Tue, 29 Jul 2008
Neo Freerunner: first impressions
I finally got my hands on my Neo Freerunner two weeks ago and have been playing with it when time allows (so much so that I haven't given myself time to blog about it).
Overall, the hardware is great. The first thing you notice is that the unit feels very solid and the quality of the display is excellent; bright and high resolution. I've had success with wifi, GPS, the SD card slot and basic GSM usage. I haven't had a change to try out the accelerometers yet, mainly due to a (surprising) lack of software that uses them.
Read more...posted at: 22:46 | permalink | comments
Fri, 27 Jun 2008
OpenMoko release
The OpenMoko Freerunner has been released! This is big news for people who'd like an open and free phone (running Linux) with some interesting hardware: GSM, GPRS data, WiFi, GPS, accelerometers, USB host support, accelerated graphics, SD card slot and much more. The software is still a work in progress so the phone is primarily for developers at this stage
The UK distributor has been swamped by the amount of people interested in buying one. This is certainly an encouraging for the potential success of the project. I'm on the list to get one in the next batch, fingers crossed.
posted at: 11:13 | permalink | comments
Sun, 06 Apr 2008
Photos, photos, photos
I've posted heaps of photos over the last week. Here's the summary.
- Our camping road trip from London to Ukraine and back last summer.
- Bestival 2007
- New York last Christmas and NYE.
- Our visit to Bletchley Park yesterday. As well as having lots of facinating exhibits about code breaking and the infamous Enigma, the site is also the home of the National Museum of Computing. It's filled with historic computer hardware from the first programmable digital computer onwards. Highly recommennded to anyone with an interest in computing.
- Today's Olympic Torch run through London. We watch it near City Hall. It was freezing cold and still snowing slightly but plenty of people still turned out. There were a large number of Chinese supporters as well as many pro-Tibet protestors. Police ran with the torch bearer, completely surrounding the runner. Pro-Tibet chanting and booing was drowned out most of the cheering. The pro-Tibet message was pretty clear.
posted at: 17:45 | permalink | comments
Thu, 05 Apr 2007
Data on the rocks
I was asked to help a friend recently whose hard disk was dying. The system wouldn't boot anymore with the BIOS reporting disk or read errors. Ironically this starting happening the moment after my friend mentioned to his girlfriend that they should "really start doing backups".
Said friend was instructed by me to buy a new hard disk and an external hard disk enclosure and I went around armed with various Linux based rescue disks and a Windows XP install disk.
Things didn't start out well. I booted using one of the rescue disks and tried mounting the failing hard drive. The mount process hung and dmesg showed the kernel spewing out IDE related error messages at a great number of Hz. I ended up having to forcibly kill the mount process. Several more attempts failed in a similar way.
I had heard that failing hard disks can sometimes be made to work if cooled down. The theories about why this works seem flimsy (something about contracting the metal inside the drive so that components go back into alignment), but since options were limited at this stage I figured it was worth a try.
The new hard disk went into the computer and the faulty one was installed into the enclosure. I then wrapped the enclosure in several plastic bags and put it into the freezer with the cables hanging out of the door. With fingers crossed I connected the enclosure to the computer and turned everything on. This time I was able to mount the disk from the rescue disk without even a single kernel error. I couldn't believe it! I hurriedly partitioned the new drive and began copying before something went wrong.
There was a lot of data to copy (56GB). This gave plenty of time for worrying thoughts like "what if condensation occurs inside the cold drive and the electronics short out?". Fortunately all went well and every byte was recovered from the failing drive. After a bit more fiddling with boot.ini, NTFS conversion and incorrect file attributes the system was working normally again. Great!
After all this, I did some research to see if other people use this trick with success (one might question why I didn't do this research before I tried it...). It turns out that in most cases it does work. I'd love to hear a solid explanation of why...
posted at: 09:35 | permalink | comments