Off you go… into the purple yonder!

I’ve been running an old Shuttle with a 2.4GHz celeron CPU, 512MB of ram and two 500GB disks in raid-1 as home server for the past 5 years or so. Well, I upgraded the disks in February 2008, before that it had 2x 200GB in raid-1. The thing has no UPS and runs in the [...]

I bought an Intel X-25M SSD drive for my laptop in early June. I got the 80GB version, and this was to replace a Hitachi 7K200-160 – a 160GB 7200rpm drive. Note that the X25-M is generation 1; Intel has since released an updated, cheaper version of the drive that is slightly faster and uses [...]

We recycled at work this week – literally over a metric ton (estimated) of old servers. This is what about two thirds of that amount looked liked:

Apologies for the low quality picture – I only had a crappy cell phone camera on hand…

I used Peter Stuge’s “ghetto” method to replace a PLCC bios chip with a socket on an asus m2a-2vm board. This board has excellent coreboot support.
The method basically consists of cutting off the legs of the PLCC chip as close to the package as possible, so as to minimize strain on the paths on the [...]

So I have a poweredge 2800 with some hardware issues (voltage sensors on the riser card seeing things they should not…). The Dell support folks wanted me to run a DSET report with this tool

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R155882&formatcnt=2&libid=0&fileid=208066

Man – what a pile of crap. This thing is a self-extracting archive for rpm-based systems (redhat/suse). Fine – except that [...]

Dell announced that a few more models are now available pre-installed with Ubuntu: the XPS 1530n and the Studio 15n.
I configured an XPS 1530n with the following specs, which are available both with Ubuntu and Windows:

SYSTEM COLOR
Tuxedo Black

PROCESSOR
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5850 (2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB cache)

LCD AND CAMERA
Full Hi Definition, glossy widescreen 15.4 inch LCD (1920×1200) [...]

Via Hack-a-day, this is a great (video) introduction to surface mount (SMT) soldering.