How To Destroy A Filesystem

November 9, 2008 by Eliot 29 Comments

rmrf

The G1 ‘execute every command you type‘ bug naturally spawned ‘rm -rf /’ jokes. rm is the Linux command for deleting files. The -r and -f flags will cause it to remove files recursively and ignore confirmation. Executed as root it will annihilate the entire filesystem. Won’t it? [Jon Hohle] decided to test exactly how destructive the command was to *nix systems. How functional would the system be afterwards? He tested it side by side with the Windows equivalent, both ‘format c:’ and ‘del /F /S /Q’. He wanted to see what protections were available and what would be left working. Linux ended up completely broken while Windows, thanks to file locking, actually shutdown cleanly… and never came back. Some OSes, like Solaris, refuse to run the command ‘rm -rf /’ to prevent accidents.

PCjr 25 Years Later

November 8, 2008 by Eliot 24 Comments

pcjr

[Trixter], connoisseur of old hardware, is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the PCjr. IBM’s PCjr was killed only 18th months after being revealed and [Trixter] lays out exactly why. Overall, it was designed to be cheap to produce and sell, but many of the choices made it difficult to use. They used the CPU instead of DMA for floppy access; cheaper to make, but you couldn’t do much during disk reads because of it. The video memory scheme left little room for programs that could take advantage of it. It also had compatibility issues that made IBM clones a more attractive choice. [Trixter] ends by pointing out that some good came of it when the Tandy 1000 copyied the good ideas while leaving out the restrictive memory issues. He recommends Mike’s PCjr Page for more information on this classic machine.

IR Glass Level Detection

November 7, 2008 by Eliot 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG3_2lvoL8A]

[Johnny Lee]’s colleague [Paul Dietz] has done some interesting work using interactive tables. He’s specifically researched how to determine how full a drink glass is. In the video above, he’s using Microsoft’s Surface, but this technique should work with any IR camera based multitouch table. Determining the drink level requires custom glassware that has a small prism inside. When the liquid level is above the prism, light passes through, but when it’s below the top it reflects more IR light back into the table. Using this information, restaurant staff could serve drinks in a more efficient manner.

[Paul] has worked on another project that uses RFID and capacitive sensing to a similar effect.

Install OSX On The HP TouchSmart

November 6, 2008 by Kimberly Lau 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLoqu8G9oEo]

[Aaron Nelson] of Hijinks Inc. wrote up how he installed OSX on his HP TouchSmart IQ507. It looks and works like you would expect, save for a few things. The touchscreen works, but the calibration is so far off it’s useless. The most important things, like ethernet and the memory card reader, work fine. [Nelson]’s biggest frustration is that he has to disable the on board audio every time he logs in, so that the keyboard and mouse will be recognized. He is working on improvements, and would love to hear any suggestions you have.

Battle Of The Thumb Drive Linux Distros

October 30, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

We were expecting eye gouging and body slams, but this review of several thumb drive Linux distributions will do. They compared Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Xubuntu, and Fedora. They don’t mention why they chose these four specifically, as UNetbootin has many many distributions available. They put each through its paces, listing common issues and boot up speed.

Their conclusion was that puppy Linux was preferable as it has a graphically nice interface and the ability to have persistent data storage on the disk. They have a poll going though, so head over and voice your opinion.

Buy An Oil Cooled PC For $11k

October 20, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

For roughly $11,000 you cold have this awesome oil cooled computer rig. This system was designed specifically to be able to keep the electronics submerged in oil. The system uses SSD for storage, so everything can be submerged. Check out the pictures of the top panel, what is going on there?

If $11,000 is too much for you to spend, you could always do it yourself with an old aquarium, like this one, but be careful, that oil can get pretty messy. There is also a happy medium too, check out this method. Its nice, clean and not too expensive.

[via DVICE]

LED POV Hard Drive Clock

October 17, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 29 Comments

[Ian Smith] sent us this POV display made from an old hard drive. It works by flashing some LEDs under the platter, which has a line cut in it. Since the platter spins at roughly 90 rotations per second, we perceive a solid image. He was inspired by [Alan Parekh]’s project, but did several things differently. Mounting the LEDs was much simpler in this project as he had a strip of RGB LEDs that came with adhesive tape on the back. He also used a small magnet and a hall effect sensor to measure full rotations instead of an IR beam sensor. Check the video after the break.

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