The local AT&T stores sold out of the iPhone 3G by around 9 AM.  The salespeople are telling customers that they can order and pay for an iPhone today, and they will get it by “direct fulfillment”, which they explain means that the phone will show up at the store in 7-10 working days for [...]

On the CCTALK mailing list, I found myself in the unusual position of defending some of the design decisions that went into the original IBM Personal Computer (PC), which was introduced in August 1981 and with which all modern PCs are still largely compatible. At the end of the posting, I wrote:
[Geez, I can't [...]

I wanted to clone an image of the internal hard drive of a new Mac Mini before booting it up. It is common knowledge that a putty knife is the tool to use, as long as it has a thin blade. However, I found a posting to one of Apple’s own forum claiming [...]

I’ve generally been happy with my Epson Stylus R300 printer.  I chose it because of its ability to print onto printable CD-R/DVD-R media, which wasn’t common at the time.  As with all inkjet printers, though, it subjects the owner to the Inkjet Conspiracy.

In 1990, Bob Pease of National Semiconductor published a “design idea” in the June 14, 1990 issue of Electronic Design for the use of a FET for reverse-polarity protection, with the advantage that it will typically have much lower forward voltage drop than a diode.   Pease mentions this on page 164 of his book Troubleshooting [...]

AMD announced last year that they would publish the programming specs for their graphics chips.  Last September they started that, with register-level documentation on several chips.  While that was a good start, today they have made many of their customers who use Linux (and BSD) very happy by publishing the 3D programming specs for the [...]

On Friday, I needed to add disk space to the RAID 5 array on my server. I’m using a 3ware 9550SX-8LP RAID controller, which I’ve generally been very happy with. It has support for online capacity expansion, so I decided to reconfigure it to drop the hot spare drive, then add that drive [...]

(Sounds like a program the Fox network would air…)
Some time between 2 AM and 11 AM PDT, both my server machines in the colo dropped off the network.  It seems implausible that both would fail for any reason other than a power failure, so I drove over to the colo to have a look.  Both [...]

As usual,Jacque ignored me most of the day, but as soon as the logic analyzer arrived he rushed over to help me set it up.
(click for gallery with more photos)

Today Guy and I removed the KW20 Master Oscillator from my KL10 (PDP-10 CPU, part of DECSYSTEM-20), so that it can temporarily be used in his KL10 until he can fabricate a suitable replacement.  As we removed the KW20, I couldn’t help feeling  a little like Dr. Chandra in the book and film 2010, sequel [...]