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Hard Drives for Backup

The general trend seems to be that cheap hard drives are increasing in capacity faster than much of the data that is commonly stored. Back in 1998 I had a 3G disk in my laptop and about 800M was used for my home directory. Now I have 6.2G used for my home directory (and another […]

Love of Technology at First Sight

After seeing the Retina display I’ve been thinking about the computer products that I’ve immediately desired. Here is the list of the ones I can still remember:

My first computer which was the TEC-1 [1], in 1982 or 1983. A computer with a full keyboard and a monitor (Microbee), in about 1984. A hex-only keypad […]

Sam Harris on Lying

The Neuroscientist and atheism advocate Sam Harris has written a short blog post about a journalist named Jonah Lehrer who destroyed his career through false quotes and lies about them [1]. The main point of the article seems to be to promote his new eBook about Lying. The book is available for free until the […]

Hetzner now Offers SSD

Hetzner is offering new servers with SSD, good news for people who want to run ZFS (for ZIL and/or L2ARC). See the EX server configuration list for more information [1]. Unfortunately they don’t specify what brand of SSD, this is a concern for me as some of the reports about SSD haven’t been that positive, […]

Cheap SATA Disks in a Dell PowerEdge T410

A non-profit organisation I support has just bought a Dell PowerEdge T410 server to be mainly used as a file server. We need a reasonable amount of space and really good reliability features because the system may have periods without being actively monitored, it also has to be relatively cheap.

Dell servers are quite cheap, […]

ZFS on Debian/Wheezy

As storage capacities increase the probability of data corruption increases as does the amount of time required for a fsck on a traditional filesystem. Also the capacity of disks is increasing a lot faster than the contiguous IO speed which means that the RAID rebuild time is increasing, for example my first hard disk was […]

The Retina Display

Last night I played with an Apple Macbook Pro with the new Retina Display (Wikipedia link). Wikipedia cites some controversy about whether the display actually has higher resolution than the human eye can perceive. When wearing glasses my vision is considerably better than average (I have average vision without glasses) and while kneeling in front […]

Links July 2012

The New York Times has an interesting article about “hacker hostels” [1]. I had an idea for similar things after watching a Japanese movie about Tokiwa-sō – a shared apartment for Manga artists which among others inspired the creator of Astro Boy [2].

The TED blog has an interesting interview with William Noel about open […]

Some Proprietary Platform Issues

Android vs iPad

I’m currently in discussions with a client about a potential future project which involves a tablet computer talking to some electronic equipment. The options are an Android tablet and an iPad. One advantage of Android is that it runs on devices of all shapes and sizes, so we can choose a device […]

Breaking SATA Connectors

I’ve just broken my second SATA connector. This isn’t a lot considering the number of hard drives I’ve worked with, but it’s still really annoying as I generally don’t break things.

The problem is that unplugging a SATA cable requires pushing a little clip, this isn’t overly difficult but it unfortunately doesn’t fit well with […]