Hardware

Since my trusty softmodded xbox died on me, I have been forced to hook up my laptop to the TV whenever I wanted to enjoy a movie on the big screen. I quickly got tired of fumbling with cables all the time, so I resolved to find a used original XBOX and once again softmod it to install XBMC on it.

After years and years of service, it looks like it is now time to retire my XBOX. One of the capacitors soldered on the motherboard has blown out and charred the board and a few components around it.

It seems like yesterday when I first got my hands on my xbox... I remember I immediately opened it up (thereby voiding the warranty, a potentially very expensive proposition) and softmodded it on the same day I bought it.

This was just too good to not share!

Check out these two, somewhat related, YouTube videos:

• the first is just amazing!
• the second is hilarious!

Enjoy!

It's not very often that I get around to cleaning and dusting my home desk... in actual fact, it happens all too rarely.

That's why I decided to take a picture of my desk in spotless condition. Who knows, maybe this will motivate me the next time I notice that a heap of dust has piled up all around the keyboard.

This Slashdot article warns that a default setting may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature / acpi bug / OS configuration.

If the load cycling count has a high value, compared to the expected life time of the hard drive and the expected maximum load cycle count, then your hard drive might be affected too.

What is it with rocket science that fascinates people? Surely, most people nowadays appreciate that there are many other disciplines that are just as hard as rocket science. But the expression 'It's not rocket science, after all' has stuck around.

One field of scientific endevour that is surely as hard as rocket science (if not much much harder) is robotics. Robotics combines tough hardware and software problems. Typical robotics problem are hard when taken individually. In fact, they are usually NP-hard, when talking about software problems.

Years ago I bought an IBM Thinkpad laptop as a gift for my loved one. Granted, it was a good few years ago, when IBM still owned their laptop business, well before Lenovo acquired their Thinkpad line of portable computers. The laptop, an IBM Thinkpad 600, equipped with an Pentium II processor, 64 MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive, has worked consistently and surprisingly well.

Until a few days ago, when it started to report BIOS error codes 161, 192, 163 on bootup.

What's a man to do, if not disassemble the machine open and fix the problem? Read on for an account of what was wrong with the laptop and how the problem was fixed.

I just won a bid on an awesome ultra-mobile slick Dell laptop!

Yahoo!!! I got this featherlight, ultra thin and very powerful notebook from Ebay.
It is only 1.36kg in weight. It is only an inch thick. It's got a 12.1 inches display.

I can't wait to entirely wipe out all the load of crappy proprietary software that comes preloaded on Dell machines and install my operating system of choice!

...or the art of recovering from a bios flashing gone bad.

Picture this scenario: you set about flashing your mainboard bios with an updated version, but something went horribly wrong and now your computer is no more useful than a giant paperweight.

I sincerely wish you will never have any use for the information contained in this article. In the unfortunate event that you do, I hope this information will make your life a little bit easier and help you fix what seems to be an insurmountable problem.