Tag overview for: 'computers'
Entries on this site with 'computers'
- Wow. BBSes are as old as I am.
Thirty-two years ago (plus a day or two - real life happens) two computer hobbyists stuck at home in a blizzard not unlike snowpocalypse named Randy Suess and Ward Christe
- On transhumanism.
I've been wrestling with this post for weeks now because, at its heart, transhumanism isn't a simple set of beliefs, actions, or ideas. It encompasses many disciplines, fr
- Leave nothing to chance.
Something that I keep meaning to write about is the topic of practical data backups - how to back your data up in such a way that you won't go bonkers trying to manage it,
- Gary McKinnon to be extradited to the US.
Just a few days ago it was made official - eccentric systems cracker Gary McKinnon, known as the UFO Hacker by the news media has lost his final appeal and will be extradi
- First solid-state quantum processor developed.
Quantum computing, thought by many to be the holy grail of information technology, is based upon one of the basic tenants of quantum mechanics: a particle, be it a photon,
- Linux? Linux. Linux... Linux. Oh, and user interfaces.
ObDisclaimer: I don't design user interfaces for a living. Originally, I was working on a post about Linux - about why I switched to it, and pontificating about why more p
- Birthday weekend in review.
Lyssa and I started off our Valentine's Day by getting up far earlier than should be allowed by law on a Saturday morning to go to our local H&R Block office to finish get
- Merry Christmas, everyone (a couple of days late, but still..)
The powers that be saw fit to give everyone at work an opportunity to go home four hours early on 24 December 2008, the better to go home and get ready for Christmas Eve.
- Better late than never: the weekend in review.
While we didn't get hit by Hurricane Hannah, the DC metroplex certainly felt her wrath late Friday and all day Saturday. I don't want to say that it was raining cats and d
- Now I get the hype about the NIA.
A couple of months back there was quite a bit of hype (which vanished rapidly as people forgot all about it when the next new thing came around) about the NIA brain-comput
- The Last HOPE.
I arrived in New York City somewhen around 1400 EST5EDT, after getting turned around in Penn Station (what kind of adventure would it be without my getting lost, after all
- Liveblogging: The Last HOPE and moments up to.
1007 EST5EDT: On the road, er, rail again. Just a few scant minutes ago I boarded the Acela express train out of Union Station in Washington, DC destined for the city that
- Last weekend, by this weekend.
Late on Friday afternoon, Lyssa and I hurriedly packed our bags, jumped into the TARDIS, and set course northward once again for southwestern Pennsylvania and the general
- Title restored - so how did I spent my weekend, anyway?
Unfortunately, I spent much of last Friday asleep, recovering after a routine filling went south and turned into an emergency root canal. I don't know what does it about t
- The Dresden curse seems to be making its rounds this week.
I had a really interesting post about last weekend about halfway done and ready to post when the worst of all possible things happened: My workstation at work flamed out i
- Post-reboot memory dumping software released.
Last week, a group of information security researchers released a whitepaper detailing a practical data extraction attack on DRAM after the power's been cut. Unfortunately
- Cutting the power doesn't necessarily mean that memory is cleared.
It has long been a piece of grassroots wisdom that when the power to your computer goes dead, you're up a certain creek without a means of propulsion: Whatever you were do
- Portable power for search and seizure.
A major problem faced by data forensics professionals and law enforcement was how to confiscate computer systems without running the risk of damaging or losing access to i
- Sacrificing spam when you can't sacrifice spammers.
Due to the fact that Rending the Veil hasn't finished restoring older articles from backup since the last server migration, I'm reposting my last article they published on
- A blast from the past: Heathkit is back!
Children of the 80's will no doubt remember the company Heathkit, which was famous for selling all sorts of kits for the hobbyist, most notably a personal robot called HER
- Now that I've managed to free up some time, why have things been so quiet lately?
That's actually a pretty easy question to answer. First off, my job's kept me very busy the past couple of weeks - I've been spending between two and three weeks on the ro
- Looks like Windbringer's on the ropes.
I think the USB v2.0 chipset in Windbringer is failing - all USB v1.0 and v1.1 devices I've used work fine, but now the bottommost jack is acting flaky. All storage device
- Sorry 'bout the downtime, folks.
A good bit of yesterday was spent monitoring Leandra as she upgraded her systemware and applications, which amounted to watching the output of various compilation batches
- Reformatting as banishing of ritual space.
Due to the fact that Rending the Veil magazine has not finished restoring the backlog of old articles following a server migration, here is my first article published by t
- Just when you thought it was safe to make your data safe...
A common procedure at many companies is to send the backup tapes offsite, on the off chance that if the building burns down or something, the computers will be lost but th
- A word to would-be presenters out there.
Unless it involves 0-day security vulnerabilities that amount to a global panic in the style of bad Hollywood action movies never, ever install updates of any kind on the
- Working around patent licensing problems with evolutionary algorithms.
Evolutionary computer algorithms are good at solving a relatively common set of problems through trial and error - the set of problems that we know of with a large number
- Not quite mind reading, not mind control the way people usually think of it, but significant nonetheless.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology biotech researchers have made progress on an area of prosthetics that most people don't think about because it's so obvious bu
- The Pixies almost had it right.
Yesterday wasn't so much a wave of mutilation as it was a stormfront of WTF sweeping across the land. While I can't really put my finger on any one trigger event that caus
- Clockwork automata on the micro-scale.
An article in the New Journal of Physics this month postulates a novel use for the not-yet-extant technology of nanotechnology: Building clockwork computers on a microscop
- A long week, a late night, and so much to write...
Well, let me see... it's been interesting times the past couple of days, which has left me precious little time to write about what's actually been going on with my day to
- Boy, don't you hate it when you want to write something but then it leaves your mind utterly?
I do. I've got a laundry list of stuff that I want to say, but every time I sit down to do so, they vanish utterly from my brain and it's really starting to piss me off. I
- Lucien finally packed it in.
The magick smoke got out of Lucien this afternoon. I'm going to start constructing a new mail server tonight once I find a new chassis and ATX power supply (500 watts or m
- This could make me go back to using desktop cases.
The retrocomputing enthusiasts over at briel.com are developing a desktop case that I really, really would like to get my hands on after they start producing them: It look
- Apple releases the workstation from hell.
Yesterday Apple Computers announced the release of its latest Mac Pro workstation - an eight-CPU beast running Intel cores at 3.0 GHz. That's right.. two quad-core Xeon pr
- Gary, Gary, Gary, you got some 'splainin' to do...
Gary McKinnon, who cracked US government and military networks under the alias 'Solo' in search of information on unidentified flying objects and unusual power sources wil
- FIXED: A late 20th century grimoire?
This is one of the neatest art hacks I've seen in a while. Let me explain: Books are ultimately tools for storing information in a non-volatile manner for ease of transpor
- Surprisingly, Dell is still listening.
Since announcing their plan to start offering systems with Linux pre-installed, Dell has opened a survey site at which you can vote for what systems you'd like them to off
- Weekend? There was a weekend and nobody told me?
It wasn't really like that, but it's my attempt at a silly subject line for today. Despite the large amounts of antibiotics and analgesics running through my biosystems in
- Sometimes I hate being right.
It seems that Dell Computers is putting the brakes on their new lines of Linux-equipped computers. They've changed their minds, and instead of selling machines with SUSE L
- For the system administrator or parent that has everything, how about a RAT?
'Remote access tool', that is - a little beastie (usually considered malware, though there are legit incarnations of this sort of software) that hides itself inside a work
- Dell finally caves to customer pressure and offers systems with Linux pre-installed on them.
Back in the late 90's, Dell offered computers for sale with Linux installed on them instead of Microsoft Windows, a move which got them sued and pressured to stop this pra
- It still clicks...
Remember those old IBM keyboards with the clicky keys that sounded like gunshots when you really got going on the console? It's a shame that they're so rare these days...
- Hyperreal cinema.
By now we've all seen what Photoshop is capable of - just look at Worth 1000 for examples of things that just can't exist, and yet do have a strange sort of life on the sc
- Moving visualisations of air traffic patterns.
If you've watched television for any length of time, chances are you've seen the classic FAA blips-on-a-screen representations of air traffic over the United States. A stu
- Just when you thought you were hardcore...
The more densely packed computing circuitry becomes, the fast it can run, in part because the connection paths are so short. Until room-temperature superconductors are inv
- Wrapping gifts to the sounds of Lovecraftian horror.
An old chewing gum commercial says "Double your pleasure, double your fun," but I don't think this is exactly what they had in mind.. one hannah Kersey, age 23 from the UK
- A far busier week than I'd bargained for.
The past couple of nights have been busy ones, though not painfully so. Our weekly stitch-and-bitch had been moved up to Wednesday so that Elwing could join us after work,
- I wonder if I can get enough of these to build a fort...
This is cute: An external hard drive shaped like a Lego brick.
- Diebold's had more than three strikes against it by now...
Why don't they just give up on Dibold's e-voting machines? They're already been proven insecure and unauditable beyond the shadow of a doubt. They've already compromised t
- Dell's selling blank systems again.
Dell Computers is now selling N-series computers without operating systems, advertised specifically for Linux. It's anyone's guess how long it'll take Microsoft to stronga
- Intel is the first to market with a consumer implementation of 802.11n.
Intel has released an implementation of the draft 802.11n wireless networking protocol for laptops and other portable devices. 802.11n has five times the maximum data thro
- Is nothing sacred?
Counterfit Cisco hardware??
- Artifically constructed extension nerves!
New and interesting developments in the field of neuroprosthetics! Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are culturing living data cables by stretching nerves! Bec
- Signature Generator v1.1
This utility was designed to convert information about someone or something into a form better suited for magickal operations. It's written in Perl and outputs an MD5 mess
- Gematria v1.0
This is one of my first technomagickal experiments written in Perl, a utility that converts words written in English or Hebrew characters into numbers for use in gematria,
- Shell script: burn_dvd v2.0
Here's a shell script that makes it simple to burn DVDs on a *nix machine. Requires cdrtools v2.00.0 or greater and a reasonably up-to-date set of dvd+rw-tools. I use v5.1
- The Snort drinking game.
The Snort drinking game in PalmDoc format.
- Virtual Adepts FAQ
In PalmDoc format. popup
- Holographic data storage
Physicists at the University of Rochester have made a breakthrough in data storage technology, namely, they've been able to store an entire image within a single photon us
- There's something odd on the Net these days...
The handlers over at the Internet Storm Centre have been noticing a disturbing trend lately, namely, seeing the DNP protocol appearing on the open Net. You probably don't
- Lucien's tcp.smtp file.
The tcp.smtp file I use on my mail server for spamblocking.
- Linux on the Dell Inspiron 700m.
Distributions successfully used: Slackware Linux v10.0 Gentoo Linux 2006.1 Hardware assay: CPU: Intel Pentium-III M, 1.6 GHz, clocked at 3193.03 bogoMIPS Memory: 512MB Chi
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