Headworx

A warning note tonight. Flash memory wears out. And fails. We are prepared to pay premium price for the latest and greatest SSD drives that lift performance of our systems to then next level. While the performance side is true indeed, we have to face one serious risk: flash (solid state) memory is generally not safe. At some point in time my SSD drive will refuse to write data. But this will probably be caught by the operating system (at least this is what I hope...). Or worse - it will silently lose stored data and will refuse to read it. This is a relatively high risk. Why do I write about this? Because I have just had a really bad week, with four devices that failed due to flash wear problem. The first was the Toshiba Network Camera. It simply refused to store new configuration changes and went dead after I tried to upgrade its firmware. The second was the accompanying NSLU-2 based little FTP server. It rebooted one day and reported there were no USB drives connected to it (well......

So after a week with x64 Windows 7, I have to confirm the Earth is suddenly a better place to live :) As I said a week ago - after getting here from Vista, there is no going back. Everything is so much better... The only thing that has suffered is the battery life. Remember I was getting an average of 8 hours on my x200s with low power setting. And it could have been stretched up to more than 10 hours... Now my power meter shows around 7 hours when I start working on a fully charged battery. That is about 15% less... My theory here is the screen backlight. Screen can take as much as 50% of the total energy consumed by a laptop computer. In my opinion the long battery life of the Lenovo x200s is achieved partly due to the Intel L9400 "Santa Rosa" processor optimizations, and partly due to LED backlight technology (previous display technologies were using fluorescent lamps). The display in the x200s can be very bright, so usually I run one of the lowest backlight settings. And ...

Ufff... I have just (almost) finished migrating my system (the Lenovo x200s) from Windows Vista (32-bit) to Windows 7 (64-bit). And I feel the result is worth the effort. It took me a lot of time - I started two days ago. The upgrade process itself was triggered by my hard drive running out of space after taking more than two thousand pictures during the summer holidays. As some of you may remember, I have been using the 200GB Hitachi FDE (Full Disk Encryption) drive for the last 18 months... It has been performing flawlessly... But now it is simply not spacious enough... And I am not going to give away the convenience of having all my personal data and files with me at all times. This is also the reason why I have opted for the FDE drive. The FDE concept is simple - the drive has a security chip in it and always encrypts data. You control the encryption by setting a drive password in BIOS. With no password, the drive happily releases the key used to decrypt data when passing it to t...

A few weeks ago a friend of mine inspired me to install a weather station. Indeed this is a nice hobby project and gives a lot of potential areas to learn something... My obvious goal was to have all weather data coming from the station collected on some sort of server and be able to display it over the Internet. Weather stations typically consist of a suite of sensors (temperature, humidity, rain, wind) you place outside a house and a console that collects and displays collected data on a LCD screen. On higher end models a console can be connected to a computer to relay sensor data. My requirements have been quite simple. The sensor suite should be very stable (no way to climb a roof in winter to push a reset button), running on solar power for wireless connectivity to a console (cabled connection increases potential lighting damage). The console should have Ethernet /TCP-IP interface. After some digging here and there (mostly in Google) I picked the Davis 6152 Vantage Pro 2 . The bui...