The efficiency of this power supply unit coupled with a fanless (noiseless!) design made this little unit hard to resist. After much debate, I went ahead and ordered one from newegg. The first thing I noticed after taking the PSU out of the box was the massive heat sink mounted on top where the fan would normally reside.

Did you know there’s a 237 mile point-to-point WiFi link in Venezuela that achieves 3 Mbps throughput? They used Linksys WRT54G wireless routers, one on each end. Both are running Linux-based firmware.

If you’re thinking of ATM skimming as clunky hardware that’s easy to detect, think again. Taped on hardware and bulky card swipe gadgets are a thing of the past. Good thieves use expensive equipment that works and they don’t get caught. They’re like ninja’s in that no one really knows if they exist.

ARM is greater than Intel for power consumption vs performance. ARM processors will win the tablet/laptop war in the long run. There, I said it. Unless they make some serious pitfalls, ARM should have a serious stranglehold on the future of tablet PC’s and other mobile devices.

The price finally comes down to a somewhat reasonable level for HDMI cables and now they don’t want to sell them anymore. What about small devices that incorporate hdmi such as phones?

In udev rules, the %k, %b, %n variables are nice and all, but you can also use the variables you’re comparing and setting such as ID_FS_TYPE, KERNEL, SUBSYSTEM, PHYSDEVPATH, etc. When you run a command in a udev rule, there’s nothing stopping you from calling a shell and executing a few commands without actually calling a standalone script to do the dirty work. If you write out the array of environment variables from inside an external program, you can get a better understanding of just which part of the device discovery is matching your rule and getting processed.

I hate configuring things like GPS devices that run super restricted verisons of linux or some other OS. They never seem to deal with error handling very well. For example, here’s the oddball command for fetching ntp.conf and ntp.keys from a ntp server onto a Symmetricom GPS receiver. This is what you want to see, it just works. But in the many failures leading up to this configuration, it was finding problems fetching the files or having the correct access but it was happily coasting right along, overwriting its own configuration with jibberish and rebooting it self only to find the configuration was bollocks.