hardware
Destroying Hard Drives

Today, the BBC News website reported on a Which? Computing magazine article that claims that the physical destruction of a hard drive is essential to protect the data on it, citing that they had retrieved deleted files from second hand drives. For most folks in computing, the ability to retrieve deleted files is not surprising, […]

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hardware
More on Debian on the Toshiba R500

Previously, I wrote about installing Debian GNU/Linux on the Toshiba Portege R500. Most of the information is still current, but I'm writing a follow up to address other things I got working and questions people have posed me. Bluetooth Support I still need to patch the kernel to get bluetooth support working. At the moment […]

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hardware
Playstation 3 80Gb

I had a PS1 and have a PS2. I've put off buying a PS3 for a while because they were so dear, the graphics seemed to be at the expense of game play, and because I missed the boat on backwards compatibility on the first model. Today I phoned a friend to ask about backwards […]

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hardware
Nokia N95

Just before we went on our family holiday, I went with Karen to look at new phones for me and for her. Karen liked the look of the phone, but wanted it in a specific colour and was prepared to wait to order that. I decided I liked the look of the Nokia N95. The […]

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hardware
Debian GNU/Linux on Toshiba Portege R500

This week I got my hands on a Toshiba Portege R500 for work. It's brilliant to have a laptop with a decent battery once again. Here are some thoughts on the hardware, and installing Linux. The first thing I did was cut through the label on the box that makes it clear that no refund […]

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hardware
Marvell Technology 88SE6121 SATA II Controller

When I returned from the Christmas holidays to work, I found my computer there was showing signs of impeding disk failure, and shortly thereafter I could no longer boot it due to massive corruption of the disk sectors where the C library resides. I decided we better get a SATA disk (noting there were SATA […]

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hardware
ASUS P5KC Memory / PSU Problems

Ok, I spoke to soon. I thought video was my only problem. On Tuesday I planned to work at home, to get a lot of code written for OPUS and found my computer locked. I kept restarting it, kept getting kernel panics. The temperature was fine, there was no abnormal load, I tried a new […]

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hardware
Imladris Upgrade (nvidia problems)

I upgraded imladris (my personal box) yesterday after a long gap. Most of the process went very smoothly, but there some issues that took me some time to work around. This is really to record what I did to fix some issues for the benefit of myself and any others that have the same problems. […]

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hardware
Tuxdroid with Debian (lenny/testing)

I ordered a tuxdroid from Firebox, and although they politely emailed me during the week to say that stock was delayed and it would be next week, they sent my tuxdroid yesterday and it arrived today, excellent service. I'm used to buying hardware and discarding the CD that comes with it, since it's usually windows […]

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hardware
Netgear DG834G firmware problems

I have a nabaztag, a wifi rabbit, but it hasn't been functional for some time now. I've lacked the time to explore why, but over the last couple of weeks I've spent about 10 hours all in all testing various things. The problem seems to be with my Netgear DG834G v3 (UK) router, or at […]

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