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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UberBong: Evaporative PC Cooling, Probably

October 16, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

We’re not 100% sure what exactly is going on here. It appears to be a massive evaporative cooling rig for a computer, though the title has us wondering if it doesn’t have any other uses. There isn’t much of a description, but we felt the sheer magnitude of this cooling system warranted some publicity. Some digging around shows that this was out in 2003, but it is new to us.

[via reddit]

Passively Cooled Computer

October 11, 2008 by Jason Rollette 38 Comments

This came in on the tipline: [Ville ‘Willek’ Kyrö] wanted to build a fully passively cooled computer. That means no fans at all. He started with scrap aluminum heatsinks, ripped apart a cpu heatsink to get the copper heat pipes, and began surrounding the boards with heatsinks to form a case. Cooling down the powersupply was the hardest part, as it did not lend itself to the flat surfaces of heatsinks. Any passive case with powerful components will inevitably be huge and heavy; this one weighs over 20 kg. He says, “It might not have been worth it, but it sure was weird watching the computer boot up with no sound at all”.

Install GPS In Your Dell Mini 9

October 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

[acabtp] has already started hacking on his Dell Mini 9. He wanted to add GPS functionality, but didn’t want a dongle or anything external. After ordering the smallest GPS unit he could find, he found a place to wire it in internally. The end result had no bearing on the external looks of the computer. I wonder if he used the modification guide dell released?

Marketed as direct competition for the EEEPC, we’ll probably start seeing a lot more hacks for these. We’ve already seen the EEEPC taken hacked more than we ever expected.

[thanks strider_mt2k]

Another IKEA Linux Cluster

October 4, 2008 by Eliot 10 Comments

In a bit of serendipity, reader [Tim Molter] had decided on the IKEA Helmer cabinet for his new cluster right before seeing the previous IKEA cluster we covered. He and his coding partner recently completed building their own version of the IKEA Linux cluster. The cabinet was $30 and holds six headless boxes. Each board has a quad-core AMD processor for a total of 24 cores. They also feature 1GB of RAM and an 80GB laptop SATA drive. The latter was chosen because of space limitations in the case. [Tim] describes the Helmer cabinet as being almost perfect. The power supply lines up with the top edge of the drawer and the motherboard fits with a millimeter to spare. Power buttons were added to the front plus slots for airflow. It looks like a really clean installation and at $2550, incredibly cheap for the processing power.