Perfect? Is that even possible? I guess not, but my newest server is pretty close in my opinion. The Focus was to get power consumption and price as low as possible while maintaining performance and safety. My current home server is an averages PC with an AMD64 and 2 GB of RAM while having a RAID 5 with 6 hard disk. As you can imagine, my power bill is incredibly high, so I definitely want a more energy efficient solution this time.
Green IT is a big topic, that’s why more and more computer power supplies get a 80 PLUS label for showing off their superior efficiency. But if you every decide to run a Intel Atom based PC, use a PicoPSU, just power your notebook or charge your phone, you won’t really find out how efficient the power supply is. I came across this problem while searching for an efficient power supply for my new Atom-based home server. First, I wanted to use an 80 PLUS 350W power supply, but after reading some reviews, I found out that they are totally inefficient (<50%) on low load (<50W), which the targeted power consumption of my new home server is supposed to be. So I googled and found the PicoPSU, advertising >93% efficiency. Wow great, but wait, it needs to be powered by 12V DC. How efficient is the converter from 110/220V AC to 12V DC? No word on the manufacture site. I tried to google for efficient converter, so I gave up… until the case of my new home server arrived, a Gigabyte MIB T5140. Read more »
I just got my new Android cell phone, the Motorola Milestone/Droid and I have to say Android is great! It’s so much better than Windows Mobile. A lot of the functionality comes from the Android Market. So while I was downloading Apps from it, I couldn’t find any tools for managing my analog dual-sim-adapter, so I decided to write one on my own. The Android SDK seemed to be very well documented, so I thought I give it a try. And guess what, I found the resulting program to be useful enough that I purchased a Market-Account for $25 and published it there. Find out more on the MultiSim section of my website.
A few weeks ago, my T-Home Entertain VDSL 50 stopped working, for no reason at all. My VDSL modem, the “Speedport 300HS” suddenly couldn’t sync anymore. I thought T-Com is probably doing maintenance, so I waited for a day, but it still wouldn’t sync. So I called the T-Com, asking what the problem would is. They told me everything should be fine, but I can order a technician, who can come to my place to check the line. The only condition is, if my line isn’t broken, I’d have to pay €100 for the technician.
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Li-Ion batteries are practically everywhere. They are used for mobile phones, notebooks, even cars. But most people don’t really know about them and give out wrong hints on how to use and charge them. So here are two important facts about Li-Ion batteries you should know:
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Currently, Flash does not natively support prevention of multiple instances, so a workaround is needed. Why would anyone want to prevent multiple instances anyway? Well, I use Flash as a Chat client, so allowing a user to run multiple instances would mean that they could join the chat multiple times, which is not really a wanted feature. So how do I prevent users from joining the chat multiple times?
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Some of you have probably read my article complaining about the Logitech product quality. Well, after my third diNovo Keyboard ended up looking like crap after short usage, I decided to get myself a different keyboard. Just like the one before, the rubber from the palm rest started peeling off. Take a look at the picture, does that look like a € 200 keyboard to you? This wouldn’t happen to a cheap € 2 keyboard after 1 week of usage, but on a € 200 one? Paying 100x and getting 100th life time? WTF? Logitech Service worked, unlike the products, flawless (again) and replaced it within 3 days. So after I received my fourth (!) replacement, I decided to sell it on eBay and get myself something different.
The first time I used 2 display on one computer was around 1997, with Windows 95. At that time, one of two computers at my home broke, so there was one monitor more than computers. As I was trying to fix the broken computer, I wanted to test whether the graphic card was broken, but as I was too lazy too remove the old one in the working computer, I simply plugged them both into one computer (they were all PCI at that time). Once plugged in, I played around with the settings and then suddenly realised that I had just doubled the working space of the computer. This is quite a lot at that time, where we only had tiny 14″ CRT screens. As I was playing around with Winsock at that time and was creating something like VNC at that time, it was really helpful having two instances of a IDE running, one on each screen, to test the communication. But as monitors were incredibly expensive at that time and as I couldn’t convince my dad to buy a new monitor for the next computer, I never used a dual-monitor setup again until a few days ago.
It is now possible to get the keys for Windows 7 Beta Activation Key under this URL: (German 32Bit Link)
https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/productkeys/win7-32/dede/default.aspx
You will need to have kept the technet registration process window open from yesterday to get the key.
Maybe it’ll work if you are signed on Technet too.
UPDATE: Downloads are now possible too.
I have the Intel U2500 (2x 1,2 Ghz) in my notebook (Toshiba R400), which is simply to slow for developing heavy Javascript applications (like my WordPress plugin qTranslate). Most of the time I was sitting in front of my computer and waiting for it to react. this made me realize that I need a faster computer. But what to do if I don’t have much money left? Luckily, I still had a case and 2 harddisk left from somwhere, so I only needed a CPU, Mainboard, Power Supply, RAM and a CPU Cooler. So I started looking for pieces to put together for a really cheap computer, yet really silent and fast.