etbe - Russell Coker

Recently I’ve been having some problems with hardware dying. Having one item mysteriously fail is something that happens periodically, but having multiple items fail in a small amount of time is a concern.
One problem I’ve had is with CD-ROM drives. I keep a pile of known good CD-ROM drives because as they have [...]

Yesterday I received two new machines from DOLA on-line auctions [1]. I decided to use the first to replace the hardware for my SE Linux Play Machine [2]. The previous machine I had used for that purpose was a white-box 1.1GHz Celeron and I replaced it with an 800MHz Pentium3 system (which uses [...]

There has been ongoing debate in the Debian community for a number of years about what standards of behavior should be expected. Matthew Garrett sets a new low by making a joke about Jesus being molested as a child [1]. While I believe that debate and discussion about religion is a good thing, [...]

I’ve just read an interesting post on TomsHardware.com about a solar powered PC [1]. It describes all the steps involved in creating a modern high-performance low-power computer.
They have a lot of interesting information. One surprising fact (from page 3) is that the PSUs tested (both for AC and DC input) were more efficient [...]

I install quite a number of internet gateway machines for one of my clients. While eventually he will probably move to using an ASUS EeePC [1] or something similar, the current plan is to keep using desktop PCs (unfortunately server-class machines make too much noise).
P4 machines use an unreasonable amount of power and don’t [...]

My cousin Greg Coker has created an eBay auction for Football cards with the proceeds going to a charity that protects animal welfare (I can’t remember the name - I’ll update this post later). He also has a bunch of other eBay auctions of football cards going which are not for charity.
The charity auction [...]

Unusual Things to Help the Environment
Have a party! Keeping a house at a comfortable temperature on days of extreme temperature takes a moderate amount of energy. If instead of having three houses that each contained two people you had one house with six people and two houses with the heater or air-conditioner turned [...]

Over the past four years every visit to a doctor or hospital has involved some time spent in a waiting room, in the case of hospital visits it has often been more than an hour waiting. Each of those waiting rooms has had a selection of bad magazines and a TV. If I [...]

I just read interesting blog post about Lenovo service information [1]. They have huge documents about how to service their machines as well as apparently having videos in flash format to show how to perform various tasks.
The first thing I’d like to see is other companies following this example. I clearly recall one [...]

I was watching the British police drama show The Bill [1] and I was impressed by their use of computers.
They were analysing the evidence of a homicide and one of the tasks was to assemble a time-line of the related events. They had a projector connected to a computer which displayed the data and [...]