Putting this out there for search engines, since someone will probably need it some day. Symptom: Dell Chromebook 11 inch 3380 would not turn on, despite being on charger all night. Same effect with different chargers, ruling that out as a cause. As soon as power was connected, the power light blinked at around once…
Category: hardware
There are a bunch of complete build logs available for the Dactyl Manuform and similar mechanical keyboards, so I wanted to focus on the specific design choices I made and why. Huge hat-tip to Zack Freedman, in particular with this video, which served as inspiration that I could pull this off. Why a mechanical keyboard?…
If you played pinball in the 80s, you know about 16-segment LED displays. They existed in the narrow technology window after mechanical switches and alarm-clock-style 7-segment displays, but before full dot-matrix displays or full video were feasible with off-the-shelf computer hardware. There’s something geekily charming about these old displays. So naturally, I wanted to have…
Found this article interesting. Not too many hundreds of years ago, cutting-edge scientific research involved watching balls roll down ramps. Making fundamental discoveries seems to be slowing down, or at least getting harder. As a consequence, we should expect more big discoveries from the sciences where the relevant technology follows a Moore’s-Law-like exponential growth trajectory….
So Steorn’s Orbo technology is on display in Dublin. They have multiple live video streams, but at the #3 view at this hour shows “Offline” and “The channel owner has prohibited viewing from this web page”. Public viewing hours run from 10a to 7p six days a week. What is it? There’s a detailed exploded…
If this site is accurate, it’s now possible to have superconducting material at household freezer temperatures: 254k, or a tiny bit below 0F. From power lines to maglevs to supercolliders to energy storage, the potential applications boggle the mind. -m Note: I’m having trouble finding independent verification of this, other than what appears to be…
The central thesis of The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper is dead on: engineers get too wrapped up in their own worlds, and left entirely to their own whims can easily make a product incomprehensible to ordinary folks. For this reason alone, it’s worth reading. But I do question parts of his…
60 Minutes covers it. Disclaminer: haven’t seen it, the video doesn’t even play in my browser. Let me know if you have better success in viewing. -m
[Update: now featuring Actually Correct Math. Somebody stop me before I late-night-blog again…] Recent news coverage mentions a badly-needed breakthrough at MIT in battery technology. Using a slight variation of existing lithium materials, much faster charge and discharge rates are possible. The money quote is that [Professor Gerbrand Ceder and graduate student Byoungwoo Kang] went…
My friend and XForms conspirator T.V. Raman was written up in the New York Times. (Link) [If the link happens to not work because of NYT’s stupid content policy, access the article via a search on Raman’s name on Google News.] Raman has done all kinds of great accessibility work that benefits everyone, photon-dependent or…
Blackberry singing in the dead of night Take these calendars, and do invite All your life You are only waiting for this email to arrive More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info/. P.S. Got a better one? Post it. -m
Day 3 and the first real difficulty: I can’t type most of my passwords except by muscle memory. Overall, though, I’m enjoying the challenge, even if my postings are conspicuously short. :-) -m
I taught Anita some Python this weekend, and was peppered with questions like “where is the key for the two little lines?” “You mean a quote mark?” “Yeah.” I’m going through much the same now. Moments ago I changed my keyboard layout to dvorak. Why? I type alot. Variety helps keep carpal tunnel at bay….
According to Ars Technica, Google captured 61% of mobile search market share in the first four months of 2008. Yahoo! came in at a distant 18%, so pretty much reflecting desktop search market share. This is due, of course, to Google being the default provider on the iPhone, and the iPhone being the biggest bulk…
I’m posting this during a power outage. Since I re-rigged my telecom setup with the Ooma box, I put all my telecom and internet boxes on a UPS. I’d been itching for a power outage to test it out. Temperatures are close to 100F today here, and with all the AC units working, I got…
Up on Flickr. Anita and I had a blast. We spent about 8 hours and saw maybe half of everything. -m
New gear, an Ooma VOIP box. I plan to post more technical details soon, but the short story is that you get a sleek little box that goes between your dsl or cable modem and your router, and you get unlimited local and long distance calling. For free. For life (or 3 years, according to…
Thanks to chromatic for the link. Largely hidden, largest app clusters of this particular platform can: Control over a million computers and can deliver over a hundred billion advertisements per day. However, “don’t be evil” is not a part of this particular platform’s strategy… -m
I have here a pre-release copy of Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother. With permission. In plain text. Being read with the UNIX command less. On an XO laptop. And so far it’s awesome. -m
Amazon hosted a networking event tonight. They had me at free beer and a chance to look at a Kindle. Now that I’ve actually played with one, I can comment on some of its features for better or worse. It’s heavier and more solid than it looks. With the little padded cover, it could pass…
I’m taking some time off from work to relax a bit. And just in time for that, my OLPC arrived. Check out the photoset on Flickr. It’s an impressive little machine, and I’m very happy to have got this instead of a Kindle. :) -m
Or, why the Kindle cost $399 at launch. What is Amazon’s most valuable IP? How about a list of registered users who are guaranteed as willing to pay a premium price for a nifty gadget (I mean “service”) along with the exclusive privilege of buying more things from Amazon? Somewhere in Amazon’s database land, alongside…
Where’s Project Gutenberg? One difficulty in launching an ebook platform is the lack of available titles. I keep hearing about 80,000+ titles, but expressed as a percentage of Amazon’s book catalog, it’s minuscule. There should be all kind of public domain titles ready to go on day one. And where’s the Creative Commons books? There’s…
Amazon announced their ebook reader today, Kindle. Some of the earlier hype I’d read about it suggested that it would be not only a reading tool, but a writing tool as well. Nope. The obvious thing is the keyboard, an immediate non-starter for typing more than a few words. But if an external keyboard is…
If a free energy device (like this one) were really possible, simple economics would dictate that (as soon as patents expired, etc.) one or several would be found in every cell phone, iPod, notebook computer, desktop computer, appliance, automobile, airplane, house, building, and factory. That’s a lot of waste heat that would get dumped onto…
Still more mobile news. Yahoo! Go is shipping. No alpha, beta, gamma, etc.–the real deal. Give it a whirl. If your phone, like mine, can’t handle the awesomeness, you can visit the slick web-only version at m.yahoo.com. -m
I have an older iPod. I don’t go G numbers, but it’s 40 gigs and a black and white screen. The battery life is measured in minutes. Hmm, 40 gigs, same as the original Apple TV. We don’t have a TV in the place, but we do watch movies on the computer screen. As long…
For the last several years, I’ve taken some time off around the end of the year to work on a special project. In 2004 I ported some of Rick Jelliffe’s code from Java to Python. In 2005, I made an editing pass over a novel I wrote the previous November during NaNoWriMo. This year was…
Opera just released a version of their Mini browser for Treo. Here’s what the download and install process looks like. point your existing Blazer browser at http://mini.opera.com the page detects your device (a Treo 650 in this case) and offers a download link clicking the link starts a 100k download the phone offers to store…