Recent blog entries for elwell

Power Power Power

'Dear Santa'

Please can you get someone to injection mould a bog standard 4-way british multiplug trailing socket wotsit with a built-in IEC power inlet?

Thus by downrating to say 10A (hey, this is for geek things not space heating) we can have a simple 'travel adaptor' for all those clunky power brick things that you can simply pick up a single cable for $foreign_locality to fit. (or. more usefully, stick inside a rack to handle any transformers)

I'd do some photoshoppage (sorry, Gimpage) but my photo-fu is weak

Syndicated 2008-11-25 00:21:00 (Updated 2008-11-25 00:25:41) from Elwell

Sniff...

Alas poor lex, I knew him well

My trusty Lex Light 500MHz fanless C3 has just died. Turned off power and its not coming back on. Sniff. Bulging capacitors on PSU part of motherboard - not looking good.

Ho Hum. Anyone got a 2.5" adapter cable for the disk?

Syndicated 2008-09-10 20:56:00 (Updated 2008-09-10 20:58:36) from Elwell

gotta cut back...

Still hacking at the currentcost - I've at least got a small python script that plugs the data straight into sqlite these days. I also did a quick distribution curve of the wattage - still can't get it under a really cr*p 240W

Syndicated 2008-09-06 23:17:00 (Updated 2008-09-06 23:21:04) from Elwell

I've got the power

... it's gettin' kinda heavy.


I've jumped on the latest Currentcost bandwagon with a serial cable connecting my meter to the mini-ITX box in the loft. For now I'm not doing 'proper' logging to sqlite / rrdtool as I intend to abtract this through monami - but for the first days run with some quick n dirty gnuplot work it looks OK.

Syndicated 2008-09-04 22:08:00 (Updated 2008-09-04 23:30:09) from Elwell

Firefox3 / google / UK

When I'm roaming I'm fed up with the default google search plugin redirecting me to google.ch at cern and thus providing me with german pages.

Simple enough fix on osx - vi /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/google.xml and change

<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
into
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.co.uk/search">

Tada!

Syndicated 2008-06-12 12:35:00 (Updated 2008-06-12 12:38:44) from Elwell

Fizzicists

Y'know what worries me? I'm out in Geneva just now at CERN - sharing a flat used by the Glasgow ATLAS scientists. Supposedly a rather smart lot.

...except the batteries in the TV remote control were the wrong way round.

Syndicated 2008-06-11 20:51:00 (Updated 2008-06-11 20:55:02) from Elwell

Nosh.

Just thought I'd mention "L'Aviation" - Steak, Chips and Yummy sauce. All a mere spit from the number 9 bus stop too.

Syndicated 2007-06-06 23:03:00 (Updated 2007-06-06 23:09:55) from Elwell

Furlong Floppies

Tired of confusing Mega and Mibi bytes? Hard disk choices getting you in a spin? well, FEAR NOT - Sanity is at hand. Most old-timers like myself will remember the 3.5" floppy disk (yes, the thing that you kept all your hard work on, mistreated and then wondered why you couldn't print your assignment at the deadline). Each held 1.44Mb of data and so....


Stack em all up, and a furlong (220 yards, or 201.16m) of em would contain 87.782 GB.


I hereby propose that we all use the new SI measurement of "furlong floppies" to describe data.

Syndicated 2007-06-06 07:30:00 (Updated 2007-06-06 07:37:25) from Elwell

Windows 0 : Linux 2

I've just traded up an IBM P4 workstation to a brand shiny new Dell E520 Dual core goodness. Well. Semi goodness. According to Wikipedia I have a 915 chip and it's the 9x0 ones that support x86 virtualization. Boo Hiss.

Anyway, Threw in a ubuntu AMD64 install and it's up n running in 30 mins. (once I'd nuked the 'orribly nasty "Vista Home Basic 32bit" install off it. I was looking forwards to all the aqua toys but thats apparently an upgrade...

XP install not so smooth. Blue Screen complaining of "Stop 0x0000007B" - probably the SATA Raid card? Well dells website doesn't have any handy "Use this driver disk to install XP" links and following a v good scotlug virtualisation talk I decided to throw on QEMU following this guide

Syndicated 2007-02-24 22:21:00 (Updated 2007-02-24 22:39:22) from Elwell

Videotastic

No, not another youtube one, but a 1975 classic featuring touch screen menus, electric bikes, distributed monitoring, a gripping title sequence, and of course, facial hair. Intrigued? head over to SPS : the control system and enjoy :-)

Syndicated 2007-02-06 19:31:00 (Updated 2007-02-06 19:42:46) from Elwell