Putting SSD drives into the MacPro was a total change in experiencing OSX. The increases in speed and responsiveness gave new life to this aging platform (mine is a Mid 2010). Â The next step in performance is using NVMe drives on the PCI buss. And this is surprisingly easy to do. Asus has an…
Category Archives: Tech
NAS Near Death Experience – PX4-300r
 I have a few different NAS in my home network, each used for different things. Having multiple ones also ensures when I have a problem I won’t lose all my files in one go. Recently I was bit by a issue updating the firmware in my EMC NAS. I was able to recover and not…
SGI Land
So I’ve been very busy this year working, collecting and playing with my growing collection of SGI systems. My most interesting one to date is the Power ChallengeL that I obtained from an associate who found it destined for the trash at an NYC University. Â Picking up the Challenge from NYC. It was suprising…
1088XEL The Missing Manual
I’ve been diving deeper into the 1088XEL and the U1MB Firmware that drives all it’s pieces and it’s a fascinating system. It’s primarily three parts: the 1088 itself, which collects all the new hardware bits (CF drives, PS/2 keyboard, DVI out, stereo sound) into one platform, the U1MB BIOS which drives, configures and boots the…
Amiga 500 2018 Uplift Project
I’ve started a project to pull my Amiga 500 out of the attic where it’s been for 18 years and try to use it again for fun (with the floppies that I’ve also saved for years) and to try and get it on the Internet. To do that I’m willing to spend some money on…
WOMBAT
I spent some good money and time getting my SE/30 uplifted and retrofitted for modern use. Both the motherboard, analog board and power-supply have been recapped, it has 32M RAM installed and a SCSI to CF adapter to ensure quiet operation and no surprise disk failures. The one failure I encountered was the keyboard and…
Macbook
The MacBook is an incredible piece of engineering technology. This one is sitting on the MacBook Pro it’s replacing- after three years. 13†vs 12†and it’s more powerful and has more storage. The same amount of ram however. The size difference is astonishing…
Android Still Sucks at 4.3
When Android 4.3 API18 came out I pulled my old Nexus 7 out of the drawer, charged it, let it update to 4.3.18 and tried to use it for the next three days, leaving my iPad mini in the drawer instead. Â What I found out was: Android OS still sucks unbelievably bad. It’s kinda…
Windows7 Reverse Scrolling
Do you use Windows7 on bootcamp? Or anywhere? After adjusting to the scrolling system on Mountain Lion (which I love) it’s almost impossible to go back to Windows and have wierd scrolling again. You can easily change it for USB mice (still need to figure out how to do it for trackpad) where easily assumes…
Tiny Linux computer
New toy…
PowerMac G5 and LACP
I’ve been playing around recently with backups, trying to get them going again for my data. I’m moving the backups to my oldest Mac, a G5 Metal Tower. I purchased a gig ethernet card for it and since it comes with built-in gig I wanted to setup LACP with it. LACP will bond the two…
iPad Fail
Note to self: don’t browse to a flash-embedded page in Apple iPad demo…
EEE 1201n Ubuntu Karmic – Good Results
So the EEEbuntu 3 install (based on Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty) was too flakey, and while I had the ION working great, I still had no ethernet or wifi. EEEbuntu is working on release 4 (based on debian) but they haven’t even released a beta yet. So, being bored I wiped the EEEbuntu and replaced it…
Updating Nvidia ION Drivers on EEE 1201n – Ubuntu
Using EEEbuntu (9.04) on the new EEE 1201N with Nvidia ION? You may have noticed that the built-in gfx driver is crushingly slow. But you can grab the latest Nvidia Linux drivers (which support the ION) without too much effort. Below is exactly what I did to my system to get this working. Do this…
Removing Blastwave from Solaris
Solaris on spac is a lot of fun, however, sometimes you need to clear the deck of all the fun and start fresh. With blastwave (CSW) you install pre-built binaries for your system as regular solaris packages. Removing them using pkgrm is a pain if you want to clear blastwave off completely and start fresh…
EC2 and OpenSolaris with EBS
Using OpenSolaris AMIs on EC2, and wanted to use EBS… currently, Elastifox is mute on naming the devices (only gives examples for linux based device names) so I was looking for a read on Opensolaris and found this…
Hope for Newton – squashing the 2010 Bug?
Mottek: John Arkley was wrong … Eckhart Köppen has built a Newton patch. So it seems like there are 3 people alive who can do it, despite what John has written. John, Paul and Eckhart. And only one of them is actively developing for the Newton… Which is pretty impressive. Meanwhile, the excellect Nitch software…
Why the best Newtons could die next year
There is a bad bug in the handing of time for Newton OS 2.1, which is used on most Newtons still around today. Details of the bug have been collected on the 40hz site. There is one ‘fix’ that doesn’t completely work. What is needed is a real system patch, and those are just not…
Amazon’s EC2 Portal
Amazon announced a web-based portal for EC2, and while it’s nice, it’s no ElasticFox. I guess I’ll use both, but ElasticFox is much much faster…
Mysql Gem for OSX Lepard Ruby
Want to build the mysql gem for the system’s Ruby and use the mysql binary you just installed from mysql.org? Easy, has wonko.com has the answer and it worked perfectly! I love Google. airbot:~ [504]$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″ gem install mysql — \ > –with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql –with-mysql-lib=/usr/local/mysql/lib \ > –with-mysql-include=/usr/local/mysql/include Password: Bulk updating Gem source…
2 cool free iPhone apps
1 Mint 2 PCalc Lite two great apps to have on your phone, and they don’t cost a dime. Meanwhile, I’ve got SimCity for the iPhone and it’s everything they claim it is, only downside is that it can’t run in the backgroud. I no longer need a port for the Mac…
2008 and the Newton
Genghis7777 has a great roundup of 2008 Newton Developments. I haven’t used my Newton much, but I’m actually considering taking it back up again since the iPhone is not able to track all the notes and things I need to keep around. There is still a strong community, still developing and making the Newton relevant…
MacBook Pro – new trackpad
Just used the new MBP for about 4 hours. The new new ‘all one big button’ trackpad is really annoying. I had my thumb down at the bottom of the ‘pad trying to click a button that just isn’t there anymore. Having to remember to click the entire pad is just really…. weird. Too weird…
Android 101 – Part 2
Now that the emulator is up and running, you need to get familiar with adb – the Android Debug Bridge – and start poking around at your device. I found ADB back in the latest SDK, and used it to connect to my emulator. You can start a shell and poke around. I want to…
Starting Android Open Source Emulator
Once you have build Android on your Mac OSX (I have Leopard) following the Google directions, it’s time to start it. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds, as I couldn’t find any docs that talked about this, except for this page that talks about the emulator in the SDK. In your droid repo directory,…