respective system alerts (indicating message content and type), b) with a pop-up tray icon showing type of message by icon, and c) with some RGB LED wired to a RS232toUSB-adapter via a small picaxe08m microcontroller, which lights up in the corresponding color (twitter is turquoise, pidgin is purple, email is red)
New LED mail notifier pics
about 3 months ago - No comments
I’ve added a light diffuser made of milky glass.
dBird Notifier 1.1 – new version
about 3 months ago - No comments
I’ve just finished work on a few improvements of my dBird notifier scripts collection. Now all relevant user data (twitter account name & password, ICQ buddy list, domain for which special alert will be given, serial port to use) is saved in one central “config.conf” file, I tried to prevent problems with missing packages by compiling all modules into python bytecode executables, and added a bugfix for the forthcoming “twitpocalypse” buffer overflow bug (and cleaned up the code a bit)