Tag: Hardware
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Any use for an NSLU2 device?
Now I work as a software engineer and because of the covid-19 lockdown I am spending even more time in front of computers at home and I thought that – finally – this was the moment to make proper use of the NSLU2 NAS decvice I bought more than a decade ago. But it turns […]
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None of the easy things work
This is a post about my PhD research: in fact it is a sort of public rumination, an attempt to clarify my thoughts in writing before I take the next step. It’s also possibly an exercise in procrastination: a decision to write about what I might do next, rather than to get on with doing […]
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The Pentium D is dead
Just as they faced up to the inevitability that they could no longer keep producing ever faster processors, Intel released the “Pentium D” – a dual Pentium CPU. The two Pentiums were not on the same die though and the whole thing gobbled energy, heated quickly and generally performed pretty poorly in comparison to the […]
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Compute power versus storage on the Raspberry Pi
My three additional Raspberry Pis are here and one thing is immediately obvious – compute power is now much cheaper than disk storage. The three devices together give me about 2100 MIPS (based on the BogoMIPS calibration on my existing system) and cost around £90 for the lot. I am not sure what the storage […]
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Why do people hate Apple redux
The Guardian has an interesting piece called “why do people hate Apple“, which makes some telling points but I do not think really gets there. I suppose I should begin by saying I don’t “hate Apple” – in fact I think their products are quite nice if hideously over-priced. But I do have a bit […]
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Burnt out video card
This week a ten or so year old NVidia FX5500 died on me (looking at it it looks like things I take to be capacitors (they look like water towers) on the board blew up – the metal casings on all of them are cracked and one seems to have leaked something. Second NVidia card […]
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Ondemand scheduling does not work on the Pentium 4
Finally got to the bottom of my issue with power saving and scheduling on my Pentium D machine (essentially a dual core Pentium 4). It seems apparently lowering heat output (the Pentium D is a notoriously hot running processor), the “ondemand” frequency scheduler is not likely to save power in the real world and has […]
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 